sexual abuse

Misplaced blame

~ KJ ~ 6 Comments

Last week, one of my therapists gave me Beginning to Heal: A First Book for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse.  I read through it rather quickly, as it’s a small book.  Parts of it were difficult for me.  The hardest part was on page 38:

“When children are abused, their ability to say no is severely damaged.  So even if the abuse continued into adulthood, you are still not to blame.  There is no magic age when you suddenly become responsible for your own abuse.”

I struggled with this most of my adult life.  I still struggle with it to this day.  My mother remained physically and emotionally abusive until the day I left home.  But that didn’t bother me as much as living with the fact that she sexually abused me until I was 28 years old.  And I let it happen.  Every single time, I let it happen.

The sexual abuse wasn’t consistent.  It stopped being consistent when I turned 14/15.  But every time I got sick, which unfortunately for me was quite frequently, it was like she preyed on that, and I became like a child too weak to say no.

“You can’t bathe yourself, I’ll do it.”

I didn’t fight back.  She’d undress me and make me stand in the shower as she washed me down.  Then she’d lead me into the bedroom and dry every last part of me.  Then she’d dress me.  I couldn’t go to the bathroom myself.

“I have to watch you.  Keep the door open.”

And she would sit right beside me.  I didn’t fight back.  Why didn’t I fight back?  My arms weren’t broken.  My legs weren’t broken.  I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself.  But I couldn’t say no.  Here I was, a mentally competent adult in my 20s, letting someone take advantage of me.  How can I expect anyone to feel sorry for me when I chose not to stop this woman from continuing to abuse me?  I made the choice to let her.  I had a choice.  I could have said no.  I could have stopped her.  I could have left.  But I didn’t.  All of those times it happened, and I didn’t.

My own bad feelings about the situation were magnified when someone who I thought was a friend blew up on me, and said I was a grown ass woman who could just leave, but that I was “scared of my mommy”.  She then continued to call me derogatory names for not leaving, and that I just kept letting it happen and so it was my fault.  It was one of the worst verbal attacks I have ever experienced in my life, made even worse by the fact that it occurred on a public forum.  I was ashamed.  I was already feeling like so much of this was my fault, and she only confirmed by beliefs.  I was acting strong on the outside, but on the inside, I was breaking apart.  What kind of person lets their mother abuse them?  She’s right.  I must have issues.  Something must be wrong with me.

Except not.  Why are we victim-blaming?  The person responsible in this situation is my mother.  Not me.  When she abused me all of those times in adulthood, I was not an adult.  I was a scared child, afraid to go against her mother for fear of being hurt or killed.  Same situation, just a different age.  How should I have expected my response to be any different?  For so long, I’ve blamed myself for letting the abuse happen.  I blamed myself for what happened in childhood, but I especially blamed myself for what happened when I was an adult.  As if a magical cloud of knowledge and responsibility appeared before me on my 18th birthday and gave me everything I needed to know any better.

I should have known better.  But I couldn’t have.  I never had the opportunity to learn what was normal.

Superman

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

The other day, one of my therapists suggested that I buy a stuffed animal to comfort my child self.  I never had a stuffed animal.  If I needed to hold onto something, I’d use a pillow.  I’m usually compliant when it comes to therapy, so that night, I checked online to see if there were any stuffed animals that caught my eye.  After ten minutes or so, I came across the perfect bear – a brown teddy bear dressed in a blue sweater with a lightning bolt, red cape, and eye mask.  It was the teddy bear version of Superman.

I knew I had to have it, so the next day, I trekked to the nearest Toys R Us and searched frantically for over a half an hour for that bear.  I even went to customer service, who could only tell me that they had it in stock and that it “must be somewhere in the store.”  I was minutes away from breaking down and crying before I finally found it, stuffed behind a bunch of ballerina bears.  I hugged that teddy bear so hard, right there in the middle of the store.  No fucks given.  That bear was mine.

You might be wondering why it was that particular bear that I needed.  As a child, I would close my eyes and hope that Superman would fly down and defeat my evil mother and save me from ever having to be hurt again.  I would look out the window, just waiting for him to fly through, at the same time trying to distract myself from the pain of the abuse.  Superman never came.  But that never stopped me.  Superman gave me hope in a hopeless situation.

Now that I am older, I know that Superman can’t save me.  I have to save myself.  In a way, I had to become my own Superman.  I took on a Superman persona.  I wore my Superman pajamas every night to bed.  I wore Superman t-shirts all the time.  I even wore a cape (out in public).  People that knew me associated me with Superman.  During a group therapy workshop a few weeks back, we had a body image exercise in which other members and therapists wrote messages on traced images of our bodies; my therapist drew the “S” and wrote Superman on mine.  Among all of the messages, it stood out the most.  I knew I wasn’t Superman.  I just needed to feel like I was in a theoretical sense.

My coworkers used to call me Superman because I could do anything.  I could unload trucks, answer any question, and complete any task with ease.  Little did they know how weak I really was.  I could lift a 200-lb grill by myself, but I didn’t have the strength to fight back my abusive mother.  While I may be physically strong on the outside, my inside is completely shattered.  There’s no point in having physical strength without the support of an internal structure.

While I have escaped, I still don’t see myself as strong.  I didn’t confront my mother.  I didn’t stand up to her.  I didn’t stand my ground.  I left in a weak way.  There was nothing Superman about that.  I’m still so broken.  Why didn’t anyone save me?

Five Weeks

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

As I typed in the title of this post, I wondered when (and if) I would ever stop labeling the weeks of my life based off of the time I escaped my ‘old’ life.  I’m sure there may come a point in the future when I will be so occupied with my new life that I will no longer need to base it off of the old.  For now, I feel that each week that goes by is an accomplishment.  I came here expecting very little of myself.   I’m not even sure I expected to make it one week.  Now I’ve made it five weeks.  So what’s stopping me from making it six, seven, eight weeks?

I probably shouldn’t even be writing this blog post right now.  I have a thesis that is not writing itself.  Chapter 5 was due last Sunday while I was hospitalized and I have yet to hand it in.  Honestly, I haven’t even started it.  I’ve been so preoccupied with work, so exhausted with adjusting to a new schedule, and so many things on my mind that I just haven’t been able to sit down and focus.  It will get done today, I promise..right after I finish this post.

I can’t believe I have one more week of school left.  One. More. Week.  I have to give myself credit.  In five weeks, I have moved/escaped, got a new job, started therapy, gotten hospitalized, and still managed to write 60 pages of a thesis on a topic that I unfortunately live with every day.  And in one more week, I’ll have my 120 credits (121 actually) for my BA in Psychology.  I don’t know that many others would have been able to do what I’ve done.  I have fallen, but I’ve also gotten right back up.

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned the possibility of a DID diagnosis.  For me, it was hard to swallow.  That whole experience was hard to swallow.  I was dissociating so badly, it was out of control.  I could have been hospitalized again.  The other therapist brought up the possibility of putting me in IOP and my heart sank.  For me, I see that as a failure.  I am in no way saying those that go to IOP are failures, I am saying for me personally, it is a failure.  I want to be as normal as possible.  I want to be able to go to work every day.  I want to function.  I feel like IOP takes that away from me.

At the same time I understood where she was coming from.  I can’t put them in a position where I am a danger and it comes back on them.  They are only equipped to do so much.  I told them I didn’t want to do IOP.  I’ll do whatever it takes not to do IOP.  But to do that, I need to accept that I have a dissociative disorder and focus my treatment on that, instead of trying to cover up my symptoms and having it blow up in my face like it did in therapy on Thursday.

I think hearing those words hurt more because I knew deep down that I had a problem with dissociation.  I was familiar with DID from my courses in psychology and through meeting people with DID through trauma support groups.  I always felt that so many of the symptoms rang true for me.  But I didn’t want them to.  No one wants DID.  No one wants a lifetime of therapy, a lifetime of misunderstanding from others (although I sort of have that already).  There’s no cure.  DID won’t go away with a pill.  A lot of therapists won’t even acknowledge its existence and therefore won’t treat it.  It’s a complicated diagnosis.  It’s a complicated disorder.  I don’t need any more complications.  Why can’t life be simple?

Maybe I am just overwhelmed right now.  I’ve always wanted answers, and now that I have them, I am pushing them away because they are not the answers I want.  Why is it that now that I have escaped the horrible abuses my mother had been committing against me for so so long, that I am still being affected?  Why couldn’t everything just become normal once I left?  Why do I still have to suffer? She should be the one in the hospital (or better yet, in prison).  She should be the one in therapy trying to figure out why she does the fucked up shit she does.  She should be hurting.

Instead she’s living her life day in and day out like it’s nothing, like everything is okay.   Yet here I am, physically and emotionally in pain.  Here I am paying for therapy instead of groceries because my mind is going to kill me before hunger does.  And here I am struggling day in and day out trying to keep it together, not only for myself, but for those out there (my friends, my readers, my therapists) who are pulling for me.  This shit is backwards.

There is a part of me that is strong, that knows I can overcome anything and do great things.  Unfortunately, a lot of times, that part goes into hiding and I am left with my fearful, anxious self.  The self that doesn’t want to get out of bed.  The self that is so scared just to take a shower.  The self that fears mother is coming to hurt me.  I almost enjoy when I’m not myself because it gives me a break from living in fear for a while.  Or maybe it’s not even myself.  Maybe it’s another part of me entirely.  How do I even know?

Maybe I understand myself a little more than I like to acknowledge.

Resilience

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

Some would say it’s a contradiction for someone with PTSD to refer to themselves as resilient, since PTSD itself contradicts healthy adaptation to stress.  But you know what, I am resilient.  I don’t care who agrees or disagrees with me.  It doesn’t matter.  I’ve made up my mind.

With less than a day of being released from the hospital, I started my job.  I called them as soon as a got out of the hospital to find out if I even still had a job.  Luckily my roommate called them while I was in the hospital so they were somewhat aware (though they do not know the circumstances).  I woke up at 4:45 in the morning so I would be able to shower and get ready in time to make it to the 6:00 bus.  I was tired and in pain, but I managed.  There were a couple of times when I just had to go to the bathroom to decompress for a few minutes.  I also lost myself for I don’t know how long.  When I came back to reality, it took me a few seconds to even realize where I was and what I was doing.  I don’t think anyone noticed, thankfully.  It’s not something I wanted to happen on the first day, though.  I’m so scared of someone not understanding what’s going on.  Why can’t I just be normal and not dissociate and not have flashbacks and not have breakdowns?

Regardless of all that, you know what?  I still went to work.  I functioned like a normal human being.  I would bet my savings that a good portion of the other patients that were discharged either went right back to drugs or right back to another hospital (most of them admitted that they would).  I’m not about that life.  I want to function.  I’m fighting my hardest to be normal despite all this bullshit I have to deal with.  How is that not being resilient?

Even in childhood, I managed to adapt quite well despite everything that was going on.  I received excellent grades.  I rarely got into trouble (except the rare instances when I was tremendously bored out of my mind).  I wasn’t a complete social outcast, though I was definitely socially inept.  Perhaps being resilient hurt me in a way, because no one suspects anything bad is going on when a child is acting relatively normal.  Maybe if I did act out, someone would have noticed something was wrong.  Resiliency seems to have been a double-edged sword for me.  While it got me through to adulthood alive, it also quite possibly prolonged the abuse and trauma I experienced for so long.  But I can’t do anything about that now.

I know a lot of people think I am weak for not being able to handle myself all of the time.  My strengths far outweigh my moments of weakness.  Maybe that is my fault for not talking as much about my strengths as I do about my faults.  I believe people can learn more from me if I talk about the things that so many others don’t want to talk about.  No matter what people say, no matter what people think…I am strong.  I am resilient.  I am me.

Involuntarily voluntarily admitted

~ KJ ~ Leave a comment

I’m back.

A few hours ago, I was released from the psychiatric unit of my local hospital.  I had been there since Friday.  I didn’t want to go to the hospital.  In the end, I knew it was the right thing to do.

Friday night, everything just came to a head.  My flashbacks were occurring quite frequently to the point that I was becoming almost paranoid.  Looking back, my thoughts were so irrational.  I genuinely believed that my mother was going to come and hurt me.  I heard her voice in my head and I couldn’t get it out.  I didn’t feel safe.  I jumped at every little noise.  I couldn’t breathe because I had gotten myself in such a panic.  I was switching between wanting to die and wanting to find safety.  I ended up cutting myself more than I even consciously realized.  I taped menstrual pads to myself, grabbed my hoodie and my sneakers and ran out of the house.  I left the house originally planning to take a walk, hoping I would be able to find some relief.  Instead, I found myself panicking even more, constantly looking over my shoulder, running through the streets in the dark of night.  After awhile I decided to walk to the hospital.  I waited in front of the emergency room for a while still hoping the feelings would go away.  But they were still there.  I knew I had no control at that time.  So I went in.

When I first got in the ER, I was panicking. I kept telling the nurse to “please don’t let them (my family) find me, please don’t tell them I’m here.”  When I met with the social worker in crisis, she asked me if I was hiding from anyone because of what I kept saying. I told her the basics, that I left my family because they were not nice people. No one wants to hear that shit anyway.

After a few hours in the hospital, the panic began to subside.  I started to feel safe again.  I wanted to leave, but of course you can’t just do that.  If you don’t admit yourself voluntarily, they will involuntarily commit you.  Then, if you try to sign out of voluntary before you are released, they will involuntarily commit you.  So not much of a choice, is it?  The staff kept trying to tell me I was depressed.  I specifically told them I was not depressed.  It was an issue of anxiety and PTSD.  I know the difference very well.  It always seems to be a fight, though.  I was more upset at the fact that I was now going to be missing my first day of work, and I’d probably be out of a job.  All these steps forward I took and now I’d have to start over.

In the hospital, I contemplated going back home.  Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this freedom.  I don’t know.  I moved away, yet I still ended up hospitalized.  So maybe it wasn’t the right choice.  Maybe I missed something.  Maybe my mother was right.  Maybe I can’t live without her.  I just want to be normal.  But maybe I have to acknowledge the fact that I will never be normal.

It doesn’t help hat my support system is lacking.  I have no family, and while I know that is for the better, hospital staff see that as concerning.  I tried to reach out to someone on Friday night, only to be shut down.  I couldn’t contact my therapist because she was out of the country.  While my online friends are available, I often think there is a lack of understanding, especially when some of the comments they make tend to piss me off or upset me even more than I was upset to begin with.  I’m not even surprised I ended up in the hospital.  I have no one here.  I’m not even sure the people I have a distance away are supportive for me anymore.  At this point, I only have complete trust in my therapists.  Everyone else is just sort of out there outside of my protective bubble.

Going back to my hospital experience, I can’t tell you how much I dislike going into psychiatric hospitals because you have to answer the same horrible questions so many times, tell all your problems to at least one person on each floor.  It’s frustrating for me because I always struggle with whether or not I should be open about my history.  If I say I have flashbacks, they want to know of what and why.  When they ask about any abuse history, they want to know who, how, and how long.  I never know what reaction I’ll get when I say it was my mother.  I admit, the last couple of times I was hospitalized prior to this, the staff were accepting and appropriately responsive to me.  During this hospitalization, when I revealed that my mother was my abuser, the nurse made a face and asked me “Are you a lesbian?  Is your mother a lesbian?”  What? Hold up.  I just told you that my mother and father both abused me, which means my father was in the picture, which means my mother was not a lesbian.  But even then, what the hell kind of a question is that?  Saying something like that makes me feel like you are insinuating all parties involved are homosexual.  Mother-daughter sexual abuse has nothing…I repeat NOTHING…to do with homosexuality.  This assumption gets me so infuriated.  If I was a male who admitted being abused by a male, would she have asked me if I was gay?  I highly doubt it.  Sexual abuse is rarely about sexuality.  I am not a fucking lesbian.  Fuck.  If it weren’t for the fact that I hadn’t slept in about 30 hours at that point, I probably would have blown up at her.  But I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I just let it go.  It makes me rage just thinking about it, though.  Then again, I can’t blame people for their complete lack of knowledge about MDSA.  I just need to use this experience as more fuel for me to spread awareness.

I have to say, the one (and probably only) positive that came out of this hospitalization experience was seeing the psychiatrist.  This psychiatrist had a brain.  He had a concern.  He actually talked to me for a good 30 minutes, which is something I have never experienced from a psychiatrist before.  He listened to me.  He listened to my concerns.  We went over my whole lengthy medication history.  For the first time, someone is focusing on treating my PTSD.  Not depression.  Everyone always wants to shove anti-depressants down my throat.  In fact, within 10 minutes of arriving on the psych floor, they wanted me to take a dose of Celexa.  I refused.  First of all, been there, done that drug.  Second of all, these people don’t even know me or my history yet, how are they medicating the unknown?  I am glad I stood my ground, and the psychiatrist agreed with me.  I think he liked me.  He told me that I should pursue a career in psychiatry.  When I told him I wanted to be a counselor, he said “you can do both, you can do whatever.  You’re probably smarter than I am.”  This dude just met me.  What?  How does he assess me so fast?  At the end of our session, he said “I would be honored if you would be my patient.  I genuinely enjoy talking to you.  Can I shake your hand?”  It was late at night.  Maybe he needed sleep.  I don’t know.  Everyone else was saying how much of an asshole he was, but he was anything but to me.

Anyway, he prescribed me Prazosin.  It’s actually a blood pressure medication but has been used off-label to treat combat veterans returning from war with PTSD with considerable success.  He said it should help my nightmares and night terrors.  He also prescribed Topamax, which has been used in treatment-resistant PTSD (since I haven’t responded well to anti-psychotics) and hydroxyzine for panic attacks.  So far, so good.  I had no problems in the hospital.  No side effects, except for the hydroxyzine making me extremely tired.  But I’d rather be tired than in a panic.

Overall, the other patients were cool people.  I talked to everyone.  There was one girl who was a little inappropriately attached to me and the other patients were saying she was in love with me.  She may very well have been.  She was constantly sitting next to me and at one point pulled me over to the side to ask me to help her fix her bra.  She also touched me several times despite me telling her please do not touch me.  It irritated the hell out of me.  I try to be nice to everyone but between the MDSA and the nurse’s question about being lesbian, I was just not in the mood to be involved in that shit.  I knew I had to be patient and bite my tongue if I wanted to get out of there.  Acting out would have just gotten me involuntarily committed or punished with a longer stay.

Since I was doing well on the medication and had a therapy appointment already scheduled today, they released me.  I’m glad, because being in that place was not an overall positive experience.  It was very unstructured.  There were very few groups and activities, no outside time, and very little staff.  There were no individual counseling sessions and no meetings with a social worker, which I have always had in my other hospitalizations.  It just seemed very disconnected.  You never really knew what was going on.  If it wasn’t for my roommate getting in contact with my therapist for me, I don’t think the hospital would have even ever contacted her to tell her I was there.  I learned a lot of the patients were “regulars”.  With the lack of care there, I am not surprised.  Many of the patients were just homeless and needed a place to stay.  It’s sad.  The system isn’t working.  It needs to be fixed.

Four weeks

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

So, it’s been four weeks since my escape.  I’m still alive.  I’m still kicking.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t all over the place emotionally.  These last few days have been trying for me.  I had a lot of feelings about my family resurface after trying so long to keep them suppressed.  There are a lot of unresolved issues I have with people in my family that I just haven’t had the strength to deal with.  I still don’t have the strength now.  I don’t know if I ever will.  For now, my anger and sadness about it come out through my tears.

I have been on edge these past few days, and likely will be into this weekend and coming week.  As this is the four week mark, it is also the time I told my family I would be coming back home.  I haven’t had contact with my family since I left; the few text messages I received from my mother remain unanswered. I was actually relieved that her contact has been minimal.  With that being said, she hasn’t yet had the realization that I am not coming back.  People have warned me to prepare myself for her acting out.  When she realizes that she no longer has any control over me, she is not going to just concede; she is going to try to gain back her control.

While I have taken every precaution I could to make sure I am untraceable, I am still scared of her.  I am still scared she will find me.  It may be irrational, but to me, the fear is real.  The last couple of nights, I have barricaded my bedroom door before I go to sleep because I am scared she will somehow get in the house and try to hurt me.  I haven’t left the house the last few nights because I’m afraid she’ll be there, waiting for me.  I’ve had nightmares.  The other night, I became startled by a fight my roommate was having with someone.  Before I was able to process what was really going on, I began fearing that it was my mother coming for me, and I urinated on myself.  I haven’t done that since I left home.  I felt like a failure.

To add to my already increasing anxiety, I start work tomorrow.  Yes, I got my social security card just in time and was able to finalize the paperwork on Tuesday.  While the job is nothing I haven’t done before, I am anxious about being in a new environment with people I don’t know and who don’t know me.  At my old job, I often had days where I was not mentally present.  Sometimes, I was completely non-responsive, staring into nothingness; other times, I was in a child-like state.  Regardless, my close coworkers knew my situation and covered for me.  Now, I don’t have that.  What if I can’t focus enough to get my work done?  What if I break down?  What if I have a flashback while at work?  No one is going to understand what is happening.  I’m going to end up getting fired.

I really just hope I can get through these next few days unscathed.  I don’t know if I will ever get over the fear of my mother coming back to hurt me.  I can only hope that over time, the fear fades away.  I don’t want to live like this forever.

Glorifying parents

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

I was checking some random news stories on my Facebook this morning out of boredom.  I came across the story of an 18 year-old who witnessed a woman in danger of being run over on a highway and came to her rescue.  I thought to myself “What a great man, with courage and bravery.  He made the right choice.”  Then I read through the comments on the news story and came across multiple people congratulating the man’s parents on doing a great job raising him.  What?  What did this man’s parents do?  They weren’t in the car.  He didn’t call them and ask what he should do.  This man made his own decision.  So why are we thanking his parents and not thanking him?

By that same logic, do we blame the parents when someone does something absolutely unthinkable?  Not that I have seen.  No one blamed the parents of Adam Lanza when he shot up an elementary school and killed so many innocent people.  No one blames the parents of murderers or rapists.  I don’t blame my mother’s parents for the traumatic abuse she inflicted upon me.  She made that decision. Just like the 18 year-old man in the story above made his decision.  No one else did that for them.

Unfortunately this is a common occurrence.  I’ve had it happen to me personally more times than I can count.  Whenever I won academic awards in school, people would tell my parents they had done a great job parenting.  Excuse me?  I won the award.  Not my parents.  Neither of them did anything.  They didn’t help me with my homework.  They didn’t encourage me to study or do better.  I chose to do that on my own because I needed something positive to hold on to.  When teachers told my parents how kind and driven to help others I was, they always included “you’re doing a great job as parents.”  No.  No they weren’t.  If these people only knew the horrors I was living through.

I was parenting myself.  I had to parent myself.  The only good thing my parents ever did for me was showing me everything NOT to do.  My mother never wanted me to succeed; I wanted that for myself.  My mother and father never showed me how to be caring and compassionate; that came from never wanting others to feel the same pain and despair I had felt all of my life.

I can’t tell you how I ended up becoming the person that I am, considering what I came from.  What I can tell you is that some of the most kind, compassionate, and exceptional people I have ever met have had the shittiest upbringings.  We raised ourselves to be everything our parents were not.  We raised ourselves because that’s what we had to do to survive.

Stop assuming that everything a person is, is because of their parents.  It is so invalidating to do something good, only to have someone else be recognized for it.  You wouldn’t want that for yourself, so don’t do it to others.

Changes

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

After my therapy session and subsequent blogging Tuesday night, I decided to go ahead and make some changes for myself.  For the first time ever, I have control of who I am and who I want to be.

I wanted to change my hair color.  I could have just bought a box of hair dye from the drug store, but I wanted to do something different.  I went to a salon, for the first time ever.  I got 10 or so inches cut off and layered.  I told the stylist the color I wanted and she immediately made me feel like it was a bad decision.  She said it wouldn’t look right, and that I’d regret it.  Usually in circumstances in which people disagree with me, I give in to their wants without a fight.  But this time, I stood up for myself.  I told her I knew what I wanted, and eventually, she gave in.  I went from one side of the color spectrum to the other; the change was drastic…and I love it.  I received a lot of compliments on it, which made me feel even better about my decision.  The best part?  My mother can’t copy me.  She has no idea what I look like.  It’s freeing in a way that I can’t explain.

I also did some shopping for myself.  I bought new glasses, some jewelry, and a nice shirt.  I probably would have gotten a tattoo as well if I knew where there was a tattoo shop around here.  I should think that through a little more, anyway.  I don’t want to turn into one of those out-of-control youngsters who goes crazy once they get a taste of freedom.  I’m too old for that now.

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, I decided to go to the beach…by myself.  I was just going to sit on the far end away from the water and absorb the sun, but by the time I got there it was windy and there was not much sun.  I didn’t want my efforts to get to the beach to go to waste, so I took a chance and went into the ocean.  This was big for me.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I tried to drown myself in the ocean.  I’ve managed to avoid anything further than dipping my toes in the water for that reason.  I didn’t want a flashback.  I didn’t want to go back to that place.  And since I was alone, I was taking a chance that if I went back to that place, I’d have no one to pull me back to reality.  But I did it.  I went in.  At one point, the waves knocked me right down on my ass and I just sat there for a while as the water pushed and pulled me back and forth.  But I got through it.

Maybe it was the physical changes I had made that put me in a different place.  Maybe it was the Adderall I had taken the night before so I could get my paper done.  Who knows.  I feel like a different person.  Even small changes can mean so much to a person.

I am not my mother.

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

I am not my mother.

It is such a simple sentence, yet it is an extremely difficult concept for me to embrace.

I try to avoid thinking about it as much as possible.  But when I was at a group-therapy workshop this past Sunday, I participated in a body image project that brought up a lot of those feelings.  It took everything in me not to just color over my body outline and stab the paper.  I’ve always had difficulty connecting to my body.  I’ve always had difficulty loving my body because I feel like it’s her body.

I’ve mentioned before how many people tell me I look so much like my mother.  That makes it so much harder to separate myself from her.  Aside from her being a couple of inches shorter, she has the same skin color, eye color, and stature as me.  To make matters worse, my mother consistently went out of her way to make herself look even more like me.  I believe she did it because she knew it bothered me.  It was just another way to manipulate me.

If I dyed my hair, she dyed her hair the same color.  If I got a haircut, she got a haircut, too.  She’d buy the same underwear as me.  She would even take my clothes without my permission and wear them.  I remember getting picked up from work one day last year and she was in the back of the car, wearing a familiar outfit.  It was the outfit I got for Christmas from one of my best work friends.  I didn’t even get to wear it.  When I asked her why she took it, she said it looked better on her anyway.  It didn’t even fit her.

I avoid looking in the mirror because I constantly see her, both in body and in face.  I never see myself.  If I look like her, that must mean that I am like her in every way.  It is nauseating to me.  I hate my body because it’s her body.  I hate my face because it’s her face.  I don’t know if I can get past that.  I’ve never been able to feel like anything is my own, and that includes my body.

During my therapy session today, my therapist asked me about the body image project.  I told her about my difficulty in seeing myself as separate from my mother, and how that makes it difficult for me not to hate my body because of how much I hate her.  My therapist tried to get me to realize that I was not my mother, especially on a psychological level.  Our personalities are very different.  I am also more intelligent than my mother – and that was something that she hated about me and constantly made me feel bad about.

Despite the differences, I still have a hard time acknowledging that I am not my mother.  It’s hard when you grow up in a society that judges you on your looks before anything else.  Part of me wants to make a drastic change, because now she won’t be able to copy me.  Maybe I’ll dye my hair dark.  Maybe I’ll get a new pair of glasses.  I need something to help me feel different, because knowing it isn’t enough for me.

The Letter Left Unsent

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

Before I escaped, I wrote a letter to my mother.  It wasn’t the nicest letter.  I called her out on her shit, so to speak.  I also wrote that I never wanted to hear from her again.  I e-mailed a copy to myself, which I’ll paste here.  I believe I added a few things here and there, but this was most of the letter:

I have removed you from my life. Remove me from yours. Do not contact me. Do not attempt to contact me through others. Do not speak my name. You’ve spread lies about me to anyone that would listen; nothing that comes out of your mouth has ever been the truth. I’m crazy and bipolar? Newsflash – I don’t have bipolar disorder, and I’m not crazy. You are the crazy one. You say I don’t have any friends because I feel that I am better than everyone else? I never had friends because you never let me leave the house. I’m not better than anyone else – in fact, I have a hard time believing I am worthy of anything because you’ve treated me like shit for so long that I believe I am worthless. You think telling people I hurt myself makes you look better? How about you tell them that both your children hurt themselves? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both your kids are so fucked up. But it’s okay, keep acting like you’re the innocent. No matter how much I hurt myself, it will never be anywhere near as painful as all of the ways you have hurt me.

You never tell people what you’ve done. You are a histrionic, narcissistic abuser. It wasn’t enough that you took away my childhood, you had to take advantage in my adulthood, too. You are sick. One day, everyone will know who you are really are. You are not the victim you play yourself out to be. You were never the victim.

You’ve controlled me for 29 years. You will not control me anymore. You have tried to isolate me from everyone. Some have fallen for your manipulation, but others have seen you for who you really are. You should be rotting in a jail cell; instead, I can only wait for you to finally burn in Hell.

You were right about one thing – I hate you. You are not deserving of anyone’s love. You don’t even deserve to be called a mother.

I ended up editing the letter a couple of times.  After I wrote my first draft, I took a picture and showed it to a few of my closest online friends to ask if it was too mean.  Someone pointed out that I had written “please” several times throughout the paper; I hadn’t even realized.  I shouldn’t have been asking her for anything; I don’t owe her that.  I promptly changed it and added more to it, and eventually ended up with the above.  I knew I couldn’t mail it from my new address, because the postmark could reveal my location.  So I mailed it to a friend on the other side of the country.  That will REALLY throw her off.

My friend hasn’t mailed the letter yet.  She is waiting until I give her the okay.  I’m still so unsure of myself.  Is it too mean?  Am I going to hurt her feelings?  Am I a bad person for cutting off all contact?  Will this make her even more angry at me?  Can I live without her?  I don’t know.  Some days I feel like I am ready to take that step; other days I am not so sure.  How am I going to deal with the aftermath?  What do I do when someone asks me about my family?  No one wants to hear that you cut off all contact; they don’t understand that.  Either way, soon, she is going to realize that I’m not going back.  I can’t leave her with no explanation.