Better day

Feeling better today. Just having an ebb and a flow. Therapy helped me to learn how to generally manage the regular ups and downs of daily life without slipping into self-abusive maintenance, which was the first and most important thing I needed to do after the divorce. Later, when I had gotten through that first layer and was able to get through a day without a panic attack, therapy also helped me identify when my past would rear up and cause me to get self-abusive, with no trigger and no discernible, tangible reason. There’s just a lot of that shit built up, and it comes out in bits and pieces, usually whenever I feel happy and calm and nothing’s going on. BAM. Crippling depression. Because there’s no trigger, no event or moment that starts to lead down a path of bad thinking and habitual and protective self-hate, I have yet to learn how to nip it in the bud when it starts creeping up on me, and I usually require a few days of depression and panic and anxiety and then one night of crying hysterically before I go, oh, right, I feel all fucked up because fucked up shit happened.

It can be some major kind of mindfuck to be going along with a life that’s really honestly okay and suddenly feel panic and horror and fear. My first reaction is to think, well, there’s nothing wrong with my life right now, so there must be something wrong with me that I feel this way. Instead of remembering that somebody put that wrong with you mantra in my head, and that safe places aren’t happy forever places, but places where you can feel pain and vulnerability without fear of being attacked. So, of course when my life is feeling at its safest and most stable, that’s when I start feeling all the things that were too scary to feel before. It’s hard to get those concepts to match up in your brain: good life = panic and fear. How complex and exhausting.

It is amazing to me that during these times, I can feel as alone and alien as I do. At my job, we work with children who have been through a lot of horrible things. They will be very quiet and very placid and still and resigned, more unshakably and disconcertingly adult than you’d think, and once they’ve been placed in a safe environment, they flip their shit. Because they’re testing the boundaries of safety and love, which they’ve never believed in before, but the fact that they’re testing it means they sense it’s there; they know they’re in a place that has enough good in it to subsume the bad they think is in them.

A non-sequiter. There is a group of siblings we work with who has been through a lot. Currently, they’re safe, placed in a home with a family that is consistently referred to as “one of the good ones.” They’re experienced, loving, and tolerant as the day is long. Which they need to be, because while these siblings are adorable, wonderful, sweet and intelligent little children, they’re also complete hellions. They’ve been taken from a home that has, so far, had eleven children taken from it in different sibling groups. There hasn’t appeared to be much physical abuse, but the negligence is just staggering. The parents just don’t understand that children need food, clothing, toilets, toothbrushes.

There was a twelfth child, a baby, that was killed when the father swung it against a wall, the first sign of physical abuse in the family. The latest sibling group to be taken, comprised of three children ranging from 2 to 4, witnessed this. Initially the police and social workers didn’t believe them when they said “daddy killed the baby,” and they remained in the home for several more months before the coroner lost his shit and kept pushing the autopsy reports in the face of the police and social workers, screaming about how he was going to call the paper if they didn’t get those kids out.

All the kids are dealing in different ways. The two little girls seem to be okay, but every now and again, apropos of nothing, they will glaze over and begin recounting their memory of the baby dying, as if hypnotized. Once they start, they can’t stop until they’ve gone through the whole memory, and then they’re depressed and quiet. The third child, a little boy, doesn’t talk. He’s capable of it, but since being taken from the home, he rarely speaks, rarely smiles. But sometimes, he will flip and start screaming, running around the room, punching people with little baby fists.

At an event we had recently, all the children were asked to make a poster with their names and something special about them. The little boy couldn’t think of anything, and was obviously getting frustrated and sad, so the very savvy counselor we had on staff had a great suggestion for him. At the end of the event, I came into the room with a camera to get some pictures of the kids. I felt a little tug at my shirt and looked down to see this little boy looked at me with large solemn eyes, clutching his poster to himself. I had tried taking pictures of him before, because I thought he was the sweetest looking little kid, but he would make cranky face and run away. I asked him, “Did you want to show me your poster?” He paused, shook his head, and I asked, “Did you want me to take a picture of you and your poster?” He nodded, turned his poster around.

“I am special because I say NO a lot”

I took the picture, showed it to him, and he skipped away happily. When I mentioned it to the counselor on staff, she said, “Good for him. That’s a kid who really deserves control of his environment.”

The events we have, they are mostly things where kids can get together and play and generally be safe and happy while their parents recuperate from taking care of them. A lot of parents across the city get together here, and by sheer coincidence, this sibling group ended up meeting up with an older sibling group who had been taken out of the home before them. They had only briefly known each other, with the youngest barely being a baby before the older children were taken away. But the youngest, the little boy with the solemn eyes, somehow immediately recognized his older sister, followed her around during the whole event, holding onto her shirt. She was annoyed, mentioned it to her mother, and the two moms got together and figured it out. Before the next event, they both took the kids aside and explained to them that they were siblings. They knew this was going to bring up past trauma with the family of origin, but felt the kids were all in a place that they could handle it.

Of the older sibling group, there was an older girl and a younger boy, ranging from about 15 to 17. The younger boy was overjoyed, spent the event in dogpiles with his siblings, playing Candyland, a big goofy grin on his face. His only sadness was that he had been told not to ask them, yet, about the baby who had died, because the families thought that would be a better thing to talk about in group therapy. The older girl, though, she became withdrawn, angry, frustrated. Didn’t want to play with her siblings. Didn’t want to touch them. Would deny they were related, if asked. The parents were handling it very well, but I could see them snap sometimes, and realized this was only the surface I was seeing, that there must have been fights and acting out abounding at home. As time went on, the girl seemed to accept it more, settle into it.

So how much happier could this story be? The older kids were in a good, permanent home. They had been reunited with siblings they barely knew, who were also in a good and happy home. The oldest girl was about to become an adult, embark on a whole new wonderful life.

So she tried to kill herself. She’s okay, by the way. But she tried.

I think of this story because to me, the older girl and the young boy are just flip sides of the same feelings. An attempt to control their environment, and the attempt is only made because the environment is one that can finally be controlled. The girl knew she had parents who were going to take care of her, love her, do what they could to make her better. The boy knew he had the same. So they began experiencing the anger, the fear, the helplessness, the pain that they’d had to bottle up to survive. Just as things began to get better in their lives, the bad came up to match. They had everything a person might want — family, stability, love — which meant they could feel, more acutely, the deprivation of years of not having had those things. And could experience that feeling completely.

In I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a character in a psyche ward is trying to explain to her parents why they shouldn’t be creeped out by what a psyche ward looks like, even though what it looks like to them is sick. They cringe every time they look at the barred windows. But the character remembers a time that she finally just broke, let all the pain and hate and fear from all the years come bubbling to the surface, and she spent hours clawing and ripping at the bars. Not because she wanted to get out, but because “sometimes you have to fight against something that you know won’t give and won’t hurt.”

It’s a testament to how stable I really do feel the fabric of my life is right now, that I can break down and freak out when I need to, and I know it won’t give, it won’t go away.

My bear pointed out to me that when I get all twisted up thinking about what I must look like to other people, I’m mostly talking about what I look like to myself. When I feel like talking about abuse is going to cause people to ask me, “What’s wrong with you that you didn’t leave?” I’m really saying that to myself, and with a spiteful sneer in my voice to boot. My therapist has told me this on multiple occasions, about multiple situations, and yet I haven’t figured out how to generalize this as a thing I do habitually. Every time it comes as a surprise and a revelation.

I have been thinking a little bit since about how abuse and victimization can really fuck up your sense of cause and effect, of causation vs. correlation. Such as: I am depressed and feel all messed up. I must be a weak and fucked-up person, and that must be why I got abused. I can’t let anybody see how fucked-up I am. I have to say incredibly self-abusive things to myself to make sure I don’t crack and show others how depressed I’m feeling, or else they will hate and abuse me. All these self-abusive things make me feel really sick. Because I am sick. Because I say these self-abusive things to myself I am all depressed and messed up and that’s why people abuse me.

As opposed to: Some people abused me for no reason that I caused or deserved and told me it was my fault and that nobody else would ever love or help me, causing me to develop crippling fears of other people and also the evil invisible thing inside myself that causes me to get abused, and I am depressed and feel all messed up about that.

Maybe more about that later. Actually, that whole last post was pretty much about that. If you want to see what kind of toll abuse can take on the ability to reason effectively and accurately about yourself and your surroundings, you can see what comes out of my mouth in a foul mood. Though I think a lot of what I feel and think is similar to others, only more intense by a matter of degree. The regular dysfunctional thinking patterns a person can get into when they have a low self-image just get amped up to the far end when you’ve had somebody encouraging and confirming them for years and years. And part of that dysfunctional thinking pattern is imagining (and really honestly feeling) I am the only person like this in the world. I don’t remember where I picked up this term, but I’ve always called that the feeling of “terminal uniqueness.” It’s amazing to me that I can feel that way, knowing as I do that ordinary people experience alienation and fear and self-doubt to a lesser degree, and working where I do, knowing children who experience what I feel to a far more excessive degree. But that alienation itself is part of the disease, part of the trauma. Honestly, feeling alienated in an abusive relationship was probably as much help as it was hindrance: I am not like you, I do not belong here, I am not a part of this. I am completely different than you, inside and out. Those feelings now are partly remnants of a defense system that doesn’t need to be activated anymore, and partly pain that needs to be expressed, because I am now in a place where I can say, “I feel different,” and know that doesn’t make me different. At least, not bad different.

Okay, so getting hit with the neuroses stick has taken a bite out of my work productivity for the last few days, so let me get back on it.