Draciack

ESH –

Hi, fellow ACoAs (and anyone else who might be reading… )

I want to post my story here first – that’s probably the first step to healing and also direct, honest communication is a technique I still don’t use that often. So, in a fashion, I’m breaking a family rule. It feels good.

I’ll be brief and succinct and detached too I hope. I want to gain some distance from this and let the past be the past while moving forward in the present.

I gave myself away early on, in a way that is both understandable (I was five) and disturbing. Living in my household was like living in a minefield – one wrong step, one wrong move, and a bomb might go off. That was my perception anyway, as a kid. See, my father was an okay man who tried his best but he had his faults like all other parents. His temper is still unlike anything I’ve ever seen. He does not explode often but when he does he is completely out of control. When other people get angry, they may be dangerous but at least they are predictable. I call my father’s anger liquid anger because whenever it came out it splashed onto everything around him and with incredible force.

At five years old, I decided to cater to his feelings because upsetting him and standing up for myself / my own interests was unfathomable. Really, I was just scared. But I placed my internal security into the hands of other people – my safety depended on how they acted – and that initial decision hurts today. The ramification are obvious and sad: I never understood personal responsibility and from then on I was always looking for something external to make me feel better, feel safer, feel okay, and quickly I went down the rabbit holes of addiction and codependency. That’s a lot of pain for a simple childhood mistake.

I don’t know if my mother was an enabler a lot – but she never really stood up for herself or for me or for my sister. She had her own struggles and she never really seemed like a true adult. When she went to work, it was like she slipped into a fake role. When she came home, she was just depressed and exhibited all sorts of obsessive-compulsive behaviors and does so to this day.

I felt responsible for her. She seemed like she needed help but never sought help from a professional. I became the support she needed. And like a chameleon I became the person who took the brunt of my father’s anger whenever he needed to let loose some steam during the divorces. I was the good kid, the responsible one, and according to Wikipedia terms – the Hero. In reality, I withdrew from the age of twelve and developed a series of predictable and useless coping mechanisms: dissociation, suppression, denial, addiction, self-obsession, and others.

None of this is really shocking I suppose – just a few simple mistakes compounded over time, like a bank loan compiling interest. It’s codependency and trauma and dysfunction and addiction all tied together in a crazy web that I’m only now seeing (hopefully) in full for the first time.

I do know this: the family had a set of rules.

1. No boundaries.
2. No open conflict.
3. Do not feel negative emotions.
4. Always lie, always wear a face.
5. Pretend, pretend, pretend.
6. Deny, deny, deny.
7. Take responsibility for others but not for oneself.

It’s been a tough road no doubt and over the past three months I have become unraveled. Thankfully, the suffering is over and I have the chance to move forward.

For the last 23 years, I have been living a script without knowing. Today, I get the chance to break it.

Thanks for reading

Thumper

That is such a powerful post. Welcome to SR. I rarely post, mostly read, on this forum. I am more active on the Friends and Family forum.

I recognized all your rules to some extent but this one really jumped at me.
Take responsibility for others but not for oneself. That one so accurately reflects my mother, and myself. I have always been very responsible, very driven to set goals and achieve them and in that way I do take responsibility for myself and when other people do not have that same drive or approach to life - I get incredibly irritated with them. I wonder if some of that is that I am irritated with myself for not taking responsibility for my 'inner' self, my relationships etc. Not knowing how really but I plan to learn!

Yes. I'm sorry to hear that you feel unraveled (know that feeling) but you are to be commended for getting there at a much earlier age then I ever did!

Yes you do. I'm trying to do that too, and in the process write a different script for my own children.