In 2019/2020, I was bearing up under the burden of lifelong struggles that had never been resolved, but only endured. And this two-year period was a watershed of insights, which I started writing down to make sense of them. I started figuring out tactics and strategies for finally trying to remove some of the burden, and right the ship once and for all. One of the first things I started was concentrating on one thing at a time, instead of everything all the time while getting nowhere. Because of this, I broke things down into categories, such as “job”, “family”, “self”.
I began thinking about those things separately, and maybe that helped me realize something about the way I’m influenced by certain circumstances. My usual M.O. was just to beat myself up for my reactions and lack of ability to handle things the way I thought I should.
One of the big realizations I came to at this time, was about how truly poisonous my family dynamic was to me. For a long time, I had kept my supposedly close family, full of “nice, normal people” at arm’s length. I hadn’t quite separated in my mind whether there was something wrong with them, or something wrong with me. Of course, you can’t really separate those things, because among many other reasons, you adopt the behaviors you are raised with. But I hadn’t really gotten anywhere with this as an issue.
In a big way, I had never decided, or sussed out, the fact that my whole framework for even thinking about my distance from my family—my whole mindset on this subject—was related to blame. So, there was an undefined guilt associated with this avoidance of my family. Just a vague, never-quite-identified feeling that there was something wrong with me. And that was true, but not in the sense that I had been thinking about it.
My grandmother’s illness, and the extended hospice at home care situation that followed over the next couple of months, brought my thinking about my family to a head. It was full of realizations that I didn’t really have time to properly work out at the time, because I was devoting most of my energy to trying to take care of my grandmother.
The ultimate realization that I had, was that this family dynamic, even in the absence of most of the overt traumas one normally associates with really bad family experiences—in other words, there was no overt abuse—was completely toxic. It was poison. I’ve gone from hating my family, even while recognizing they’re not terrible people, to realizing that I hate who I am when I’m caught up in the family dynamic. The description “toxic” has become so overused that it’s nearly meaningless. But I understood it on a visceral level during this time period. I felt ill. Not in a specific, symptomatic way. But just crappy. I felt like I was full of poison.
Everything about my mindset at this time was the expression of an undercurrent of nasty feelings: defensiveness, resentment, blame shifting, victim mentality, self-absorption.
As a child raised with those moods and messages from my family, and with the undercurrent of that mental functioning, I’ve not only absorbed and are affected by them, but I amplify them with my own sensitivity and spit them back out in every communication. It’s mean, I’m petty, and ugly. And the result is, it doesn’t matter how loud and nasty you get, you will never ever feel heard.
I found many resources helpful during this time. I began learning about, surprisingly, complex PTSD, and wondering about the complex issues of the victim/perpetrators of abuse.
The reason this was surprising to me is that, while I’m not the victim of physical or sexual abuse or neglect, when I read the symptoms of CPTSD, I identified with almost all of them, and realized I was, after a lifetime, reading the first description of a psychological condition that really described ME and the issues I was dealing with.
Perhaps I’m dealing with more subtle and insidious cumulative effects of modeling and of what I learned are clinically called “adverse childhood experiences”, and it has resulted in these C-PTSD symptoms. And, though I don’t have the horrifying childhood history of many children, there was plenty wrong in my family when I was growing up, and I was exposed to things that showed me that there is no safety for me in the world if I show who I really am. Plenty of messages that were instilled in me that told me that I was damaged goods, that there is no integrity to be found in people, that you can’t rely on the people who are supposed to love you, that if I see anything wrong in other people, that is my fault, and it really means that there is something wrong with me, and I’m just warped and can’t see the good in what looks wrong to me.
The more subtle and indirect these traumas are, perhaps the harder they are to work out, and the easier it is to stay stuck in them, possibly.
A part of what contributes to staying stuck in this mindset is that sufferers will always find a reason to feel shame. And if the trauma you suffered is non-obvious—I’ve heard referred to as “little ‘t’” traumas—then you don’t even consider yourself “worthy” of having issues that interfere with your life. So ironically, you keep yourself stuck in trauma, but not allowing yourself the legitimacy that you grant to victims of obvious abuse. “Real” abuse.
That’s how I can remain stuck in misery, striving and looking for a way out, but yet never quite taking myself seriously, the way I’d take that level of suffering in someone else.
And yet, I’m still trying. And looking back on it, this has been the time period when I am, at long last, finally laying down a real foundation for change.