Morgan Pommells over on instagram has a post that says “Trauma Makes You Who You Aren’t”. That’s an absolute truth. And how poorly this culture sees people’s trauma is one of the biggest flaws of it. That and patriarchy.
It has taken me years to look deeply at the harm domestic violence has had on my children myself. Too long. The fact I only came up for breath in my 50s is a sad testament to the expectations women are painted with in this culture. I’ve written about it.
Almost all effort I have made over the years to talk about the abuse and larger dysfunction of my family has been met with subtle and overt insistence I stay silent. That isn’t the case any longer as I take on this chapter of my life. And it will be hard for some in my life to accept.
There’s an overlap in my life of a family of origin childhood dysfunction, frankly my very large extended family is deep in dysfunction, and the misogynistic bigoted violence of the man I settled for marrying when I was a teenager that has been so confusing to me. Among his tactics was to denigrate my family as worthless. I was already pretty disillusioned with my family of origin so it worked pretty well for a long time and I was very distant from them much of my life.
For so many years I wanted to protect my parents’ reputations as good people while the man I settled for marrying committed domestic violence on Oldest Son and myself -and likely Daughter and Youngest Son mentally and emotionally. So I could not bear being frank about my childhood dysfunctional family among the slings of insults he would bombard me with about what a bad family I have.
If you've read my blog you can read my working through some of that over the last few years. It’s been a healing exercise and I am glad for the work I am doing (not the experience of harm) because that immature life folded unconsciously into the life I imagined would be my married life. I stayed stuck in teenager maturity while living in defense mode for the almost 18 years I stayed married.
The best decision, to this day, I have made for myself was to divorce the violent abuser in 1997. And at that time there was so much negativity coming my way around that decision it was almost impossible to stay above water emotionally let alone try to figure out how to heal my mental health after all of that time and abuse.
Back to Morgan’s post: “trauma makes you who you aren’t” is a statement that is beyond accurate-it helps me stay grounded in my own understanding of myself as I learn my own history, my own flaws, my own responsibility in life and relationships. And it helps me stay on track knowing that there are and will be people in my life who are not going to come along on this growth chapter with me. It also helps me recognize people who are good for me, not good for me and who I want to build new friendships with.
Sometimes knowing there are people I have known for decades who will not want to see the growth or are afraid of the truths in this family saddens me because I believe my children may be among those people. At least temporarily. Daughter has said she’s 100% done, I am tentatively talking to Oldest Son and my timeout is not complete yet, set by Youngest Son.
The relationships with my children are the ones in my life I will mourn if we all cannot repair. There are plenty of other relationships I will welcome back in my life. I cut many people out as a defense and not knowing how to navigate the hard parts of relationships while stuck in immaturity, so I lost the chance to repair way back then and don’t know if there is room for it now. And no matter what, these new/repaired/rebuilt relationships will have to be different moving forward, mature and mutual, another thing I never learned-mutuality.
Several of the things Morgan calls out in her post have been shot at me as insults meant to keep me in line (silent). Attention seeking. Liar. Lazy. Bitter.
And for a long time I believed the insults. There is an element of shame built into those insults that is unbelievably effective. That’s part of the learning too; to discern what is real constructive criticism versus what is a hurled weapon thrown to keep someone silent. It takes practice but I’m in this for the long run and have been so happy to be building a better me from the inside out.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon