That’s the video I watched this morning that brought so many important things to the surface of my psyche.
And here’s the notes I took while watching it :
I was named and shamed for being alive and for not being able to learn things instantly the first time and for clumsiness over which I had no control.
My father was duplicitous in being one person in public and a worse one in private.
My psyche is preoccupied with not ending up like my father, rageful and impatient. And I know for a fact that shit is inside me ready to come out.
I have shame that stems from being abandoned to do things myself. Like buy clothes.
Those times I tried to ask for help were key shaming incidents.
Rewrite shame scenarios into what would have happened with a healthy parent.
This is some very heavy, very powerful stuff. I have approached this topic before but never have I seen how truly wracked with shame I am, and how big a factor that is in my inability to emerge from my own shadow.
In fact, this is so huge that I kind of feel dwarfed by it. I am having trouble figuring out how I am going to address it. It’s so biiiiiig.
But I refuse to allow myself to be intimidated. Let’s press on.
Like I said, I was made to feel bad for even being alive. I was not valued in my own family and everybody treated me as an afterthought at best. I was unplanned and hence unwanted and unwelcome and I grew up trying to deny my very existence.
Hence their total lack of patience when trying to teach me a task. They would start to teach me, and I for some reason would be clumsy and hesitant.
Almost as if I was afraid someone was about to angrily take the task away while saying they might as well do it themselves and making me feel horrible for that.
Which is what happened, of course.
And I would not have been so clumsy if someone had taken the time to play with me in the appropriate way for developing motor skills.
I wasn’t ashamed of my father’s two faced nature but it definitely hurt. Seeing him being this amazingly charming, charismatic, personable guy to strangers when he was such a miserable, irritable, abusive prick at home really made me feel like shit.
Why couldn’t THAT guy have been my dad?
Hence my not wanting to become him, and yes, I can feel his voice inside me trying to come out sometimes. It would manifest slightly differently – more sarcasm, less aggression – but that would make it oh so much worse.
And like I mentioned once long ago, I was abandoned to do my own clothes shopping when I was only 9 or 10 years old. They just handed me my money from the monthly Baby Bonus check (AKA Family Allowance) and sent me on my way.
Those trips were nightmares. Just one long anxiety attack. I had no idea what I needed or how to buy it but everything was so expensive that I knew the money would not buy very much at all.
And what an act of callous contempt.
“Here, take the money we get only because you’re alive and buy all your clothes with it. This way we don’t have to invest any of our own time OR money in you., ”
No wonder I am so broken.
More after the break.
Why do I always feel like the alarm clock starts ticking the moment I get out of bed? What if I am sitting at the computer being social and having fun? Why run off?
And now, the homework : rewriting the bad scenarios with better parenting.
Hence my emphasizing the times I tried to tell my parents about all the bullying I was subject to in school, only to be dismissed and made to feel bad for bothering them with my problems without them even listening to me at all.
Those incidents fucking crushed me.
Competent parents who actually loved their youngest would have listened with great concern as I told them about the horrors I endured on a daily basis, and would have been very upset that such things were happening to their beloved child.
They would have asked me what I wanted them to do about it, and I would have told them I wanted them to make the school stop the bullying.
And my mother would have done what her mother did for her : storm down to the principal’s office and raised holy hell until she was sure they had gotten the point that their neglect was unacceptable and they were gonna protect me or ELSE.
And I would have been safe. Which means I would eventually stop being in a constant state of low grade panic any time I was outside the classroom but inside the school.
I might not even have started hanging out in the library all the time.
Books always make me feel safe.
And when as a wee one I wanted to learn to do all the chores my older siblings did, my parents would have been kind and patient with me and accepted that I was not going to get it the first time and they would have encouraged me to keep trying till I got it.
And my father would never have said “stop attracting attention to yourself” and I would have been made to feel warmly welcome to the family and my siblings would have accepted me as one of them and my brother David never would have cut me down out of jealousy and I would have grown up loved and accepted.
And I would never have been depressed.
I don’t think I did that right. Because that did not make me feel better. It just made my heart ache with longing for the childhood I should have had, and made me feel the terrible wrongness of my childhood all the more keenly.
Perhaps I was not supposed to phrase it as a theoretical. Theoretical scenarios can’t overwrite the bad tapes in my mind.
But I can’t lie. I can’t say things happened in a way I know they did not, not even for a purely theoretical exercise that’s for my own good, like this.
Too realistic for my own damned good again.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.