Of Ignorance and Erroneous Assumptions

I remember a song from the 1950s titled “It Pays to Be Ignorant.”  I think this was the theme song of a Groucho Marx quiz program on early television, but I could be wrong about that—just as I have been wrong about so many things.  As the song title implies, sometimes it’s good to be ignorant.  For example, I am happy to not know much about the seamy side of life and its darkness.  Oh, I know something about life’s darkness as it relates to my own experience, but my own experience has been sufficient.  I don’t want to know about the darkness of other lives if I don’t need to know. 

In my position as a community college remedial writing instructor, I helped other women find relief from the darkness when they wanted my help. I listened to them and referred them to competent help and to safe places to stay. In the process, I always encouraged them to turn themselves toward the light and not look back into the shadows. I did the same for myself—I gravitated toward the light and didn’t spend a lot of time looking back.  Looking back into that pit was so distressing that it rendered me unable to teach my classes.  Now that I am retired and have the support of a competent therapist, however, I am looking back and trying to make sense of my own darkness, and recently I have found myself focusing on the darkness in my twenty-year marriage.  As I do this, I’m also discovering the degree of my ignorance as a young woman in my early twenties.

 Some people may prefer to call ignorance by another name.  Granted, innocent or naïve may be more appealing adjectives than ignorant, but no doubt about it:  I was ignorant!  First off, as a young wife, I operated on the assumption that my husband’s mind worked the same way my mind did.  I assumed that he lived by the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.), a rule which I have always kept in mind as I have interacted with other people.  I also assumed that he obeyed the Ten Commandments, the rules for life that I learned in Sunday School at the local Episcopal church when I was growing up.  Didn’t everyone obey the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments?  I assumed they did.

When I was young and first married, I assumed that my husband followed the same moral beliefs that I followed, and I also assumed that any punishment I received from him, as from my parents, was justified.  As my twenty-year marriage wore on and his behavior became more problematic, more violent, I managed to overlook his abusive behavior toward me, figuring that I deserved what he dished out.  He broke the Golden Rule, but when he did that, he must have had a good reason.   Never did I imagine that maybe he felt the Golden Rule didn’t apply to him.  No, when he broke the Rule, he must have known something about the game of life that I didn’t know.  And because I knew from my childhood experiences that I was in the wrong, I felt I had no right to ask him to explain his behavior.  I was so conditioned to my lifetime role as being the person at fault that I saw no disconnect between my own use of the Golden Rule as a guide to my behavior and his apparent rejection of the Rule. 

I took my husband seriously and blamed myself for my failures when he yelled at me and called me a stupid bitch for making a mistake and overspending at the grocery store, for not having the “right” kind of dinner on the table, or for not having his clean underwear folded in his drawer—this despite the fact that I worked outside the home and contributed to our family income.  I accepted my failure as a wife and as a woman, but the thought that he may have had some shortcomings never entered my mind.  I accepted the fact that he was free to break the Golden Rule and I was not.  The rules didn’t apply to him.  My denial was so strong that I did not challenge this assumption. 

Now, when I go back in my memory and remember the times I saw a man who treated his wife tenderly and with respect and thought to myself, “Gee, I wish my husband were like that,” I remember the guilt I felt at thinking those thoughts.  I was a married woman, and in my mind, I had no business wanting something other than what I had from my husband!  “Thou shalt not covet” loomed large in my conscience.  And I assumed that in my husband’s conscience the words loomed equally large. Now, however, knowing that not only did my husband covet but acted on his coveting and cheated on me for a good many years, I have become aware of the degree to which I was ignorant.  Looking back, I am truly amazed at my ignorance, in fact.  Only after I had reported him for child abuse and was going through the papers he had left in our home did I discover the letters from one of his lovers and have concrete proof of his misbehavior.  Just as he had not obeyed the Golden Rule, he also had not obeyed one of the Ten Commandments.  Here I had felt guilty for wishing, and he had gone far beyond wishing many times.  Another of my assumptions blown to hell.   More evidence of my ignorance.

All the years of my marriage, all twenty years, I assumed that I was the person at fault, the person who failed in my marital relationship.  Just as I had failed my parents, I failed my husband.  Was my father at fault when he picked my cat up by the tail and bashed her against the kitchen wall because I had misbehaved?  No.  I was only nine years old at the time, but I deserved to hear the thud of my cat’s body hit the wall and hear her cries.  So I thought.  Nobody told me I didn’t deserve the punishment.  Was my mother at fault when she said, “All my friends believe you are getting married because you have to get married”?  I wasn’t pregnant, but the guilt I felt for having sex with my future husband before I was married led me to feel deserving of her words. After all, good girls did not have sex before they married, and I had wanted to be a good girl all my life.  My mother knew I was a bad girl.  She was right about me, and I deserved whatever punishment she deemed appropriate. 

So after I had reported my husband for molesting our daughter, and after he had been to court and was given supervised visitation, and after I had asked him on one of these visits why he had become progressively rougher with me in bed and he had replied, “I just wanted to see if there was anyone in your body,” I thought, “It was my fault for not being there.”  Oh, yes, it was all my fault.  If only I had given him the satisfaction of knowing he was hurting me as he tore up my insides, then he would have known I was really there and would have stopped hurting me?  Something did not add up.  It was my fault that he pounded me like I was a piece of tough steak and tore me up?  I don’t think so!  Now I can say, “I don’t think so,” but at the time, I still believed I was at fault for willing myself to leave my body and giving him nothing but an empty shell to pound on. 

Recently, I had a conversation about my husband’s response to my question during the visitation, and my friend enlightened me as to the manipulative ploys of men such as my former husband, men who cheat on their wives and molest their little girls.  As my friend pointed out, I had married a master manipulator, a person who no way would take responsibility for his behavior and who had no conscience.  As my friend stated, when my former husband responded to my question by saying that he “wanted to find out if there was anyone in my body,” he was putting the responsibility for his behavior onto me.  According to him, it was all my fault that he was ripping my insides and tearing me up until I bled.  When she said that, I thought, “Wow!  I’ve never even considered that he was wrong about that.  I’ve reached the age of 73 still believing that I deserved what he did to me.”  All these years, I have believed that he had a right to pound on me and that I was at fault for not responding to him and letting him know I was there?  Yup!  All these years! 

Slowly, I’m defogging my mind and replacing old erroneous assumptions about relationships with new, more realistic assumptions.  I don’t have a lot of time left in my life, but in the time I do have, I want to see life and my role in human interactions as clearly as I can.  Now I feel as if I’m at an optometrist’s office, and each time the doctor changes the settings on the eyepiece I’m looking through, I can see more clearly.  Will my vision of life ever be 20-20?  Probably not, but I want that vision to be as clear as possible. I’m learning my lessons late in life, but knowledge is power even at my age.  I just thank God that I am still capable of learning and still able to cut through the fog of my ignorance and see the light. I wish the same for you, my readers.  Namaste.  Peace be with you.   

A Simple Gift, But Oh So Powerful!



Jean, Age Two

This week I'm taking a break from the far past, and I'm dealing with a "realtime" situation in the here and now but rooted in the more recent past.  Maybe you can relate to my state of  mind and the process of grieving the loss of an ideal.

I have a very dear friend who is a retired clinical psychologist, and one of the most useful gifts she has given me is a saying that goes something like this:  "With awareness comes change."  Very, very simple and short--but oh so powerful!  If we don't know what the problem is, then we can't fix it.  But once we have identified the problem, then we have a choice: we can fix the problem, or we can ignore it.  Whichever decision we make, however, will lead to consequences that could be life-enriching or life-depleting.  The consequences of our decision will catch up to us and to the people we love, one way or another.

Most of my adult life, I have tried my best to identify problems in my behavior and in the human environment in which I have lived, and when I have been able to recognize my part in problematic situations, I have attempted to remedy my own behavior--knowing full well that the only person I can possibly change is myself!  For example, I tried really hard to raise my own kids differently than I was raised.  I remembered my own childhood, and I did not want to repeat what I perceived as the mistakes my parents made.  I know a lot of people who have done what I have done and who have tried their absolute best to not pass toxic behavior from their past to their children.  In raising my own kids, my ideal was to raise my kids in such a way that they reached adulthood without the miseries I have had.  At the time I was raising my kids, "miseries" was the only term I could use to identify what I now know as C-PTSD.   

One component of my C-PTSD is the problem I have of forming attachments to other human beings.  This problem, I believe, stems largely from the fact that I was left in the hospital nursery for weeks after I was born.  My mother was sick, and there was nobody available to take me home.  And then, after I did go home, I was put on a strict four-hour schedule: changing and a bottle every four hours, bathing several times a week, and no handling in between.  Human touch was largely missing from the equation.  Breaking a baby's will was "in"!  Babies had to learn early who was boss, and cuddling led to spoiled, tyrannical babies.  During my childhood, I felt like an object, an inanimate object that could be moved and directed by adults however they chose to move and direct me.  Thus, I became an excellent prey for sexual predators and other abusers.  I carried this role into my marriage and became a battered wife. My children suffered, too, each in his or her own way. 

Thus, aware of the damage my own upbringing had done to me, when I became a young mother at age twenty-three, I realized that I had a choice.  "With awareness comes change."  I was aware of my own misery, my tendency to remain aloof and disconnected from others, my inability to trust other people, and my inability to sustain a close relationship with most adults.  I also had a vague idea as to the cause of my problem.  I did not want to do the same damage to my children that had been done to me.  So when my son was born, I picked him up every time he squeaked.  I nursed him whenever he seemed hungry, and I cuddled him when he cried.  After all, I thought, a baby must have a reason for crying, and it was up to me to reassure him that his world was as it should be, safe and warm and comfortable.  I was present for him in every way I could be present. 

As my children went through childhood, I tried my best to be present for both of them, but the chaos in our  home, their father's temper outbursts and my fear of him, rendered me incapable of simply gathering the kids and leaving the marriage.  I was aware, but only partially aware, of the problem, and only when I caught my husband molesting our daughter did I become fully aware of the problem.  When I fully saw the situation, the problem, as it existed, then I made the change: I reported my husband to the police, filed for divorce, and became a single parent. 

Now, I look back on my days as a mother, and I look at my children, and I ask myself if I achieved my ideal.  My kids are adults now, middle-aged, and my son has children of his own.  Did they escape the misery?  Sadly, I must face the fact that they did not escape, although I can honestly say that in some respects they have fared better than I did.  I can give myself credit for giving my son a better start in life than I had.  My daughter was adopted as an older foster child, and she had already gotten off to a rocky start in life. 

So what is this "realtime" struggle I'm having now?  It's this:  Recently I have been hit smack in the face by the fact that I did not reach my ideal.  My children and grandchildren are, like the rest of us mortals, having to deal with their own humanity and all the sorrows and sadness that go along with being human.  And I am responsible for part of their suffering!  In my state of being unaware of all my own miseries and the underlying causes of those miseries,  I was unable to help them avoid some of their own suffering. 

How do I feel about this recent insight, this new awareness?  It's laid me low for the past few days!  I've felt the sadness, the grief that comes with knowing I did not achieve my ideal of giving my children the childhood that I didn't  have, a childhood at least free from the toxins that were forced upon me.  With this awareness, what changes can I make?

I've been thinking today about the changes I can make.  First off, though, I need to accept the fact that I did not do everything possible to help my children grow to adults who have no "miseries."  When I was an active parent, I was dysfunctional, incapable of cutting through the fog in my mind and being the effective parent that I wanted to be.  I see that now, and I am so sorry that I failed to be all to my children that I wanted to be.  I've felt the sorrow and the grief over that failure.  But I'm not going to beat myself up over it.  That would not be helpful to my children, my grandchildren, or to myself. 


What am I going to do?  I am going to continue in therapy, for one thing, and do what I can in the time I have left to become even more aware than I am, even more cognizant of the process in which I am involved, working my way out of the mental tangles of C-PTSD.  I also am going to be more present and available to my grandchildren.  If I've learned anything in my life that might help them in their lives, I want to be available to pass that learning on to them--if they want me to do that.  Only if they want me to do that.  At any rate, I want them to know that I am there for them. I also want my children to know that I am available to them if they need me.  One of them does know, I think, but I'm not sure about the other one.  I can't change my children or grandchildren, but I can change myself.  I have the strength to do that, and I will do it.  Am doing it. 

In the process of becoming more aware of my inner self and as I unravel more tangles of Complex PTSD, I will know more about changes I need to make in my perceptions and in my behavior.  I'll make those changes.  That's what life and therapy are all about--becoming aware and making changes.  I'm capable of this task, and I will do it to the best of my ability.  As my therapist once told me, each person who heals helps the whole universe heal.  Namaste.  Peace. 

On Memorial Day 2012, A Prayer Rejected

Some years ago, a group of women in the Episcopal Church attempted to publish an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer and asked women to contribute original prayers for this book.  Various categories were listed for the prayers, one of which was the category of abuse/domestic violence.  So I wrote and submitted the following prayer.  My prayer was rejected.  Why?  Because it was, according to the editorial committee, "too direct."  In other words, it wasn't "nice enough."  

Well, I hate to tell those people on the editorial committee this, but sexual abuse, abuse of any sort, and domestic violence are simply NOT nice!!  They wanted me to submit a prayer in the category of abuse/domestic violence that was NICE??  That tiptoed around the subject matter??  I don't think so!!  

Below is my prayer . . .

Tender Mercy

(Icon, Virgin of Vladimir)

A Prayer for Victims and Survivors of Abuse and Domestic Violence

Lord, may our lips give you praise, and may our prayers rise to you like incense.

For all the innocent little children who are at this moment being victimized—
May God’s hands hold your souls, shield them from evil, and keep them pure;
May God’s beauty and strength flow into your bodies and take away your pain and     your shame;
May God’s peace form as a blanket around your minds and shield you from the horror, chaos, and confusion that accompany exploitation and violation of innocence.
*Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

For all the people who as innocent children were victimized and who now
struggle to reclaim their souls, their bodies, and their minds—
May God’s firm hands stop you from harming yourselves or others;
May God’s eyes give you vision to see your true and innocent  selves;
May God’s ears enable you to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit;
May God’s feet move you gently and steadily on His Path. 
*Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

For all those who are presently being violated and exploited and who are living in fear for their lives and the lives of their children—
May God’s gift of clear vision help you see through the fog of denial and deceit;
May God’s gift of courage enable you to stop the process of evil before it consumes you and those whom you love;
May God’s gift of discernment allow you to recognize the forces of good;
May God’s gift of tears help you mourn that which is worthy of being mourned;
May God’s gift of love enable you to know that you are beloved, unblemished, and cherished children of God, forgiven and blessed inheritors of His kingdom.

*Oh, God, you who sacrificed your beloved Son Jesus for us that we might have hope, please hear our prayers  for victims and survivors of sexual abuse, sexual assault,  and domestic violence. We ask that you help these people find bright new lives that are free from the tarnish of abuse.  We ask, also, that in times of weakness and trial, you send your angels to comfort them and give them strength.  We ask this in Your name, in the name of Your beloved Son, Jesus, in the name of the Holy Spirit, and in the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Theotokos, with her Son, the ever loving Mother of the motherless.
Amen.

Parental Alcoholism, Parental Mental Illness, and Shame: Three Threads In the Tightly-Woven Tapestry of Complex PTSD



My Father

After my father’s memorial service in August of 1962, somebody, a friend of my father, I believe, let slip that my father had been an alcoholic.  “What a pity that such a brilliant man was an alcoholic.  He was simply too sensitive for this world of ours.”  Those were the words.  I was too upset to remember who the person was, and that information doesn’t really matter, but I remembered the words and have thought about them over the past five decades.

Now that I have more knowledge of alcoholism, mental illness, using alcohol to self-medicate, and the accompanying behavioral quirks of both alcoholism and my father’s mental illness, I can look with more understanding and compassion on the members of my nuclear family—and on myself.  Compassion and understanding, however, do not erase the damages, the C-PTSD symptoms, resulting from living with a parent who has an untreated mental illness and who self-medicates with alcohol.  At age 73, I'm still working at the task of undoing the damage done, in part, by my father's behavior.

Parental Alcoholism:  One Thread of the Tapestry

I have heard others talk about being raised by alcoholics.  I have listened to friends talk about the knock-down, drag-out fights, the violence, the yelling and screaming, the abuse, and all the craziness present in many homes where parents are alcoholics.  My childhood home, however, was not like this.  My childhood home was quiet, too quiet.  My parents were, evidently, “quiet, functional alcoholics.”  They quietly did their drinking, went to work, came home, and went through the motions of parenting. Each of us came and went individually and unattached to one another.  Our house was a hotel—except that the people living there were blood relations and not strangers.  But the normal interpersonal family attachments were simply not there!  My parents were wed to their bottles of Jim Beam but not to each other.  My brother and I were their responsibilities but not their children.  They took care of responsibilities, but they loved and were attached to their cigarettes and their booze.  If they felt loving attachment to my brother and me, we didn’t know it.

Despite his outstanding performance as a teacher and his other accomplishments, my father was a shy person who avoided interaction with other people, including his family, when he was not required to be “on stage” in the classroom.  He spent a lot of time holed up in the bedroom grading papers when I was very young; later, when we lived in houses with basements, he holed up in the basement where he built his ham radio stations.  In a recent telephone conversation with my brother, my brother revealed to me that our father had bottles of alcohol stashed in the basement where he spent so much time, a piece of information I did not have—one more piece I can use as I work to complete the puzzle of my own past and trace the roots of my C-PTSD.

As I was about to graduate from high school, I realized that my father’s “sick headaches” that kept him home from work more and more often appeared to be related to the number of drinks he had.  And then one hot summer day when I was in high school, my father, who had been working at Mt. St. Helens as a park ranger and was usually gone all week, came home in the middle of the week.  He revealed to my mother that he had caught himself standing behind a co-worker, axe raised, ready to bring the blade down on the co-worker’s head.  He told her that he was going to Portland to find a psychiatrist and get help.  And that is exactly what he did.

Effects of Parental Mental Illness: Another Strand of the C-PTSD Tapestry

When I was a child, my father seldom talked directly to me unless I had done something to make him angry.  Then he yelled at me. Until I was about ten years old, I thought that mothers talked to their children and fathers did not.  Only when I was I was about ten or eleven and I began to babysit in our neighborhood and observed fathers speaking lovingly and directly to their children did I realize that my perception of fathers was skewed: Many fathers actually enjoyed direct conversations with their children!  What a revelation!  My father required my brother and me to read at the dinner table, a requirement meant to prevent any conversation! 

At the time, I didn’t understand why my father never spoke directly to me or carried on what might be a normal conversation with me, and my speculation on this matter led me to make some very erroneous and damaging assumptions concerning my worth as a human being.  These assumptions contributed to my deep sense of shame and feeling of being invisible and totally worthless as a human being.

What I did not know when I was a child was that my father suffered from a mental illness that impaired his ability to make and sustain close relationships with other human beings, including his own children.  His diagnosis was “Borderline with schizoid tendencies,” a diagnosis that described his behavior accurately, especially in the area of relationships.* I learned this when I was in my early forties, and now that I know more about his illness, I understand and have forgiven his behavior toward me.  Forgiving him has not, however, taken away the marks his behavior left upon me.  Erasing those marks is part of my present work in therapy. *(See the Mayo Clinic website on the Internet for a list of symptoms of borderline and schizoid personality disorders.)

After my father died in August of 1962, I grieved not for the loss of what had been but for the loss of what might have been.  Now, however, in the year 2011, when I think of my father, I remember his courage in recognizing his demons, in seeking help, and in using that help to change his life.  I am inspired by his example at a time when I am working hard in therapy to heal the wounds of my own past. 

Shame: A Third Thread In the Tapestry of Complex PTSD

If you read my essay on shame (See “Of Shame and Snowballs” at http://relievingptsdsymptoms.wordpress.com) and its contribution to C-PTSD, you know that shame is often a component of C-PTSD, and shame usually originates in childhood.  Although my father was probably oblivious to the effect of his behavior on me, his failure to interact with me was a contributing factor to my shame.  I lived in the same house as this male adult who was reported to be my father, but because this person seldom interacted with me or addressed me directly, I doubted my own existence.  Was I really there?  If I existed, why didn’t this man talk to me and interact with me as other fathers talked to and interacted with their children?  Was I so inferior and so flawed that he regarded me as not being worth his time? 

The only way I could explain my father’s attitude toward me was to conclude that there was something wrong with me, something that made me unworthy of being his daughter, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what that something was.  Add together the shame I felt as a failed daughter to my father and the shame I had long felt as a failed daughter to my mother, and the sum, the result, was a burden of shame heavy enough to sink a battleship.  Later, when I was a young adult and in college and tried to commit suicide, the shame did almost sink me. 

Now, in my early seventies, I am trying to undo the tightly woven tapestry of Complex PTSD, tease apart the strands that comprise the whole and step through and beyond the tatters into a better place, a place where I can enjoy just being myself, the self I have never really met.  I’m looking forward to that!
 
 

Shadow Girl

Jean, Age Four

Complex PTSD is said to result from prolonged exposure to abuse during childhood or adulthood.  Each of us who has been diagnosed with C-PTSD has a unique story, but the element of prolonged exposure to abuse is a thread that seems to weave through most C-PTSD stories.  In my case, being forced by my parents to pose nude for their friends, one of whom was a professional photographer, was a source of shame and no doubt fed my Complex PTSD.  Unlike other sorts of abuse to which I was subjected, the abuse described in the following short essay did not involve physical or sexual violence.  Nevertheless, this abuse traumatized me, made me feel ashamed, and was as devastating in its own way as violent sexual abuse.

Some years ago, after the death of Jon Benet Ramsey, special programs on television examined the issue of child beauty pageants. I remember watching the little girls parade across the stage, many of them resembling highly sexualized adult models, some looking like street women, hookers, and I cried.  At the time, I did not know why I felt so sad.  A few years later, I knew why I felt sad because I remembered what happened to me when I was ages three, four, and five. 

My experience was probably not abuse as most people think of abuse.  My abuse involved posing nude for my parents' friends as they drank their cocktails and smoked their cigarettes. As long as I cooperated with the photographer and my parents, I was not hit.  Nobody directly abused me sexually or physically during these sessions.  However, being forced to pose naked, my entire body, including my genitals, exposed to the scrutiny of a gathering of my parents' friends, left a mark on my heart, spirit, and mind.

When I began my present therapy, I could not bring myself to talk much about these photo sessions, and my therapist did not ask me to talk about them.  The photo shoots had, in fact, been a source of trauma, and I have yet to deal directly with them.  I was able about a year ago to reach into my mind to the place where the nonverbal effects of the trauma lie and use oil pastels to depict my emotions surrounding these photo sessions, but so far, I have not talked much about them. 

As I did the art work, I remembered "Shadow Girl," the little gray girl hiding under the table on which I was made to pose.  She was my friend, a part of me, and I knew she would be there with me and wouldn't leave. She loved  me. I could depend on her in a way I could not depend on my parents. It was Shadow Girl who protected me from my parents during the photo sessions and who has protected me ever since. She was there for me when nobody else was.  She is still with me, and I am just now, at age 72, getting to know her. 

The photograph at the top of this essay is the only remaining photo taken during the "naked" sessions.  Note the forced smile.  Below is my depiction of the photo sessions, the art work I did in my attempt to capture the pre-verbal memory.  Note the little Shadow Girl beneath the table. It was not until I did this drawing in 2010 that I remembered Shadow Girl. 

Beyond Shame

Jean, Age Seven

If you read my last post, “Of Shame and Snowballs,” you know that I recently turned an important corner in my therapy.  All my old feelings of Shame suddenly seemed to melt away, and along with the Shame, went a part of the “old me.”  Now, I know the truth of the statement “Nature abhors a vacuum.”  Every time I have had an important insight into myself, and every time I have abandoned a dysfunctional part of myself, I have been in a state of discomfort until I have filled the empty space.  So what am I doing now to replace Shame?  What will I find to fill that empty space?

If you have been in therapy, you understand the problem I am having.  For one thing, the rest of my psyche has not heard the news that Shame is no longer with me.  In my experience, there is always a lag between insight and emotional response to the insight.  It seems to take a while for the news to trickle down through all the layers of wiring in the right side of my brain and for that part of my brain to realize that the old emotional responses are no longer functional or appropriate. 

It’s as if the responses related to my feeling of Shame are now sitting in my right brain waiting to kick into action, but they no longer are wired into a live circuit.  They wait for the old switch to activate them, and they don’t know that the wiring has been cut.  What will happen to all those Shame responses?  I hope they just wither and die from disuse. 

Now I am in the process of finding a replacement for Shame, a tenant/tenet to inhabit the space that Shame occupied in my psyche.  While I am doing this, I feel a sense of imbalance.  My paradigm is shifting, but as it shifts, I feel somewhat off kilter.  Having gone through this process in the past, however, I know that the feeling of being off kilter is temporary.  All I can do is endure until the world rights itself.  That will happen.  And what then?  A beautiful rainbow?  We’ll see.  I’ll let you know.

Update:  Since writing this a few months ago, I have become much more aware of shame's influence on my life, how shame has held me back and has kept me from realizing my potential.  Shame is all-pervasive, and it must, like weeds in a garden, be identified, uprooted, and destroyed so that the beautiful flowers of the mind can thrive.  Once one has begun the process of eradicating shame, then the pace of the journey through therapy for C-PTSD may move faster. This has been my experience.  Hang in there! 

Of Shame and Snowballs

This essay is one I posted on my old blog titled "Healing PTSD Symptoms." The essay is about shame and how shame can have its roots back in early childhood. If you have been diagnosed with Complex PTSD, you may be able to relate to this essay.  I have learned that being ashamed of oneself is a complex matter, and once I began to get beyond shame, my recovery process seemed to move faster. If you see yourself in any way in this essay, please get help for yourself or if you are already getting help, please stay with the process. It's worth it! 

 

Today I’ve been considering snowballs.  Snowballs?  Yes, snowballs.  You see, snowballs usually begin their lives as pristine objects formed in the hands of eager little children, but as the children roll the snowballs across the ground and as the snowballs gather snow and grow larger, they also gather little rocks, dirt, and all sorts of debris.  By the time the snowball is large enough to be the base for a snow person, it has incorporated into itself an assortment of dreck, garbage, and it is no longer the pristine object it was before beginning its trip across the lawn.
 
The snow person produced by the little children, then, bears the scars and blemishes of its journey.  As it melts, it sags and droops and shrinks until finally nothing is left but a puddle filled with pebbles, chunks of dirt, twigs, and perhaps even the droppings of a neighborhood dog. Such is the fate of this snow person made by the hands of little children.  He or she, unlike a living human being, has no control over her inner life—in fact, she has no inner life to control.  The upside to being a snow person, of course, is that snow people feel no psychic pain.
 
The downside to being a human is that, unlike the snow person, we do feel psychic pain.  All the nasty little bits of emotional garbage we collect and internalize as we roll over our life’s path do their damage.  What are these nasty little bits of garbage?  They are all the toxic, devastating bits of emotional fallout from abuse and neglect.  They are the hurts inflicted on us by adults when we are children, the hurts inflicted by our peers, and the hurts we inflict on ourselves.  All these hurts do their damage, some damaging us more than others.  Recently, I have stumbled across one of these bits of toxic fallout that has affected my own life more than most others.  So what is this toxin called?  It is called shame.

For decades I had read about the damage that shame does, how shame can affect self-esteem and cause a human being to feel worthless.  However, no article I had read had given me much information that I could actually use to help myself.  The articles told of the devastating effects of shame on a human being’s psyche, but they did not discuss possible origins of shame, the dynamics of shame, or give any clues as to how one manages to shed the toxic effects of shame.  Furthermore, I did not identify shame as being one of the specific factors that had eroded my self esteem from the time I was a child. 

Also, because I remembered being told by my mother innumerable times that I should be ashamed of myself for having done this or that, I reached adulthood believing that shame was tied only to certain acts that I had committed in childhood and later in adulthood and was not one of the more generalized but deeply-rooted poisons that interacted with other psychic poisons to produce my low level of self esteem, the belief that I was utterly worthless and completely unworthy of being in the company of other humans. Thus, until last week, I rolled over the path of my life largely ignorant of the role shame has played in perpetuating my C-PTSD.

If I ever had doubts about the value of therapy, my doubts evaporated last week!  Why?  Last week I met Shame head on and decapitated it, rendered it powerless!  How, suddenly, did I do this? 

First, a conversation between me and my therapist caused me to connect to some of my earliest childhood memories.  I remembered when I was about three asking my mother at various times if I could sit in her lap, and I remembered that she always said “no” and always had a reason for her “no.” Sometimes she said no because I was “too big for that”; sometimes I was “too heavy”; sometimes she was too busy or too tired, and sometimes she wanted to smoke a cigarette and I would be in the way.  Each time she turned me away, I felt sad.  When I was an older child and clearly too physically large to sit on her lap, she complained about having to touch me or touch my hair when she got me ready for school.  I remember her cracking me on the head with the hairbrush one morning when I squirmed, and I remember hearing her say, “I hate touching your hair.”

By then I must have achieved the “age of reason” because I remember thinking to myself, “Then why won’t you let me get my hair cut?”  She hated touching my hair, yet she wouldn’t grant me my request to have short hair that I could brush without her help.  I was smart enough to keep my question to myself; if I had asked her the question, she undoubtedly would have cracked me on the head with the hairbrush.  Why did she dislike touching me, and why didn’t she seem happy to be with me?

As my childhood turned to pre-teenage years, my sadness grew, and accompanying the sadness came a new element, a feeling of not being good enough and a feeling of being ashamed because I wasn’t good enough.  I felt angry at myself for being such a failure as a human being. If I had been good enough, I reasoned, my mother would have wanted to touch me and to let me sit on her lap.  Mothers of my friends liked touching their little girls, letting them sit on their laps, and holding them close. And if I had been good enough, my mother wouldn’t have cracked me over the head with the hairbrush or frowned at me all the time she was getting me ready for school in the morning and at other times.  She was never happy when I was with her, or so it seemed to me, because I was not the little girl she wanted.  I was a chipped Spode teacup she had bought on sale and could not return: she was stuck with me, and she was not happy about that!

When I was a child, I was never able to come up with a specific answer to “What’s wrong with me?”  If I had been able to answer the question, I might have tried to change whatever it was about me that my mother didn’t like. But I didn’t know what was wrong; therefore, I didn’t know what to change. By the time I was a young teen, I had given up on my mother, our relationship, and on myself.  I had concluded that I had come into the world “wrong,” and there was nothing I could do about that.  My shame was so overpowering that I often couldn’t look people in the eye when I spoke to them or when they spoke to me.  When somebody hurt me, I didn’t fight back or complain because I felt I deserved being hurt.  When my husband abused me, I felt I deserved his abuse and did nothing to stop his behavior.  For the past thirty years, I’ve been on my own, not living with anyone who has been abusive, yet I have continued to feel unworthy, ashamed, unable often to look at people when they have spoken to me or when I have spoken to them. 

All this has changed, however, in the past week.  Suddenly I realize that there is nothing inherently wrong with me, and my sense of being undeserving and unworthy is simply gone.  I don’t know where it went, but it’s gone.  Just like that!  Gone!

What brought about this change?  A sensitive interaction between my therapist and me, for one thing.  Also, shortly after this important therapy session last week, I typed something like “origins of shame” into Google and found an absolutely amazing article by Richard G. Erskine titled “A Gestalt Therapy Approach to Shame and Self-Righteousness: Theory and Methods.”  (See link at the end of this essay.)  And there it was—a description of how shame originates in a child, starting with a feeling of sadness that, like a snowball, develops into a sense of being inadequate and worthless as the child rolls along her life’s path.  Not only does Richard G. Erskine describe the development of shame in a child, but he also describes the process by which shame lowers a person’s self esteem:

“Shame also involves a transposition of the affects of sadness and fear: the sadness at not being accepted as one is, with one's own urges, desires, needs, feelings, and behaviours, and the fear of abandonment in the relationship because of whom one is. The fear and a loss of an aspect of self (disavowal and retroflection of anger) fuel the pull to compliance - a lowering of one's self esteem to establish compliance with the criticism and/or humiliation.”  Erskine  [Italics and underlining are mine.]

All I could say to myself when I finished reading the article was, “Wow!  He sure hit the nail on the head!  Thank you, Richard G. Erskine!”  For in that article, I recognized the process that had taken place within me, the process that began when I was very little and was told by my mother, “No, I want to smoke a cigarette” when I asked to sit on her lap and continued on when I as a wife allowed my husband to belittle and abuse me because I felt I deserved the treatment. 

A dear friend of mine has told me repeatedly, “With awareness comes change.”  How right she is!  And now that I am fully aware of shame and its toxic effect on my psyche and my life, I feel change taking place.  For one thing, during a family gathering on Christmas Day, I let a person in attendance know how I felt about her childish, rude, disrespectful behavior.  Others had felt as I had, but I spoke out.  I don’t know whether I made a difference by speaking out, but I know I felt better because I called the situation as it was and didn’t consider myself unworthy of speaking out.  That was a first!  The New Year, 2012, is almost upon us, and I’m wondering what the “second” will be—and the “third,” “fourth,” . . .   

I feel that as a result of my newly-found awareness of shame and its effects on my life, I have leaped over a gigantic hurdle on my way to healing.  I’m getting there!  And so will you!  If you are in therapy, take it seriously and work hard.  If you are not in therapy, find a competent and compatible therapist who is skilled in treating clients with C-PTSD and PTSD.  You are a human being, a person, and unlike snow people, you are capable of change and healing.  See how many hurdles you can jump and how far down the road to healing you can travel in 2012! 

Blessings and everything good to you in the New Year. 
Jean

(URL for Richard G. Erskine's article:  http://www.integrativetherapy.com/en/articles.php?id=30)