Sometimes I wonder when I actually knew I had been an abused child who grew up to be an abused adult. I am not sure I always did know. The truth about myself was hidden in shadows even to myself. I knew something was there, but I wasn't really sure what "it" was and I just couldn't see it very clearly even though I could sense the shape and the substance of this truth I could not fully grasp it. I had no idea what the truth was because I couldn't pull it into the light of full consciousness to really examine it and to know it. As a child I had no words to really describe what happened behind closed doors and how my abuse made me feel and why it was wrong; and, in the early years of my life, I had no perspective of the greater world to even allow me to compare my experiences with my mother to the mothering other people were receiving and societal norms in general. The ability to consider your life from this point of view requires both experience and maturity as well as the ability to view things objectively as opposed to emotionally. So my awareness of how abnormal my mother's treatment was of me came only in moments of insight and through memories put into perspective once I gained knowledge of the larger world and other families and I could assess for myself what was normal or abnormal. It took years of being away from my abuser before I could really think about and analyze where I had come from, who I was because of my experiences, and who she was...this diagnosable monster who had been the true creator and author of much of my life. I knew very young that I had a crazy, unpredictable, and cruel mother. But, I didn't see me when I knew these things. I only saw her and comprehended her like I was an observer watching this awful person on a TV screen and I was constantly engaged in analyzing this character named mother so I could predict her next move. I had to know what to say to keep her calm and when to say nothing. I had to know exactly how to act to keep her anger from getting bigger and out of control to minimize my own discomfort. I had to know when she was approachable and reasonable to get things I needed. I had to know from the sound of her footsteps what I was in for so I could mentally prepare for the attack if it was coming. I got so I could literally feel her presence and the weight of her moods like something tangible in the air. It was like I had supersonic hearing and just by listening I could hear and feel where she was in the house at all times.
I once described myself to a very good friend and a colleague as a walking meat puppet robot that had this little tiny person at the controls seeing out of my eyes like an alien in a cockpit moving all the controls making me move and function as if I was a real person. I had this epiphany in my mid thirties and I believe I had that insight because I was healing and I didn't even know how damaged I was. Yet I slowly had realized I had this detachment to life and that I wasn't really fully experiencing or fully enjoying anything because I lived consciously as only this little tiny hidden thing operating controls somewhere deep within myself. Being away from my mother whether I was at school, at work, with colleagues, friends and being thoroughly engaged doing things I really enjoyed had finally created enough emotional space that I was breaking through whatever it was she had done to me over the years that had created this protective shield. I have come to believe I lived most of my life surrounded by this mental shield that kept my essence safe and buried deep within my own conscience. I suspect that this essence of the real me came out fully into the world only once in awhile and as a kind of visitor to the world as crazy as that sounds until I merged body and soul sometime in my late thirties. I also suspect this detachment which was most likely a true form of dissociation developed within me very young, because when I was a little girl my mother terrified me, I was totally dependent upon her, and I literally could not escape from her. Also, I am not sure when exactly this shield went up, but I have suspicions based on a lost period of time in my life that I have never been able to explain or access any memory from. I have no memories of the second grade at all, I never have. I can remember before with clarity, then there is nothing, and then I have a distinct memory of mentally waking up in the third grade standing in line with other children when a classmate asked me what happened to me because I used to be so different and dressed so nicely. I distinctly recall thinking about what this child said to me and replying, "I guess my mother stopped caring for me." I felt just like I had woken up and there I was standing in line realizing my hair was a mess, I was different, and I looked different and I wasn't really sure what had just happened, but I remember distinctly thinking that the changes my classmate noted involved a lot of bad things at home and these bad things involved my mother. As I stood there looking around with sudden clarity, I knew where I was, why I was there, who was talking to me, but it was like coming out of a fog and everything snapped suddenly from living in a dream to awake. This experience was so powerful, that I actually went home and tried to tell my father about it and maybe my mother too. I don't remember what he said or she said, but I'm quite sure I did not have the words to describe the experience as I just did and I can imagine he did not have a clue what I was trying to tell him. I can't even begin with all my training to really explain how the mind can develop and cope in this kind of an abusive situation to survive day in and day out and I am pretty sure there is a lot of variation from individual to individual who grows up under the tyrannies of a psychopathic parent or primary care giver terrorizing them. I have read about such things and I just thank God that I did not become a multiple personality or true dissociative personality disorder because the evidence certainly suggests, I had my toe in the water so to speak. I can only speak with clarity about my own personal experience and how I apparently fled inward very, very young because I apparently had no place else to hide, and by doing so, I never completely lost myself for which I am grateful, but I wasn't fully present for the first thirty or so years of my life all the time either which is very sad. I was never ever again completely as gone as I was apparently for the entire second grade and I have often wondered what exactly happened to me that terrified me so deeply that I went away and into this dream like state from which I can pull no memories that lasted more than a year. I may never know and I 'm not sure at this point in my life that I want to know the awful details. I know enough from my studies of multiple personality disorders in my college years as these fascinated me, that my spirit feared its own death and that the pain of whatever it was that caused this total retreat was so bad that I had to go away to survive it. I also know that this survival mechanism of going into a fog like mental state or state of detachment operated for me like it was on autopilot. When life hurt me, I was afraid, or something traumatized me, I could go into this detached conscious, but semi-fog like state easily. I also realize as I write this how as I healed, there was a period of my life when I was out of the fog when I was away from my mother and automatically back in it when in her presence. Toward the end of our relationship leading to our estrangement, I was out of the fog entirely even though I felt the weight of her around me when in her presence and this weight tended to drain me of energy, but I was fully aware of how I felt and I knew exactly why I felt as I did and I was breaking through that last stronghold of her control over me as well. I actually believe my breaking away from her controls is what in fact lead inevitably to my estrangement at the age of forty-five, but more on that later as well.
With this introduction, I just want to make clear if possible that it was only with much time, much research, and much reflection that the true picture of how my father and I were both terribly shaped by the psychopath in our lives over the course of years emerged. In time, I will reflect on the long term damages my father incurred in much more detail, but that subject deserves much more attention than I want to give it here at this time. At this point I want to the best of my ability to just focus on what it was like growing up for me with this monster as my parent. Obviously, my father was raised in a very functional and above average family. His journey in this is therefore completely different than mine in that he started out emotionally healthy and he grew up with great parents and an awesome extended family. I, however, grew up in a concentration camp of tortures, abuses, humiliations, and lies from amost the moment I was born with my whole being and developing psychology being shaped in a constant tug of war between the parent who abused me and the parent who actually loved me. But, it is very important to note, that this parent who loved me was also under siege by the same abuser and slowly eroding away from the strong, happy, intelligent, independent human being he was to the broken, trapped, hopeless, and bitter man he later became. In tackling my own experiences growing up, I am struck by my own awareness that there were for lack of a better terminology "abusive eras" that contained distinct patterns of certain kinds of abuses and my mothers abuses adapted and modified with my age and with my ability to resist her. These eras I would define in roughed out time spans of my life as follows: from birth to five or six, six to thirteen, thirteen to eighteen, from eighteen to my mid thirties, ending with a final era spanning from somewhere in my thirties to age forty-five and ending only when I was finally freed by estrangement from my entire family by my abuser who could no longer control me and who therefore had no more use for me.
My First Memories & My Very Early Years:
This section will please the Adlerian counselors because my first memories are very early indeed. I recall with absolute clarity finding my hands. I was sitting in a play pen or crib under the picture window in our trailer and I realized I could control the direction my hands moved and that they were attached to me and mine. I recall thinking (symbolically no doubt) when I do this, they go this way, and when I do this they go that way and how fascinating it was to see my fingers rippling through the air. I was so excited that I wanted to tell my mother about it and I yelled at her to get her attention. I see her face as she leaned over looking at me and I distinctly hear her say, "Oh have you found your toy, good for you." I kept trying to tell her I had found my hands and that I could control them and she kept going on about how I was playing with my toys and she finally walked off into the kitchen to continue doing what ever it was she was doing. As I watched her walk away, I realized she just didn't get what I was trying to tell her and I felt disappointed, but resigned and I went on doing what I was doing with my hands and figuring out how these were different from my feet.
In my next memory, I was a toddler and learning to jump. There was a square tile floor in our kitchen made up of white tiles and accent green tiles laid out so there was a line of green squares separated by a pattern of white tiles. I was jumping from green square to green square in a kind of game I had made up. These tiles were 12" by 12" so I know I was very little, because these were challenging big jumps. I played this game many times. In the background I could hear my parents fighting, but I don't know what they are saying. It didn't involve me. I kept leaping from tile to tile trying to jump further and to land precisely on each green square. I was wishing they would stop yelling at each other and play with me.
In another memory, I was locked in the trailer while my mother went to "the big house" to do laundry. She went out the back door and locked this behind her and I could not work this door. The front door was shut and a hooked screen door was over that door. I could work that door, but I had to undo the hook. I wanted to go where my mother went, so I dragged a big chair over to the door and I stretched up as high as I could reach and I undid the hook. Then I drug the chair back, slid the screen, and opened the door. I knew where my mother went so I toddled out in my bare feet and my diaper and a little shirt. The ground was cold and it burned my feet and I could see snow on either side of the shoveled walk way. I went as fast as I could and I found the cement steps and I crawled up them, and ran as quickly as I could to the big house to follow my mother. I couldn't open the door to the big house and my feet were burning with the cold so I jumped up and down. I went to the basement window and I saw her in the laundry room looking angry and talking to herself. I hit the window and cried loudly and she looked up, dropped what she was carrying, and her mouth formed a gasp of surprise. I think she may have screamed. Moments later she came out the big door I could not open, crying my name, obviously frantic, and she picked me up. She ran back to our trailer and she was rubbing my feet in obvious distress. I remember thinking if she hadn't come out that I was going back to the trailer on my own because I was so cold and my feet hurt, but I don't think I could tell her this because I couldn't talk yet. My dad was not home. He often wasn't. I remember her telling him what happened when he came home and how she could not leave me to do laundry any more for fear I would escape and get out again.
I share these first memories because I suspect I was not an abused baby. For what ever reason, my mother did not abuse infants. She may not have played with me much or paid that much attention to me, but she took care of me and made sure to the best of her ability that I was safe. She appeared genuinely concerned when she looked up and saw me dancing on the frozen ground outside of the basement window and I was very glad to be rescued. I think it was only as I developed and I asserted my independence, became more work, and I annoyed her by demanding her time and attention that the abuse really began to come my way. The conflicts and tensions that were going on in the background when I was a baby involved my parents and they did not involve me. I can recall not liking the way these conflicts sounded, but they did not effect me and I do not recall fearing them. I wanted my mother in these memories and I sought her out. I missed her when she was gone. I liked it when she picked me up and I wanted to be picked up. I loved my father and I preferred him even then, but he was not always home. My needs were being met and I felt secure and loved.
How my relationship with my mother changed from the point of these early memories is something that I don't remember even as I can remember the steady din of the arguments between my parents always going on in the background. At some point my parents moved from the trailer, which was also my father's mobile work home that he pulled from job site to job site when he worked on large construction projects, into the big house. I know that my dad resisted moving into the big house and I loved living in the trailer for some reason. Maybe I didn't want to move to the big house because it was big and scary to me and because the trailer had always been my home. I mourned for that trailer for years though and I always loved it and I always felt a sense of peace being in it even when I was a teenager. I think I had genuinely good memories living there and that this period of time was before I started to be really viciously abused. I don't recall my father's reasons for not wanting to move from the trailer to the large 2nd floor apartment that he owned, but the apartment had two large bedrooms, a good sized living room, a kitchen, separate dining room and one full bath as well as ample storage with large closets. It made sense to move a family into this space as opposed to a small trailer that was like living in a train car. But the decision to make this move from the outside to the inside of the main house only came about after months of conflicts between my parents. I do know that my first clear memories of my own physical and verbal abuse at the hands of mother occur in the second story apartment. I may have been four years old or very close to four when we moved. I know I had not started kindergarden yet because I remember vividly my father taking me down the stairs to walk me to school in the mornings for kindergarden. I also know that my father worked until I was five years old and I can remember waking up in the morning and realizing he was home from the road and feeling great joy that he was back.
If I shut my eyes, I can still remember looking out of the second story windows down at that trailer that I had spent the first few years of life in many times and wishing we could all move back into it. However this trailer was now permanently anchored in the back yard and it had been turned into a rental property to compensate for the rent lost from the apartment in the big house we now occupied. So a new era of my life had begun in more respects than one. Impermanent structure to permanent structure, toddler to preschooler. Unfortunately, the price of developing from toddler to preschooler for me was quite high. My mother started terrorizing me and tongue lashing me in episodes of verbal abuses that would go on for hours and sometimes entire days. Living in the big house with her was for me anything but a happy experience. My parents were fighting and the fights were turning violent. I remember my mother nagging and carrying on relentlessly at my father and I can recall toddling along beside them when my father punched her hard in the stomach once the door closed. I screamed and she crumpled to the floor. He looked at me just haggard when I looked up at him yelling daddy no. I know he had been verbally abused for hours and he had snapped from the sheer unrelenting stress of the verbal abuse. I knew it then, but to see my mother hit terrorized me and I knew this was also wrong. I know this sounds terrible, but I would have punched her too if I was him and I knew that then as well. Listening to her go on and on saying horrible, cruel things tossing them like knives into my father was absolutely awful. I hated it and I wanted her to stop. I even asked her to stop only to be silenced and shoved to the side by her as she went at him as relentlessly as a mad dog. I saw him snap one other time also when we were living on the second floor and he assaulted my mother for exactly the same reasons. She had been ranting at him for hours on end with no let up and after no amount of reasoning with her could make her stop, dad snapped and struck her when she said something particularly cruel and emotionally painful to him. I could see that he hated himself when he lost control and hit her on both occasions; and, I honestly believe this violence only happened on two occasions and each time was limited to exactly one blow. Even as a child, I could see my mother purposely driving my father over the edge of sanity so he would lose control as if the violence was her goal. To his credit, she only broke him twice so badly that he lashed out physically. The worst she got from him usually was an explosion of verbalized hatred detailing how much he despised her and how he wished he had never laid eyes on her. Often this verbal explosion in absence of physical violence sufficed as mother's apparent goal. Once she achieved the goal, her insane tirade of verbal abuse was over; but, she then got immediately on the phone usually calling her brother Bill to tell him exactly what dad said to her when he snapped and of course she relished the two times she had been hit going on and on about each of these two episodes for hours. Always, she portrayed herself to be the hapless victim with her brother on the line hanging on every word as she was telling lie upon lie about my father punctuated with a very embellished account of her "beating" or what he said to her out of the apparent blue because he was in a bad mood. Dad and I could hear every word she was saying and I can still see him hanging his head sitting on the porch absolutely silent, making no effort to defend himself as if every ounce of energy had been drained from him. Mother tortured him with what she was saying throwing knowing glances his way to make sure he could see her and so she could relish that he was paying attention to her as she painted him to be a villein and herself as a victim. In her version of events she had done nothing that could account for what had happened, she never even saw it coming, and all she knew was that he was violent and abusive. At some point, she then went on to her brother that she knew my father was tired of her and trying to make her leave. But always, after hearing her say to her brother many times that she knew she should leave him as if stating agreement to what he was telling her she should do, she would make me the reason for why she had to stay as if she needed to protect me from him. This was in fact a very stable and predictable pattern of events that happened exactly this way many, many times over the course of years. My father asked my mother for a divorce many times during this period of time and his pleas for divorce included pleas for her to surrender custody of me to him because she was too unstable to be a mother. I heard his pleas for divorce and the ensuing arguments that fired because of his pleas over and over again as my dad would tell her how unsuited they were for each other and how she was too unstable to really parent with her cross firing threats back to him that she could arrange things so he would never see me again if he didn't watch his step. Mother's roaring enraged threats detailed how she would take me, his house, his money, and how he would have nothing by the time she was done with him and the rage in her voice still rings in my ears with my father's reasonable monotone going on in the background pleading for separation. As these endless debates went on, she always played the two times he had struck her like trump cards, bringing up these two episodes, embellishing them, and expanding on how everyone, including his family, would know about the "beatings" before she was done with him and that once he had nothing, being nothing, no one would have any sympathy for him by the time she was through with him. With absolute enraged confidence, she told him over and over again how she would have everything and he would have nothing. Many times, dad would leave the house to get away from her during these tirades and the minute he was out of ear shot enjoying the luxury of his adult option to walk out, that is when she then turned on me with the full force of her fury and I was trapped and completely at her mercy. Sometimes he stayed away all day and I suffered all day until either she wore herself out or he returned and she went back at him for another round.
My mother should have gone to jail for the things she did to me in my opinion, but as I have noted, we live in a society where in general only threats of imminent death are often even responded to when children are abused. I think child abuse back in the 1960's received even less attention than it does now. Then and now, in many respects children are like the property of their parents; and, short of killing their offspring, the reality is parents can pretty much do what they want to their kids with very few consequences. I recall being drug by my hair, being thrown into the wall, slapped, having my arms painfully pinched in both of her hands while she screamed relentlessly inches from my face. I screamed, I cried, I pleaded, and I finally learned to say and to do absolutely nothing. I learned to say nothing and to show no expression when she was like this because any fear, suffering, and/or pain I showed made her go higher as if it fed her rage like gasoline on a flame. Over time I learned to stare her right in the eye and to go completely limp showing absolutely no fear. This limp focused stare tended to lessen the physical abuse and to keep the abuse mostly in the realm of verbal and emotional abuse. Mother was the absolute master of psychological torture and verbal abuse was an art that she continually perfected via trial and error ferreting out those things that she could say that hurt you most so she could plunge her hateful remarks like daggers into your soul and twist those daggers for the pleasure of watching you squirm in emotional and psychological agony. Mother's psychological torture of me as a child usually focused on things I could understand such as I was: fat, lazy, ugly, worthless, stupid, useless, like a lazy white dog and so on. She could run these things together in repetitive strings for hours without becoming bored or ever losing steam and always observing how the barb hurt or damaged and dwelling on those barbs that especially hurt when she realized they were effective. I understood very early on that the goal of these insults and the emotional agony and physical terrorism she all engaged in was for her to enjoy in some weird way the pain she was inflicting on me and her power to make me suffer. She wanted to hurt me. She enjoyed torturing me. She did it purposely and with intent to cause fear, pain, and agony. In one such episode I was confined for an entire day in my room. I don't know if I was allowed to go out to eat or even to use the bathroom. I actually remember peeing in a can in my room rather than ask to use a bathroom and pouring it out of the window. I remember staring out the window for hours watching the birds in the trees and wishing my father would come home with all my might. I also was hyper vigilant listening to my mother storming around the apartment flat ranting to the four walls while slamming things like doors and furniture as she went. Sometimes I heard a dish break. I remember pretending to play but how I was really focused on hearing her pace up and down the hallway coming almost to my room, sometimes touching the knob and rattling it, but then not coming into the room. Other times she came in like she had been fired out of canon screaming abuses and insults and all I could do was just stare at her and hope it didn't get physical; so I remained expressionless and very calm. At one point she exploded into the room and she jumped into the air landing cross legged in my bed and then bounced up in the air landing screaming right before me as I was playing with my toys. I actually laughed, even though I didn't really think it was funny to show I felt no fear. Her eyes were black and wild and her fury that time was really over the top. This was an especially crazy and frightening tantrum and that is no doubt why I remember the details as well as do even now fifty some years later. Even then, I remember how I worked so hard to show no fear and she stormed in and out of my room over and over again. I do not remember however, other than being grabbed a couple of times that I was hit though on that particular day.
When there were days like this and my father finally came home, I tried to tell him what had happened when he left and what she had done to me. She interfered with my telling him what had happened stepping right in between us screaming at him eye ball to eye ball that I had made this all up to please him and that he was teaching me to lie about her and to disrespect her. I thought at first my dad didn't believe me or he had some doubt that what I was trying to tell him was true, but the fact that I started to tell on her became a game changer. I recall during one of my parents altercations chasing my father to the door as he was leaving and because I knew what came next that in his absence I was going to take the brunt of mother's rage I was determined to go with him. I begged him to take me with him and I told him I was afraid and that she was going to hurt me while he was gone. I physically grabbed him and he had to pry my fingers off of his pants with my mother standing there calling me a liar and blaming him for my lies yet again. The door shut and he was gone and I recall feeling absolute despair standing eye to doorknob which tells me I was still around four years old; and, then I looked up at her standing to my left staring at me fully expecting to really get it because of what I had just done, but that time there was a strange dark calculating look in her eyes and instead of unleashing on me, after staring at me with that strange dark look for a few moments she walked away saying nothing. Defeated, I went to my room feeling my father absolutely had abandoned me but also surprised by the fact that my mother had also done something different this time. This something different coupled with my growing abilities to verbalize what was happening to me actually modified the abuses I received when I look back now even though I didn't fully understand what had changed at the time this particular change started to occur.
I will close this opening segment on my very early years noting that my mother took her frustrations out on other people including small four year old children if she could get away with these abuses without detection. I absolutely hate and despise how she treated me at that tender age and I am reminded once again in reliving these memories putting them to writing how I have every right to think of this duplicitous, opportunistic, miserable excuse for a human being as a monster. No child should ever be treated the way she treated me, though many are and I am not alone in having these kinds of experiences and obviously there are those poor unfortunate souls who have had even much worse. There is no excuse for what she did and no mental illness that can explain what she did. The fact she lied about what she did and had enough wherewithal to call me a liar and to rigorously hide her deeds is full evidence that she knew full well that what she did to me was wrong, but she did those things to me any way, because she wanted to and because on some very sick level within herself she enjoyed inflicting psychological pain and terror upon others. Once I was able to tell on her though the tactics she employed in her abuses changed and I will discuss these changes in more detail later on. Mother knew how to keep up appearances and just as she gaslighted my father painting him to be a villein to her brother even as she was the one actually torturing him, she could switch gears and also with no tweak of conscience or remorse gaslight me to my own abused father who didn't appear to know if I was telling the truth about what she was doing or not. Secrets within secrets existed within our home even between each other as she controlled everything and everyone within her sphere of influence completely and as she was tireless when it came to defending herself and making herself appear the victim when she was in fact the perpetrator; and, it was not unusual that even my father and I who were closest to the situation and in the midst of her abuses together to feel confusion and self-doubt as she was so adept at creating confusion and planting doubt in order to disguise her guilt.
