7. Ugh

I’m an incest survivor, and this is my ‘share’ for today, as they’d say in a twelve-step meeting. Going through The Courage to Heal and my own feelings about ‘disclosing’ is hard. My parents are both alive. They’re elderly but functional. My entire relationship with them has always been disfunctional and unboundaried, but it was a three-legged stool and I knew my role.

People who know me have been telling me for years that my relationship with them wasn't ok. I heard them, but I knew better. I thought they just meant that my folks were too demanding of me, and I was kinda too accommodating. Yeah yeah, sure, but they’d both been abused and I was really the only one who understood them. Ugh.

I’ve pulled back from them, put up walls, avoided, then sometimes been really friendly and great, just like when I was ten. Back when they were happiest-ish, and I was what they wanted.

What I hadn’t, and haven’t done in years is say anything candid to them about anything. I thought that was the best I could do. Just keep myself away from them emotionally by stonewalling when I see them. It’s near-daily; they live close by. I know I need to individuate from them, and I have been doing that from the other side of the stonewall I put between us as best I can.

But I still see them. I like them. I know how to be around them. A damaged ten-year old. That’s what I become around them when I see them and they say something that hits me the wrong way. I just clam up and don’t say anything to them. Then after a while I leave.

I used to tell myself that what had happened was just that they had been too annoying for me, and what I do when they become too annoying is I clam up and go silent.

Then I realized that physically there was more to it. I feel clammy when it happens. I don’t feel like it’s a choice to talk. I feel like I can’t talk, and all I can do is just wait it out. That’s not ok at all, not for anyone. For a 48 year old man it’s pegging my shame dial to see it. It just looks like a trauma response to me now. The other day, like 72 hours ago.

I listened to a passage in a book on trauma healing via martial arts yesterday. There was a bit about ‘long term complex trauma’ meaning an abusive environment that persists over time, and how exposure to that can lead people to develop an almost separate personality for when they are in that environment. At least that’s the clear idea that leaped out at me.

Oh, **** me. That seems like what actually happens when I am around them. I’ve been putting on a whole trauma-response personality, and then trying to deal with them while I’m stuck in that. It’s just never ever going to work.

I think sometimes that I am the only person in the world they need because I am the third person that keeps their dreamworld alive. That’s what I do, I guess, when that persona comes over me. I help maintain the dreamworld, and I do it because I want to protect them, I think. They were both very damaged, legitimately. And I was well and thoroughly conditioned to tend their needs.

Yeah. I can’t see much more healing happening for me if that just continues. Not with this in my conscious awareness. Now I know it’s just a choice to voluntarily walk back into the dreamworld where that little boy doesn’t get to exist. No. I’m becoming more integrated and think of myself as a single whole person pretty often.

But now this seems like a job for grown-man me to protect the little fella. I can’t be letting that little guy get re-traumatized by making him sit there and be quiet. I’ve been singing and taking lessons for my instrument, and writing stories and feeling peaceful and like I’m getting to know the whole man that I am. I can’t carve out a piece and leave it festering. The rest of my life is so much better now.

I know it’ll be a marker of something good for my heart to be myself with them. Maybe it just continues to be like this, the process of healing. You just move toward it. Like becoming your whole self. You just take another step. I don’t change things in my life until I can see how they are really holding me back from something I want. I want to be all integrated, to become myself.

I have to see that something is in my way before I can get past it. You’re not alone. Thank you for listening. That’s my share for today.