Dealing with self-condemnation
I hold my hand up high. Me! Me! Me! OMG the tapes that run. "Who do you think you are? What do you think you are doing? You can't. I can't." Some days more, some days less, but it is like the background music of my life.
I wake up with it in the morning. I go to bed with it at night. Day after day, month after month, year after year. And much more so as time goes by. And, in between the rain drops, I try to define myself and live my life. A therapist called them cognitive distortions. Hurrah! There's a name for it. She told me to try to understand what it meant. She also wanted me on medication for it. She gave me a book on anxiety and depression related to such things. That author said that medication doesn’t teach anyone to cope. Me? I intend to cope. Nose to nose with this adversary within.
They say that, in our minds, the effects of childhood abuse can be cumulative. A kind of drip, drip, drip over the decades that can leave you just wanting to scream. So, what does it mean? To me it means my mother, my dad and my older brother. It means parents that had no business being parents and with my brother, who learned how not to be loved, he learned also how to not love me. I would normally give each of you on the thread credit for things you have contributed to this discussion but, really, I can go researching all of who said what and all of that but, please, just bear with me and let me get on with writing this.
There’s the confusion of how it was really them that were screwing things up, but we get to thinking it was us. That was good and that was true. When you are just a little kid, it is your family that defines you, the world and your place in it – for you. It’s all you know. It’s just how it is. It has such a powerful influence on who we grow up to be and then how we go on to define ourselves, others and our place in the world. I can not emphasis that enough. It is the default mode "us". And it may just have to be our primary mission in life not to run on default mode.
And as another one of us in this discussion said, so you have opted to be a warrior. And yes, we choose to be warriors about dealing with our unwanted thoughts, feelings and our poor self-images, or those same thoughts, feelings and imageries very much have the potential to just go about wrecking limitless havoc in every direction of the compass.
I just know that those thoughts are not me and that only I am in my head, as much as I have to fight for that to be my reality. I know that those people are not here anymore, even though, I often, often see them in others who have come since. I project my family onto them. I often, even find myself drawn to them because in my insecurity, I want to go back home, to people who remind me of home – to recreate home, where, ironically, I suffered from the very abuse that caused me to be this way in the first place. I have to create a new “home”. A new center.
There’s a line in an old Police song with Sting: “Every woman I go out with becomes my mother in the end.” It may or may not be your mother, but like this woman I lived with for a few years told me. To her, as she walked along, there was a rapist behind every tree.” Like that.
It is just something I and countless others like me have to be constantly aware of and to be just that warrior, constantly reclaiming our own minds, sorting through and sorting out the thoughts we do not choose, and constantly working to define ourselves as worthy and deserving, and to go on and live our lives to the very fullest with everything we have in us. Again, ironically, such powerful motivators can end up making us so much more than we would have ever been otherwise.
Churchill said: Kites fly highest against the wind. He also said that a solitary tree, if it grows at all, grows strong.
I accept the challenge, and I will be a better person for it.
It felt good to share this with all of you. I am out of the closet about it and I will not go quietly.