emotions

The last connection

~ KJ ~ 7 Comments

After my escape, I was still financially tied to my family. They had a few of my credit cards (it was too much of a risk to take them back before I left). I wasn’t overly concerned about that. I had been paying my family’s debts for years, and it wouldn’t be much of a difference. Credit cards can always be cancelled. But there was a bigger connection, one I couldn’t quite run away from; I had a vehicle I left behind.

Let me start off by saying, I don’t even have a license. I never did. Driving was a privilege I was not worthy of having. But my family needed a vehicle. The minivan they had was 14 years old at that point, and doing what old vehicles always do — it was falling apart. My family never had money saved. My father was out of work and in a nursing home at that time, my mother was working part-time as she had been for years, and my brother worked full-time and blew every paycheck on video games.

They knew I had money. I had no choice. I could spend all of my savings buying them a car (and in turn sparing myself some infliction of pain), or I could tell them no and experience the horrible backlash. The guilt trip started before I even made a decision. I was told I had to pull my weight in the family. Realistically, I already was, but it was never enough.

I had to do it. I couldn’t take any more guilt. I couldn’t take any more threats. I spent all of my savings and paid for the down payment. The Jeep was in my name. No one in my family had any credit — I was the only one with good credit history. Because I didn’t have a license, my brother had to be secondary; it was the only way to get the rest of the balance on the vehicle financed. I put everything I had into that vehicle.

I didn’t think my family would pick up the payments after I ran away, but they did. They had no choice, really. My brother needed a vehicle. My mother hated that my name was on the papers. She tried to commit fraud by asking others to forge my signature to take my name off the title and the loan, but no one gave in. I didn’t know how to get my name off, so I’ve spent the last 14 months sitting on this last connection I had to my family, with no way of severing it.

Then on Friday afternoon, I received two phone calls from a number I didn’t know. There was a voicemail, so I sneaked away to the bathroom and listened to it.

“Hello, this is (whoever) from (wherever), and I’m here with your brother.”

My heart sank. Before I even heard the rest of the message, just hearing my brother’s name sent me into tears. I had to replay the message multiple times before I could understand it. My brother was trying to trade in the Jeep for a new truck, and they needed authorization from me since I was the primary.

I sat on the toilet for 10 minutes trying to compose myself. Thoughts were running through my mind. I couldn’t stop crying. It wasn’t just about the truck. It was about everything.

One of the many stories my mother and brother told people was that I changed my number after I left, so they were unable to contact me. I never changed my number. They never contacted me. But yet, by some miracle, my brother was able to give the dealership my phone number and they were able to get in contact with me. How could that be since I supposedly changed my number?

The only point of contact since I ran away was this phone call from a middle man car dealer, because my family once again needed something from me. I only matter when they need something from me. And that still hurts.

It bothers me that I poured all of my money into a vehicle that my brother was now trading in for a brand new (and a much more expensive) truck.

It bothers me that even though I had a choice to say no, it really wasn’t much of a choice at all. And I wanted to say no. My family doesn’t deserve these things. But if I say no, I’m the one that loses out. I’m the one that gets fucked over, because everything is in my name. Even though they can afford to pay off the loan and get my name off that way, they wouldn’t do that. They would never do the right thing.

So I had to be the bigger person and give my okay. I severed the last connection I had with my family. I had to make the most logical decision, even though it hurt (and still does hurt). I had to keep my emotions out of it. But part of me felt like I was in my mother’s control again. Here she was, controlling me from afar, without even needing to look at me. It makes me sick.

It makes me sick that I am struggling to stay afloat. It makes me sick that those thousands of dollars I put into that Jeep are the thousands of dollars I could be using right now to put food on the table that isn’t just rice and cheap chicken, thousands of dollars I could have used to pay off my mother’s credit debts that I am struggling to pay down.

My mother and brother don’t have to struggle. They now have a brand new truck, in addition to other vehicles that they don’t even need. They are blowing through my father’s life insurance payout like they’ve won the lottery, profiting from the death of a man who my mother hated and told to go and die. They have everything, and they don’t deserve any of it. Where is the fairness? Where is the justice?

It seems like the worst people continue to be rewarded, while the good people continue to struggle. My mother should be in jail. Instead, I’m the one living behind the bars she created in me.

My good friend told me “you got what you wanted, you have your freedom.”

And I know that. But I want justice, too.

Can nobody hear me?

~ KJ ~ 9 Comments

I regularly make excuses for the poor behavior of others in my life, especially when their behavior directly affects me.

I excused my father’s part in my abuse because I told myself my mother made him do it (as if she held a gun to his head). I excused my coworker’s behavior a few weeks ago when he called me a bitch several times, telling myself he didn’t know any better because he was raised to treat women that way. I excuse a close person’s consistently offensive behavior, telling myself she just can’t help the way she acts.

I do this not as a way to defend these people, but to defend myself. If I didn’t excuse them, that means I would end up angry. And I don’t want to be angry.

But making excuses only works superficially, because on an intellectual level, I know that my excuses aren’t viable, that these behaviors were/are wrong, and that I really should be able to feel angry and hurt and however else I want to feel. Eventually, my feelings come to the surface, and I can only push them back down so many times before they come out full force.

Last therapy session, I couldn’t push my anger down any more. We were discussing the aftereffects of the letter, about how it made me feel sad. Then my therapist asked what else I was feeling, because it seemed like more than just sadness. Without thinking, I said “I’m angry. All of those fucking idiots, why didn’t they do anything to help?”

I immediately felt bad for what I had said, and apologized to my therapist. When she asked why I was apologizing, I told her I shouldn’t have used those bad words. I said, “it’s not their fault. They didn’t know. I wasn’t their problem. I shouldn’t be angry.”

“Why don’t you want to be angry?”

“Because if I’m angry that means I’m like her, like my mother.”

“Anger isn’t the same as abuse. What your mother did to you, she didn’t do because of anger. Anger is something that everyone feels, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re going to abuse. It’s okay to be angry.”

I sat there for a minute, still trying to push down what was trying to come out. I looked around the room, trying to think of something else to talk about.

“No, no, I can’t do it.”

“Yes you can. It’s okay to be angry. Anger makes you human.”

I repeated what my therapist told me to myself a few times. Anger doesn’t make me like her. Anger doesn’t make an abuser. Anger is okay.

And then it erupted. Through tears and clenched fists, I let it all out.

I don’t understand. I don’t understand why nobody helped me. I never wanted to go home after school, I tried to stay with the teachers but then the teachers sent a note home and said I couldn’t anymore and then I got in trouble. None of them ever asked why I didn’t want to go home. None of them asked why I wore so many layers of clothing to school, why I was always covering up. No one questioned why a six-year-old girl tried to drown herself. Children don’t just try to kill themselves out of curiosity. No one wondered why a girl would scratch off her own skin. No one questioned my injuries. How many times could a child walk into walls? I wasn’t clumsy. But nobody did anything! They just nodded their heads and moved on!

There it was. My anger. Finally free and out in the open. The anger that was rightfully mine to have. I was a child who had no other way to communicate. A child who was threatened never to tell. And I didn’t. So I tried every other way to speak without using my words.

I could see just by looking at my therapist’s face that she understood. She got it. And she was okay with my anger, and my hurt. “There were all these red flags, all these ways you tried to ask people for help…”

“And they still didn’t hear me!”

There were so many red flags in my childhood. So many. Yet no one wanted to see them. I could have set those flags on fire and waved them an inch away from their faces, and they would have just stood there and talked about the weather.

I am angry. I am angry that these people just perpetuated my hell by not intervening. I am angry that I spent my childhood thinking that it was just normal to be hurt like this, thinking that no one is hearing my cries so this all must just be normal. No one should ever believe that abuse is normal. It should have never had to be my normal.

It’s an anger I am not sure will ever go away.

Emotionally Illiterate

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

There is an enormous amount of learning that occurs in the first years of life. I’m not just talking about the usual: learning how to talk, learning how to feed, and learning how to the use the potty. I’m talking about the things that people don’t realize: how children learn emotions.

Infants emulate their parents, including facial expressions. As they grow, they learn to associate emotion words with their expressions, with the help of their caretakers. Toddlers learn to identity emotions, and children learn to regulate emotions in the early years of schooling.

But what happens when a child’s caretakers are emotionally empty?

An infant can’t emulate emotions she doesn’t see. A mother who is never happy or joyful cannot show her baby how to show happiness or joy. This hinders the development of emotional literacy. Children can learn about emotions in school, but when there is no emotional learning going on at home from an early age, the child misses out considerably, and the effects are long-lasting.

My mother was (and still is) a sociopath. She cannot express genuine emotion. She never has. The only emotion she ever expresses is anger. She is void of happiness (and a lot of other things, but we won’t go there right now). It is no surprise, then, that I grew up emotionally illiterate.

Of course, as a child, I didn’t know what emotional literacy was or what it entailed. I remember people defining their emotions: happy, sad, surprised, mad. I knew they were emotions, but I didn’t really comprehend anything beyond that. I never felt them, or at least understood that I felt them. I knew what anger was, because I experienced it through my mother and father regularly. And as a result of their anger, I knew fear like it was my best friend. The rest was a mystery.

My facial expression has been consistently “muted anger” since I was a child. Many people accused me of being angry, and I didn’t understand because I wasn’t feeling angry at all. But my natural facial expression was typically angry. Because that is the only facial expression I experienced as an infant. It’s the only facial expression I was able to emulate, and I carried that with me through life.

I learned quite a bit about emotions when I was around my peers in school. I finally started to identify feelings within myself, only to have them trampled upon by both of my parents.

I remember one time, I had an About Me project in elementary school. I chose to write with the marker colored bittersweet, because I said my life made me feel bitter. My mother became enraged when she heard, and I was punished severely. She told me I had no reason to feel bitter, and that I should be grateful for the life she was giving me. A 9(ish) year-old who identifies feeling bitter about life should be a red flag for anybody. But of course, my mother believed she did no wrong, so she just burned that flag to the ground.

Then there was the incident when I was a teenager. My high school guidance counselor called my parents, concerned that I was significantly depressed. I was. But feeling depressed was not allowed in our family. Feelings in general were not allowed. And I was punished severely for it. For years after that incident, I became emotionally constipated. I made myself numb to protect myself from my parents. I showed or felt no emotion because I did not want to experience the pain I felt that night ever again. The little bit of emotional knowledge I had was buried deep inside of me, never wanting to be dug up.

My issues are complex (!). First, I had a rough start in life being raised by a sociopath, so I spent a good portion of my childhood emotionally illiterate. Second, what little emotional knowledge I did have became muddled in my adolescence, and pushed down into the crevices of my semi-conscious mind.

So now, at the age of 30, I find myself needing to learn emotions all over again. And yes, sometimes I feel like a five year-old. I read children’s books on feelings. I have charts with emotion words and flashcards with feelings on them. My therapist draws faces depicting different emotions that I try to guess.

Whenever I correctly identify a feeling in myself, my therapist praises me like you would praise a small child. Because that’s what I need. Because I am so emotionally inept. I am an emotional illiterate.

But I’m learning what it means to have feelings again.

He’s not there

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

Many times over the past few weeks, I’ve seen my father.

It’s not really him, of course. He doesn’t know where I am. But my mind seems to be playing tricks on me to make me think that it is him. I’ve seen him on the bus, at the mall, and on the street. Different men, each strikingly similar in appearance to my father.

It happened earlier today, as I was walking through the mall to get to the bus stop. I could have sworn I saw my father sitting in a chair in the middle of the mall. The man had the same hair cut and color as my father, the same weird slouch, the same sunglasses. I scurried past and continued to look over my shoulder, making sure he wasn’t following me. The man, a total stranger, but in my mind, he was my father.

Each time it happens, I go through a weird back-and-forth reaction process. I  panic on the inside. At first, I let myself get lost in the panic and let it simmer, leading to inner chaos and unsafe feelings. Now, I try to immediately reassure myself that it is not him, that we are safe here and no one can find us. It’s not a cure, that’s for sure, but it keeps me from totally withdrawing or dissociating out of fear.

On the other end of that fear, is the desire to run up to these men and ask them if they are my father. It is something I have (thankfully) not managed to give in to doing, but the want is still there.

It doesn’t make much sense to me, simultaneously fearing someone and wanting to approach them. I don’t understand where that impulse is coming from. It feels like a confused child’s way of reaching out to her father. And I am a rational, 30 year-old adult who does not want to speak to her father ever again. What a contradiction.

Is it paranoia? I don’t know. Maybe there are just a lot of men that look like my father. He’s not atypical in the least, so it’s not a stretch to say there are many other similar men out there. But why haven’t I noticed them before? Why is this happening now, all of a sudden? And why do my reactions have to be so complicated?

Tears on a Thursday

~ KJ ~ 10 Comments

I cried a lot today.

I cried at six o’clock in the morning. I had just woken up and I already wanted to go back to sleep. The amount of effort and energy it takes for me to get out of bed and go to the bathroom is draining.

The pain in my foot is excruciating in the morning, to the point that I cannot put any weight on it. I cannot even balance myself without holding on to something; as soon as my foot touches the floor, I am hit with enough pain to topple me over. One morning, I fell over and managed to at least fall into the wall, so I was able to push myself back to a standing position.

Since then, I’ve managed to slide out of bed and onto my desk chair every morning, roll myself all of the way over to the door, open said door, and take about three or four minutes to pull myself up and slide myself into the bathroom and onto the toilet. Sometimes I don’t even make it to the bathroom on time. That is how pathetic I am right now. I am 30 years old and can’t even manage to walk to the bathroom on time.

I couldn’t tolerate the pain anymore this morning. As I rolled myself back from the bathroom to the bed, I just started crying. I couldn’t stop. I just wanted the pain to go away, but I knew it wasn’t going to. I just have to deal with the pain. It’s what I’ve been doing all of my life.

After a while, I managed to calm myself down and stop crying. Then my mind started going into anxiety overdrive. What if I go to the doctor and it’s not a simple fix? What if I’m not able to work? I’m really fucked. Then I started crying again. I called several doctors in the last week trying to get an appointment. Every doctor I was calling had the earliest appointments at over a month out, until I finally found someone who would take me next week. But I am still so afraid to go.

I feel that this isn’t going to be an easy fix. I’ve had some really fucked up foot issues, including massive multiple bone spurs at the top of my foot. This, however, is by far the worst foot pain I have had in my life. That worries me. I needed surgery for something that was far less painful than this is, so what does that mean? Another surgery? How am I going to live if I can’t work? Disability takes (in the shortest) a month to get. I can’t financially handle not working. So I just kept crying, imagining all of the possibilities, imagining all of the horrible shit that could come from this.

I actually cried myself to exhaustion. I tried to distract myself from the anxious thoughts and I ended up falling asleep, which was probably a good thing anyway. I woke up and still didn’t want to do anything, but I knew I had therapy in the afternoon and had to get moving. I took some more pain relievers, wrapped up my foot, told myself I wasn’t going to cry anymore, and hobbled my way to the bus stop.

My therapy session started out alright. I knew the focus was going to be on my graduate school conundrum. I told my therapist before that I was likely going to drop out, as much for financial reasons as for the drama surrounding the anonymous reporting. I told her again that I just didn’t think it was going to work. I didn’t think through all of the financial shit before I jumped into starting this grad school. It’s not cheap, and there are less expensive options out there, although the quality is likely lower as well. But I really don’t have any other options.

I don’t remember exactly what set it off, but I felt the tears coming. I tried holding them in and that lasted for about thirty seconds; then I just started crying. My therapist noticed and asked me what was going on, and how I was feeling right then. All I could say was “nothing”.

My go-to answer, as usual. I don’t have feelings. I’m okay. Nothing is wrong. Why can’t my therapist just go along with that? Why must she insist that I connect with these feelings?

Then it all came out. “I made a huge mistake coming here. Why did I think I could make it by myself? I should have stayed. I wouldn’t be in this mess if I had just stayed.”

“You’re not being physically and sexually abused here. If you had stayed…”

By that point I just started drifting in my own head. I know what I escaped. But that was my normal. When you’ve been abused for so long, it just becomes your normal. I’m not sure the damage could have gotten any worse had I continued to endure it. When faced with overwhelming challenges, we go back to what we know. And that home is what I know.

I started having short flashes of memories from the recent past, reminders of how I made myself numb to what my mother was doing to me. Then I started to cry even more. What is wrong with me? I know what I went through and yet I still ask myself why I left, I still want to go back in time and forget I ever left.

My therapist told me that if I had stayed, it would have killed my spirit. “My spirit is already dead. That wouldn’t matter.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I still see the spirit in you.”

That’s not spirit. I don’t know what that is. After all of the shit I have been through, how could I have any spirit left? Shit, I don’t even know how I’m still living.

I think I cried for most of the session. By the end, I had a hand full of used tissues, neatly folded into little squares. I’m not sure why I kept on crying. I really try to keep that under control.

Perhaps it’s the physical pain I’m in. Perhaps it’s the sense of hopelessness once again creeping up on me. I don’t know for sure, but I do think I’m dehydrated now.

Guilt

~ KJ ~ 5 Comments

My heart is heavy.

The last two days have been hard for me. I’ve learned some things I didn’t know before, and I’ve had things confirmed for me that I had long suspected.

Anger, frustration, sadness, guilt…all of this overwhelms me. I spent the majority of today crying. I tried to distract myself with reading and TV, but my thoughts always returned to the emotional whirlwind going on inside.

I worry about my brother. I left him behind in order to save myself. I left him behind to continue to be abused by our mother. He is suffering. He is trapped. And I’ve done nothing to help him. I feel incredibly guilty. I am no better than all of those people who turned a blind eye to my abuse.

I fear he suffers from similar psychological difficulties that I do. Considering what we have both gone through (and I’m not even fully aware of the extent of his experiences since he is seven years older than me), it’s not unlikely.

People that I love are being dragged into the mess that I created. Innocent people. People that don’t deserve to be affected by my mother’s toxicity are now having to deal with it. It’s not fair to them. I put them at risk. Because they chose to remain connected to me, they now have to endure my mother’s bullshit, to be pawns in her chess game. This adds to my guilt even more.

Then I have people close to me that don’t understand why my mother isn’t in jail. Why haven’t I pursued legal action? Why am I protecting her? She deserves to be sitting in a prison cell, not living her life taking advantage of everyone around her. And I know that, trust me I do. But what am I supposed to do? They don’t just convict people of crimes based on what someone says. I have no proof. And she has the charm and the know-how to work the system in her favor. It would be a fruitless effort.

To be told that I am protecting her feels like I’m being stabbed in the heart. I don’t want to protect a monster. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I feel guilty for letting her go free.