Just listened to podcast on divorce...

[Joelle]

(hopefully this is an appropriate place to post? I'm new...)

 

I just listened to the podcast on divorce; I was listeningwhile doing other things, and so was not fully engaged in listening (at first…)and then, not sure exactly what line struck me, but I felt a visceral ‘WHOA!’moment hit me like a Mack truck of insight.

 

Long story (as we all are!) but my childhood was extremelyabusive- my father was physically sexually psychologically and emotionallyabusive, and growing up with my mother and grandparents in a very enmeshedconfused codependent and still abusive household, I have a lot of resentments.I know that much of who I am in relationships is impacted by my ‘upbringing’.

 

I think I have always felt a bit defective for not beingable to fully forgive or let go of anger for numerous incidents with my mother andfather (both who have never apologized and who will not even acknowledge thatthese things happened and still happen), that I am being childish or selfish orimmature for not ‘getting over’ these things.

 

Anyway, a thought that struck me- Stef made mention of achild having respect for a parent who chose to be with an abusive person etc…

 

We (my mom, brother an I) moved into my grandparents housewhen I was 3, and I was forced to spend weekends with my dad for years (untilhe decided without telling anyone to move across the country- he’s been backand forth and remarried numerous times and has been our of my life for years ofhis own choice) where I would continue to experience severe abuse.

 

While listening to the podcast, I distinctly rememberedbeing very young, maybe 3 or 4 and pleading with my mom and grandparents not tomake me to go to my dads. I did this every time before he would come. I would hide,pretend I was sick, cry and beg, anything, but they made me go every time.Sometimes my brother didn’t have to- my mom would tell my dad that my brotherneeded to stay because he had commitments with boy scouts etc those weekends,and I would go alone.

When I was about 6, my mom forced me to tell my dad that I didn’twant to go.

 

I was so amazingly terrified. She stood there and watched,wouldn’t say anything, but I felt her take great pleasure in making me do it (Ithink she felt some sick schadenfreude victory or something?). I was crying andshaking utterly terrified- physically it was very much like having an anxietyattack. I still had to go, and the abuse was much worse that weekend.

 

She never defended me in many other situations as a child(allowing my brothers friends to sexually assault me, and then made meapologize to him for punching him in the face to get away), and never taught mehow to stick up for myself (she doesn’t stick up for herself either- just isvery passive aggressive and a martyr and relishes in an absolute poor me victimidentity).

 

She has always been very frustrated by my independence andwishes she could be my ‘mommy’ (her and my brother have a very enmeshedrelationship still- he lives with her, doesn’t work, doesn’t do anything forhimself and is growing into a very angry person with no sense of responsibilityor control of himself or his life. He’s in his 30’s.).  She uses guilt as a weapon and finds itextremely irritating that I will not put myself in situations n which I wouldhave to entrust my safety (in any way- physically, emotionally, etc) in her, asto me, although I love my mother, I find her to be like a ‘little girl’. I lovemy mother, and try to be kind to her and foster a positive relationship (although there is much that she will not even talk about will literally change the subject, so I have thick boundaries) but have always found it difficult to respect her, and have alwaysfelt that perhaps this inability to respect her was a flaw within me, that I wasa selfish person for not being grateful for ‘all the great things she did’.

I'm so grateful for having heard this podcast. It's given me much to think about.

[Dave Bockman]

It was harrowing and brutal to read this post, I am so sorry you endured so much as a child.

I have to skip to the end and say quite frankly, after reading only one small part of your childhood expriences, I have no idea why you love your mother, I really don't. I'm not putting that up there as a challaenge for you to defend why you love her, I'm just saying I personally could never possibly love someone who was so sadistic towards children.

[cherapple]

I am so sorry to read about your childhood experiences. It's absolutely terrible the way your parents have treated you, and part of that treatment is inflicting guilt on you for their actions. You are not guilty for your honest emotional reaction to their abusive treatment. It was never your responsibility to love your parents. It was and always has been their responsibility to act in loveable ways toward you. If they didn't, it is perfectly reasonable, sane, and right that you would not have positive feelings toward them. You don't owe them positive feelings, appreciation or love. They owed that to you. 

[JKPgamer]

First of all, my deepest sympathies.  I can't even express how much I wish I could just hug you and tell you "None of it was your fault."  Truly terrible things done to you and my heart goes out to you.

I think I have always felt a bit defective for not being
able to fully forgive or let go of anger for numerous incidents with my mother and
father (both who have never apologized and who will not even acknowledge that
these things happened and still happen), that I am being childish or selfish or
immature for not ‘getting over’ these things.

One of the things Stef said most recently that applies to this: Forgiveness has to be earned.  "...the involuntary emotions, like love, we can't WILL those.  Forgiveness is something evoked in us by someone else's genuine and effective approach towards restitution."  

 
In that same interview he talks about anger.  Anger is a healthy emotion not something to "get over."  Anger towards what was done to you, stops the cycle from repeating so that you won't do the same to others.
From my own personal experience I'm still angry at my father for what he did to me, which is no where near what you went through...but that anger has enabled me to sever that relationship and I would suggest the same to you.

Again deepest sympathies I hope Stef leads you to freedom like he did me. 

[Joelle]

Thank you very much to everyone who posted theirthoughts. I've continued to think about these things and these specificevents. 

I believe I have a much better understanding of myself in that I have always had trouble standing up for myself, although I am anexcellent advocate for others; I have had other abusive or traumaticexperiences in life which were on-going; and I have a very hard time eventelling people when I am having experiences in which I am being victimized insome way (as an aside, I think a lot of people struggle with these thingsalso).

To me, after thinking again about some of theseevents, it makes a lot of sense to me how I 'learned' that standing up formyself leads to worse things, that 'it is okay' for me to remain in horriblesituations, and to not tell people when I need help. 

After I thought more about these things, read thesereplies (again, thank you for all your shared thoughts and words!), I came homeand cried. I have always really been bothered by what I had assumed was my 'weakness'in my ability to stick up for myself- I often quite literally freeze in themoment, even if the confrontation seems very minor. I actually feel quitevalidated today. I am asking myself 'how would it be possible for me to havelearned another way of being, given these examples?'. I feel angry. I feelheard. I feel like I am able to throw the shame I've carried (for being 'weak')onto these people who failed to be parents. 

Also, listening to another podcast this morning- Ioften have justified my parents' behaviors with the 'they did the best theycould with what they knew' thing... The Stef made an excellent point thismorning while discussing something else in the podcast I was listening to'.Basically if that is morally sound logic, than children who fail a math test,as they 'did the best they could with the knowledge they had', shouldn't haveany repercussion, or should not have to prepare or study, or feel responsibleto learn math before taking the test etc. (hope I'm not misconstruing the pointhe made).

I am so grateful for this community, for FDR, and for Stef! I happenedupon all of this one day randomly browsing iTunes... So glad!!!!!!

[Dave Bockman]

To me, these are some fantastic revelations/inroads to self-knowledge and I congratulate you on your courage. I'm sure you've read Stef's book 'Real Time Relationships', but if it's been awhile I'd like to share this quote from the book, it was enormously helpful to me (perhaps even the lynchpin) in freeing up some emotional blocks and giving me a foothold for climbing up the long slog to freeing myself from childhood trauma-repetition in adulthood: (I also excerpted just the passage below from the audiobook version of RTR, that excerpt if you would like to hear Stef reading it is here)

 

THE BOXER

Why is it that we are so inevitably drawn to re-create that which we most fear?  To understand that, let us look at the parable of a boxer named Simon.

As a child, Simon is subjected to physical abuse. He is slapped, pushed, punched and beaten. Since he is a child, he is helpless to resist these attacks. How, then, can he survive them? Well, since clearly he cannot master his environment, or those who are abusing him, that leaves only one choice for poor Simon.

Simon must master himself.

He cannot master his attackers – or their attacks – he can only master his reaction to their attacks.  He has no control over the external world – he can only have control over his internal world.  All children take pleasure in exercising increasing levels of control over their environment. If control over their external environment is impossible, however, they have no choice but to start exercising increasing control over their internal environment: their thoughts and feelings.

This is all quite logical, and something that we would all wish for, as the best way to survive an impossible situation.  If we cannot get rid of the source of our pain, what we most desire is to get rid of the pain itself.

THE RELIEF OF SELF-CONTROL

Thus Simon grows up gaining a sense of efficacy and power by controlling his own pain, fear and hatred.  The pleasure that most children get out of mastering external tasks such as tying their shoelaces, catching a ball and learning to skate, Simon gets out of “rising above” and controlling his terrifying emotions.

Can we blame Simon for this? If anaesthetic is readily available, would we want to scream through an appendectomy without it?  When Simon is young, his self-control remains relatively stable. As he gets older, though, his parents slowly begin to reduce the amount of physical abuse they inflict on him. This is particularly true during and after puberty, when he is becoming old enough to tell others about the abuse, and also because his increasing size makes it less and less possible to dominate him physically.

How does Simon feel about these decreasing physical attacks? Two words: terrified and disoriented.

Simon’s entire sense of power and efficacy – his very identity even – has been defined by his ability to master and control his own emotions in the face of terrifying abuse.  In other words, in the absence of abuse, he has no sense of control, efficacy or power.  In addition to being taught all the wrong things, Simon has also been taught almost none of the right things. He does not know how to negotiate, he does not know how to express his emotions, he has not been taught empathy, he has not been taught sensitivity, he has not been taught win-win interactions – the words that are missing from Simon’s

social vocabulary could fill a shelf of dictionaries.

Thus, in the absence of violence, not only does Simon feel powerless – since his sense of “power” arose primarily as the result of his ability to survive violence – but he is also increasingly thrust into a world of voluntarism, where sophisticated skills of self-expression and negotiation are required for success.

As he enters into his teenage years, for the first time since he was very young Simon feels excruciatingly powerless – and vulnerable.  Since vulnerability was the original state he was in before he began to repress and control his emotional responses to those around him, he unconsciously feels that he is in enormous danger. (This arises from the reality that he was in enormous danger when he was a child, but he is only now feeling it for the first time.)

The reason that he disowned his emotions in the first place was because he felt fear and hatred in the face of physical attacks. It was the reality of his vulnerability that provoked the self-defence of dissociation and “selfmastery.”  Thus for Simon, vulnerability is always followed by excruciating and self-annihilating attacks.

Having spent years mastering his responses to these attacks, he has not learned how to deal with vulnerability in a positive and self-expressed manner. As he becomes an adult, however, Simon no longer needs to defend himself against attacks – thus undermining his sense of control – and he

also moves faster and faster into a world of voluntary interactions for which he is utterly unprepared.

Simon also unconsciously knows that learning the skills necessary to flourish in this voluntary world – if that is even possible for him anymore – will take years of excruciating labour.

FLEEING THE FUTURE FOR THE PAST…

Simon has access to a drug that can instantly make all of his anxiety go away. This drug can restore his sense of control, eliminate his bottomless terror of voluntary interactions, and place him right back in familiar territory where he feels efficacious, powerful and in control.

That drug, of course, is violence.

Simon finds that when he leaves the world of voluntary interactions and re-enters the world of violence and abuse, his anxiety vanishes. His sense of efficacy and control returns, and he feels mastery over his own world again.  Like an army that does not want to be disbanded, in the absence of external enemies, Simon must create them.

After realizing the relative joy and serenity that he feels after getting involved in physical fights, Simon goes down to his local gym and puts on some boxing gloves. He finds that he is very good in the ring, because where other people feel fear and caution, he, due to his years of self-mastery, feels power and control. When he is in the ring he does not feel anxious, he does not feel afraid – he does not even feel angry – he simply feels the satisfaction of being in a situation that he can control.  The endorphins released in Simon’s system by violence quickly become addictive.

True addiction requires both a highly positive reaction from taking a drug and a highly negative reaction from abstaining from it. For Simon, boxing not only restores his sense of control, but it also eliminates the crippling anxiety he feels in the absence of violence. Sadly, familiarity breeds content…

This is the psychological story of a boxer, of course, but it can equally apply to criminals, soldiers, policemen, and others drawn to dangerous situations. Simon was utterly terrified of violence when he was a child, so how can we understand his pursuit of boxing as a career when he becomes an adult? When we become addicted to controlling our fears, we can no longer live without either control or fear.

Simon became addicted to controlling his responses to abuse – thus he can no longer function in the absence of abuse. Addiction also worsens when every step down the road of repetition makes it that much harder to turn around. This applies to Simon in many, many terrible ways.

Every time he uses the defences he developed in his childhood, he reinforces the value of violence in his adult life. Every time he avoids the anxiety of voluntary and positive interactions through the use of violence, he takes yet another step away from learning how to negotiate in a positive manner with kind and worthwhile people.  In other words, every time he “uses” the drug of violence, he makes the next “use” of violence that much more likely – and resisting the drug that much harder.

In this way, we can truly understand how a man can be drawn to endlessly repeat that which terrified him the most as a child.  In hopefully less extreme ways, Simon’s story can also help us understand why we are so drawn to repeat that which we fear the most.

Were you rejected as a child? Beware your desire for rejection.

Were you verbally abused as a child? Watch out for verbally abusive people: they will inject you with addictive endorphins.

Were you sexually abused as a child? Watch out for predators: they will tempt you with the self-medication of surviving them.

THE SADIST

The above analogy can help us understand how someone can end up spending his whole life attempting to “master” violence. However, at least Simon is getting into the ring with an equal.  How can we understand a parent who ends up abusing his or her child?

A basic fact of human nature is that it is impossible for anyone to do anything that involves a moral choice without moral justification. George Bush could not invade Iraq without claiming that it was an act of “self-defence,” or “just punishment.” When parents talk about screaming at or hitting their children, they always justify their actions by claiming that, “We have tried everything else and gotten nowhere.” Or, they claim that their exasperated responses are generated by the misbehaviour of their

children: “He just doesn’t listen; he doesn’t show us the proper respect,” etc.

It is impossible to imagine a parent standing in front of a mirror and saying: “I am abusing my innocent child.” Any parent capable of making such a statement would have recoiled in horror the first time that he yelled at or struck his child, and sought the necessary help.

Continued abuse requires continual moral justifications. In fact, the very worst aspects of the abuse that a child receives are not so much the physical fear and pain, but rather the moral corruption of the lies that are told to justify the abuse.

For a child, being beaten is terrible, but being repeatedly told that the beating is a just response to his “bad” actions is worse.  So – how could this possibly come about?

CHILD ABUSE

For the sake of this example, let us assume that the parent was abused in her own childhood, as is so often the case. We will take the example of a mother named Wendy, who ends up verbally abusing her daughter Sally.

Wendy was verbally abused when she was a child. She was told that she was bad, disrespectful, disobedient, ungrateful, selfish and so on.  From Wendy’s childhood perspective, her own mother loomed like a titan in her little world. One of the amazing things about the differences in perspective between parent and child is that the parent screams and hits because the parent feels helpless. However, to the child, the parent seems virtually omnipotent.

If parents knew how large they loomed in their child’s world, they would use a far, far lighter touch in their discipline. When you are around somebody whose hearing is preternaturally sensitive, you only need to whisper; yelling is both unnecessary and abusive.  When Wendy was a child, her mother’s verbal abuse was utterly overwhelming. The stress of having someone five times your size, who has complete and utter power over you, yelling at you, putting you down, denigrating you, or abusing you in some other manner causes a fundamental short-circuit in a child’s neurological system. It is the

equivalent of taking a man terrified of heights and constantly dangling him out the open door of an airplane. He may “acclimatize” himself to the repetitively awful stimulation, but only through extreme dissociation from his environment, which comes at a terrible personal cost. Victims of repetitive torture undergo the same “out of body” experience wherein they cease to feel, and in many ways cease to live, at least emotionally.

When a child is abused, she experiences her life as a series of fundamentally impossible situations. The capacity to abuse arises out of a lack of bonding, a lack of empathy, an absence of sensitivity towards the feelings of the child. A child’s only security is her bond with her parent. Abuse is a deliberate severing of that bond – a “strangling with the umbilical.” Abusing a child requires that you eliminate your capacity to empathize with her. If a child perceives that she cannot rely on her bond with her mother – which is to say that her mother’s capacity to empathize with her comes and goes at best – then the child feels fundamentally insecure, because positive and empathetic treatment cannot be relied on.

When you are under the total power of someone who can treat you badly whenever she feels like it, you are placed into an impossible situation because that person will inevitably command you to show “respect” and “love” towards her. If your abusive mother detects that you fear her, for instance, she will generally react with aggression. If at a dinner party your mother raises her hand and you cower in fear and beg her not to hit you, she will get very angry.

Thus you must pretend on the outside the opposite of what you feel on the inside. You must show “love” and/or “respect” despite feeling fear and hatred.  Thus, when Wendy’s mother verbally abused her, Wendy could not react with fear or hatred, because that would only increase her mother’s attacks. (“I’ll give you something to cry about!”)

Thus Wendy had to disown and repress her own authentic emotional responses and mimic their exact opposite. All her fear and pain had to be “magically” transformed into “love” and “respect.”

This form of the “Stockholm Syndrome” has disastrous effects on a child’s long-term emotional development and integrity. Instead of learning how to interact in a rational manner with reality, the child ends up forced into a situation of eternal hyper-vigilance wherein she constantly scans the behaviour of those around her, endlessly alert for any signs of an impending attack.

If you are driving a car and suddenly notice a number of wasps in the car with you, it will become very hard to concentrate on the road. In addition, imagine that you had to keep driving under increasingly

difficult conditions, while the number of buzzing wasps in your car kept multiplying – all the while knowing that you were allergic to wasp venom – this is the endless livid terror of all too many childhoods. This kind of terrible “split focus” (“I must keep driving / I must not get stung”) empties out the spontaneity and richness of the child’s inner life.

Just as we cannot daydream while being pushed out of a plane, we cannot develop an internal discourse with ourselves if we are in a constant state of hyper-vigilance with regards to our surroundings. If a child in an abusive environment stops scanning for danger, the pain of being attacked is then combined with the shock of surprise, and the inevitable self-flagellation for lowering one’s guard. Daydreaming, or self-conversation, thus becomes a form of “self abuse,” insofar as it

increases the risk and agony of being attacked – it becomes as dangerous as a tightrope-walker losing his concentration and risking falling to his death.

This terrible equation – “relaxation = danger” – keeps the child in a constant state of high alert, of hyper-vigilance, and effectively prevents her from ever coming to a true understanding of her situation.

In a nation, a state of war creates the panic, haste and hysteria that prevents people from effectively questioning their government. Just so does hyper-vigilance in childhood prevent children from rationally evaluating their parents’ behaviour. Thus, with all this in place, when Wendy becomes an adult and gives birth to Sally, an awful series of events is set into motion.

THE CHILD UNAFRAID…

To understand how parental cruelty comes into being, the first and most important fact to remember is that children enter this world in an unabused state. They are not afraid, they are not hyper-vigilant, they are not twisted, they have not become enemies to themselves or others – they are curious, perceptive, engaged and benevolent.

Remember – as a child, Wendy learned that relaxation was danger. Thus when Sally is born, Sally is fundamentally relaxed in a way that Wendy has no conscious memory of. Since for Wendy relaxation is followed by attack, Sally’s relaxation creates great anxiety for her mother, because she associates it with an impending attack. In the same way, if Sally were crawling towards a set of steep stairs, Wendy would feel great anxiety and a compulsion to snatch Sally away from the impending danger – very aggressively if need be.

For Wendy, then, when Sally in all innocence engages in actions that in Wendy’s world would have triggered a terrible attack, it reawakens all of the repressed pain, fear and hatred in Wendy’s heart. When this occurs again and again, Wendy genuinely feels that Sally is creating or causing terrible attacks of pain, fear and hatred in her.

Now, the last time that someone else created pain and fear in Wendy, it was her own mother attacking her when she was a child. For Wendy, then, any sudden eruption of pain and fear is associated with a direct attack. Thus for Wendy, Sally’s innocent anxiety-provoking behaviour is the direct emotional equivalent of her parents’ abusive attacks. Furthermore, the only way that Wendy could create any sense of security and control as a child was to brutally repress her own emotional responses. In other words, “that which causes anxiety must be brutally repressed” is the law of her emotional land.

Now, when Wendy was a child she could not brutally repress her own parents, because that created further attacks – thus she had to brutally repress her own anxieties. The difference with her own child, however, is that she now has the power to repress Sally, which she did not have with her own parents

when she was a child.

It is in this way that she makes the transformation from victim to abuser.

Since she experiences Sally’s actions as attacks upon herself, Wendy feels justified in controlling Sally’s behaviour so that these attacks do not occur.

If our child continually kicks us in the shins, we consider it good parenting to prevent this child from acting in such an abusive manner. We must do whatever it takes, we say to ourselves, to prevent our child from hurting others. What will happen, we think, if we allow our child to act in such a horrible manner? A life of brutality, loneliness and rejection seems inevitable, and we could scarcely call ourselves good parents if we allowed that to happen.

Many parents start off with relatively calm and patient lectures, but the absolute of “thou shalt not” remains determinedly hovering, in the not too- distant background. “It upsets Mommy when you act like that,” we may say gently – however, like the initially polite letters from the IRS, a not too subtle threat is always visible between the lines. We talk about “politeness,” “niceness” and “consideration for the feelings of others,” and so on, but what we are really saying is: “It makes me angry when you make me anxious, so you’d better stop!”

Children, due to their amazingly perceptive natures, find it hard to take these lectures seriously, because they sense the contradiction and narcissism at the root of such speeches. Thus they generally tend to continue to do what comes naturally to them, despite the anxiety that their actions cause other people.

Since the children remain in an un-brutalized state, they do not themselves directly feel the anxiety that their actions provoke in their brutalized parents. In the same way, if I do not have a migraine, playing loud music will bring me pleasure. If I do have a migraine, obviously it will not. Since children continue to do what comes naturally to them, and since their actions continue to provoke anxiety, pain and rage in their parents, their parents feel a growing sense of helplessness and frustration and an increasing loss of control over their own emotions.

The basic lesson that Wendy learned in her own terrible childhood was that when someone does something that makes you feel bad, the solution is to stop the other person from doing that thing. Thus, when Sally’s actions provoke awful feelings in Wendy, Wendy’s inevitable reaction is to prevent Sally from performing those actions, so that Wendy does not have to feel those terrible emotions.

To be a “good” daughter, Sally must stop doing whatever causes Wendy anxiety. If Sally continues to act in a way that causes her mother anxiety, Wendy will be inevitably driven to the “conclusion” that Sally wants to cause her pain – or, at best, is utterly indifferent to the pain that her actions cause. In this way, Wendy can frame a perception of her daughter that includes the pejoratives “cruel” and “selfish.”

Now, the battle lines are truly becoming drawn.

If we say to our child: “Stop doing ‘X,’ because it makes me feel bad,” surely the solution is simply for the child to stop doing ‘X,’ right? Sadly, no.

THE ESCALATION…

The true nature of Sally’s “offense” towards Wendy is that Sally is unafraid.

Remember that in Wendy’s childhood, being unafraid always invited attack – or made the inevitable attack even worse. Thus Sally’s state of calm or self-possession creates an overwhelming sense of “impending doom” for Wendy. When Wendy was a child, spontaneous self-expression invited attack.

Now that she is a mother, when Sally sits and sings to herself, this causes increasing anxiety in Wendy, and at some point she will express disapproval to Sally. At this point, perhaps Sally stops singing. However, five minutes later, Sally states that she wants to go for a walk.

In Wendy’s world, expressing an open desire always invited attack – thus when Sally says that she wants to go for a walk, Wendy also feels anxiety, and once more snaps at Sally. As we can imagine, this process can go on and on virtually ad infinitum. There is no end to the escalation of “little rules” that end up snaking around Sally, like an infinity of tiny spider webs that eventually leave her bound and immobile.

However, even if Sally were to obey every single one of her mother’s “rules,” she would still not be safe. As Sally becomes more and more inhibited and more and more fearful, Wendy begins to feel guiltier and guiltier. Sadly, Wendy also interprets this as some sort of “manipulative aggression” on Sally’s part and so is inevitably drawn to accuse Sally of “playing the victim” in order to make Wendy feel bad.

In this way, there is no possibility whatsoever that Sally can ever satisfy her mother. If Sally acts in a natural, independent manner, she provokes an attack. If she acts in an unnatural, obedient manner, she provokes an attack. Since she can neither be spontaneous nor obedient, neither act nor refrain

from acting, there is nothing that she can do to avoid being attacked or criticized in some manner.

THE EVIL AT THE CORE…

The central problem is that Wendy is attempting to manage her own anxiety by controlling Sally. However, since Sally is not the actual source of Wendy’s anxiety, controlling Sally’s behaviour will only temporarily alleviate Wendy’s anxiety – while making it worse deep down, since she is acting unjustly

and blaming Sally for her own feelings.

Real-Time Relationships, the Logic of Love by Stefan Molyneux, pgs. 80- 91.

Download the full copy at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/free/

[cherapple]

Precision has been very helpful for me.

You say:

"I have always had trouble standing up for myself."

Correction: You tried to stand up for yourself as a very young child, and you were attacked. It benefitted your parents for you to believe that you were weak.

"I have a very hard time even telling people when I am having experiences in which I am being victimized in some way."[/font]

Correction: Your parents didn't let you tell them. They didn't listen, and they showed you no curiosity, empathy, or sympathy. They did not teach you the skills of self-expression or negotiation. They taught you the skill of self-erasure. The very people who were supposed to help you hurt you. 

"They did the best they could."

Correction: That is their story. It was not your experience. As you point out, if they were doing the best they could, they would allow the same to you.

I think you're understanding these things, but the more precise you are with the language, the more quickly your understanding of yourself and the effects of your childhood upon you will grow.

I'm happy to hear the podcasts have helped you so much. Oh, and it never hurts to read about Simon the Boxer again.

Cheryl

[MysterionMuffles]

Joelle...you are not at all weak and I hope you realize that it took a lot of strength and courage to be able to open up about this. And wow for someone who just joined recently, that says a lot about you. It says you are ready to understand yourself better to improve your lifestyle. That you've unhooked from The Matrix, so to speak, and are ready to face reality.

 

Also, what a lucky find through iTunes indeed, welcome to the community!

 

God I hate how you mention that in your self defense in being sexually abused by your brother's friends that YOU got in trouble. There's just some really fundamentally wrong with the world if things like that happened. I...cannot express how much contempt I have for such an occurence. I know we don't know each other personally, but I really feel for you. To be a victim AND a scapegoat is a horrible fate to befall a human being, and it's about time such victims as yourself understood the immorality in it all. 

 

If you don't mind me asking, how are your relationships with men in your life in spite of what your father and brother have done? I really hope you healthy if not the healthiest of relationships at the present...that kind of treatment must be really hard to recover from. I also am more interested in what else it took (other than Stef's podcast) for you to learn how to examine your life in this rational kind of way.

 

 

 

 

And Cheryl, when you said it benefits our friends to believe that our weak...I felt tears well up at the back of my eyes. That statement punched me in the soul...makes me realize why I used to argue with teachers a lot in high school. It was me displacing my hatred for my parents towards corrupted authority figures that acted as stand in parents to some degree.

[Lens]

Joelle,

 

You are such a courageous person! In your horror story I found myself as well. Your guilt feelings show how much you suffered from these people. The more they are abusive the more the child feels guilt in order to not to feel this overwhelming sadness and rage towards criminals like your parents that do not deserve the word parents.

 

I myself had to endure sexual and extreme physical abuse from my uncle under my mom's watch (who she was abusive herself to me) and I too felt a lot of guilt towards her all my life and had to "love" her.  

 

Joelle, Violence kills love. We simply cannot love people we distrust, and this "love" you have for your mother is a poisonous cocktail of guilt that hides feelings of shame, fear and above all RAGE. I hope you can see and feel that.

 

I was very sick in my childhood because of the extreme abuse. Were you sick as well in your childhood ? and did you have any body symptoms you wish to mention ? Trauma is stored in the body.

 

There is a book that helped me tremendously on this path to heal from sexual abuse. The book is called "The Obsidian Mirror" by Louise M. Wisechild

This book is difficult and true. Louise (the author) was abused by pretty much by everyone male in her family until late teenager and she healed herself not without pain and rage. She shows how in her book.

 

Here a review of the book by Alice Mille to give you an idea.

 

In her highly creative, remarkable book THE OBSIDIAN MIRROR: AN ADULT HEALING FROM INCEST (Seal Press, 1988), Louise Wisechild describes how she succeeded in deciphering her body's messages and communications, and thereby her feelings, so that she was gradually able to free her childhood from repression. This took place in a successful therapy involving bodywork and written accounts of her experiences. Gradually, she discovered in detail what she had totally banished from consciousness: that she had been sexually molested by her grandfather at the age of four; that she was subsequently abused by an uncle and finally also by her stepfather. A woman therapist was willing and brave enough to work with her on this horrific journey of self-discovery, in spite of the manifest torture to which the patient had been subjected. Nevertheless, even in this most successful therapy Louise sometimes felt that she should forgive her mother. On the other hand, she strongly felt that this might be wrong. Fortunately, the therapist didn't insist too much on this point. She gave Louise the freedom to follow her own feelings and to discover that it was not forgiveness that made her strong in the end. Helping the patient to resolve the guilt feelings that had been imposed upon her - the ultimate purpose, presumably, of therapy - doesn't mean to burden her with an additional demand, a demand that could only serve to cement those feelings of guilt. A quasi-religious act of forgiveness can never resolve patterns of self-destruction.
Why should this woman, after showing her concern for her mother for thirty years, forgive her crime, when that mother had never made the slightest effort to see what she had done to her daughter? On one occasion, as the child, rigid with fear and disgust, was forced to lie under the heavy , male body of her uncle, she caught sight of her mother in the mirror as she approached the door. The child hoped to be saved, but the mother turned and disappeared. When Louise was an adult, she heard her mother say that she could only cope with her fear of that uncle if her children were around her. When the daughter tried to discuss her rape at the hands of her stepfather, her mother wrote her that she never wished to see her again. Even in many such blatant cases, the pressure to forgive, which effectively prevents the chance of a successful therapy, is hardly seen as the absurd demand that it is. It is just this common pressure to forgive that mobilizes old fears in the patient that oblige him or her to believe such an authority. What can it possibly achieve, except a quiet conscience for the therapist?*

 

 

You may want to continue to read the article here

 

Please continue to speak out your story there are many here who want to listen to you and want to help you. Thank you so much for sharing your story and you are not alone in this. I too was sexually abused by family members. I hope that this will bring some hope in you that we can heal by doing it step by step.

 

Take good care.

 

Lens

 

 

[Panoptic]

I am so saddened by your story. I've never had bad abuse in my family but when I was in high school I dated a girl for a few years that had a very similar situation as you. She was adopted and her parents horribly abused her, would always make her feel guilty, and blame all of their problems on her. Her brother on the other hand, who seemed far more dysfunctional than she did, got in little trouble at all and even took part in abusing her. I have witness to some of the abuse as well. It is absolutley disgusting that this is so common. I never had any understanding how somebody could do that to another human being, especially when it's your own family.

 

I think the "love" you feel is actually called attachment. Attachment is much different from love and most people have huge misunderstandings of what love really is. If you get the chance, you should read Stef's free book "On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion". It can be downloaded here (http://www.freedomainradio.com/FreeBooks.aspx). It talks a lot about this sort of problem and explains the differences between love and attachment. It's very short (only about 70 pages) and you can always go back to it when your confused about something.

 

I'm glad you found Stef by such an odd chance. I think this is will be a new beginning for you and you will never go back to being so miserable. Truth is painful to hear, but it can only lead to a happier life. Once you hear the truth and take the pain that comes along with it, you will be able to push on and overcome your fear.