The Crushed and Reassembled Self

I wish I better knew how to explain the trauma of having had my whole life defined for me. The trauma of Growing Kids God’s Way teaching my mother how to train me into “instant obedience,” how to make me only see the world through her eyes.

There’s so much, I can’t even talk about it, because the scope of it all was daily, active, constant undermining, until the words are written all over me. Story, after story, after story: nothing bad had happened to me. I can’t be mad at my brothers for hurting me, they have trauma and I don’t. I can’t have negative emotions: that’s PMS, that’s proof I might be going crazy, her reading natural medicine woo cures to tell me what I needed to look out for because of all my children you’re the one most likely to develop schizophrenia, okay I don’t have emotions anymore. Crying is manipulative, my emotions are suspect, emotions are things girls use to get their own way. I wasn’t allowed to be sick it’s allergies my mother would tell everyone, I wasn’t allowed to name or define my life, my feelings, my hurt, my pain, nothing, not ever, these stories on loop and repetition all the time. She told me who I was, she told other people who I was, until to challenge it would be to unravel a narrative so loud, I wouldn’t know how to speak louder. I was always suspect: not allowed to change my mind, to contradict a previous thing I once said about me, no matter how old I got, no matter if a previous statement was something I’d said as a child, it was held to me like an affidavit of self, and I committing perjury if I said otherwise.

I deal with a lot of dissociation from childhood sexual abuse, but I wish I could explain this dissociation: it is too dangerous, to have your own thoughts. You are not allowed to challenge what she calls you, how she defines you, you are not allowed to say you have an internal sense of self that contradicts anything she believes about you. The words themselves aren’t real, the emotions literally feel like they are behind a wall, my own visual sense of my body always relegated them to this place in my back, stirring around, unable to be pulled out.

There is a version of me that lives over my skin, a version of me still prone to coming out when I am small, and afraid, when the situation feels dangerous, when I worry that the other person has all the power to take my every thought and emotion and say no you’re wrong. No you sound crazy. No you’re not allowed to think that about yourself. And this person lived every single solitary day in that home, in that family, because there was no other choice. There was no other person who was allowed to be, it was a self created by my mother, out of my mother, and she poured it onto me until the weight of it pressed everything else down.

And how do I make anyone understand that? How do I tell them how easily the me I created out of vengeance, out of spite, out of defiance, out of rejecting the flimsy shell of a person my mother made me to be, is so fragile, so unused to being fully present, that they are easily gone, blown away by small breezes, by phrases and looks no one could even know had the power to do that to me?

Yes, it was emotional abuse, yes it was mental abuse, but the obedience of it, the Evangelical Christian story of it that made it possible to not only tear me down, not only manipulate and gaslight and insult me, but also make me agree with it, make me unable to see anything but that because to do so would violate reality itself…where is the language for it? And how do I explain how miraculous it feels sometimes, that I could even make a self? That I didn’t so fully shatter there was no climbing out of that? How do I tell someone what it cost me, so that they can know that what looks like someone so weak, and small, so far behind every moment in life, didn’t die? Can you believe it? That I found a discernible “I” somewhere in there, something unattached to her, something I created that’s me, that’s mine, that pulled out all the trauma and fear and hurt and anger and memory and being and self that were crushed and mangled, broken and convoluted, missing pieces and unable to be fully put back together, and made something of it all?

Sometimes I feel like trauma words aren’t enough. That I can’t find myself in anything. That I am looking for a language, but no I don’t want those, not that book, not that theory, not those definitions and meanings. Just someone to tell me they know these kinds of childhoods, they know the kind of self crushed and weighed down by someone who defined you, who made you obey those very definitions, who made it so that your self is so tentatively alive, you’re not even sure all the time how real you really are.

Do you know what it is, to see the world through so many different eyes, it’s like the sun itself exists in multiple versions of brightness? The emotional meaning of every object, of every thought, the feeling of your body itself, the metaphor for how light bounces off the version of you you see in your head, ever shifting, ever changing in meaning, in want, in focus? Because most of the time, I’m not even sure I share the same reality with other people. I’m not even sure whose version of the world is right. And, to quote from one of my zines: of course I’m crazy, mother. You made me that way.

The Optical Illusion of Gaslighting

From my zine, All the Things Abuse Steals, Issue 2

I have long wished to make the distinction between gaslighting and being gaslit. Gaslighting is what someone does, it’s identifiably abusive. But being gaslit is when it works. And when it works, when you believe it, your sense of self and the world begins to erode.

In my last abuse zine, I wrote about the ways my mother gaslit me, how she taught me to see myself always on the cusp of a break with reality. I had to reassure her that my worldview matched hers entirely, but not only that: she put the entire world’s eyes on me. If I had a doctor’s appointment, she would edit my language choices or else they might think I had (gasp) mental health problems. My internal world was shaped and formed with a thousand voices in my head, a choir directed by my mother, shadowing over me.

That, alone, I might have been able to handle. I might have been able to silence them, to reach the point where the sounds faded, where I could slough their control, recognize them as the fictional beings they were, crafted by my mother.

But what was worse is that my mother defined for me how to see the world. She spun me stories of who people are and in those stories she and my brothers were the sympathetic characters. She taught me that I could not understand either the depths of their pain, or the limitations of their choices. She snatched the word traumatized out of my mouth before I ever would have had a chance to use it. She had trauma. My brothers had trauma. I was so untouched by trauma, I could not even begin to grasp the sheer privilege I had in anything I did, in any accomplishments of mine…in any calls to be treated better.

It’s taken me this long to realize that, for someone who spends an awful lot of time worried about the depths of my own evil, it was because I was not cruel like my brothers, I was not abusive like my parents, I was something different than them, that helped spur this narrative, was part of the reason my mother tried to convince me that my supposedly trauma-free self could just not ever hope to understand why the rest of them couldn’t help being the way that they were.

The world forever remains situated around her, because I know what it looks like through that lens. There’s an optical illusion now everywhere I look, the trees or the face in the trees, the young woman or the old woman, the two sets of the same information, rapidly switching: what I know of myself versus how she taught me to see myself. What I know of the world versus what she told me that world was.

In the mockery of Evangelicalism, the way that those outside of it are enticed to gawk, to find it silly, and bafflingly humorous, we miss how it appeals to a tightly bound logic, a story of the world that holds up when measured against itself. The narrative is compelling and satisfying, and when you agree to it, its explanatory power—we are all sinful, we are fallen—answers all the questions of why humans are the way they are. Evangelicals aren’t anymore illogical than anyone who believes in the biology of gender roles, or espouses evo-psych beliefs about relationships and queerness. We tell these stories because we want the irrefutable, because the stories themselves lend to a determinism that shaves off the edges of our fear, loneliness, and responsibility.

What I mean is: my mother told me that men couldn’t help being like her husband was, like her sons were, because then she didn’t have to do anything, didn’t have to account for feelings like disappointment and disgust, or hold them accountable. When she told me that I couldn’t possibly grasp her trauma, or her son’s trauma, that was her way of making their actions sympathetic: it’s not that we both had choices, but rather that they were so hurt, they could only be that way. That I chose better wasn’t a choice, but that I was “granted” this option, by my lack of trauma.

Sometimes people will ask survivors to be kind and empathetic, to see the world through our abusers eyes, and I never know how to explain that I see that world every day. That I was born to see that world, that my job, my role as victim, was to stand in their shoes, account for their every hurt, their every experience, their every limitation and framework and experience, in order to understand exactly every single moment that brought them to the one where they hurt me.

The world in which abusers are sympathetic, in which men can’t help themselves but are simply acting out their own pain of either circumstance or testosterone, the world in which my mother was traumatized herself and only knew how to treat me abusively, that was my world.

And it stays with me. I hear it, ringing in my ears everyday. I know the logic of it. I know the stories, I know that there is a parallel path running next to me, and in it is a place where I would be swallowed alive, where my understanding of the world could be ripped out from under my feet, where my mother smiles confidently and full of comfort that she was right all along.

I always appreciated that Lundy Bancroft added a section in Why Does He Do That? about abusers and their allies, the collection of opinions that bolster both the abuser within their own community and within society at large.

But the appreciation is also filled with pain, because as I said: I was trained to see the world through my mother’s eyes. Which means: I know my father’s allies. I know how much it hurt my mother to be told that she should’ve accepted his abuse, to have been told that he was hurt, and sick himself, and she was cruel and wrong for kicking him out. I know how much it hurt her because she told me.

Can you understand how crazy-making it is? To have been hurt by the very weapons your abuser knows hurt? To see them acknowledge their own rights as a person, to take their own justice and freedom, and then use the very words, the very logic they know would destroy them, and fling it at someone else? It’s more than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is usually two like-minded things that allow someone to justify why it’s different. Instead, it’s that at every point my mother knew how horrible, how cruel, how unfair it was that people offered my father excuses. But only for her. It was only cruel for her.

I know the things that my mother was abusive. I know that she gaslight me. I know that her excuses, and justifications were wrong, I know that my family had choices, and I know that they chose cruelty and violence. I know this.

But I know this like one knows they can walk on a perfectly transparent glass walkway thousands of stories high. I know how sturdy the structure I stand on is, I know how safe it is to transverse forward. But still: I put my foot down, and expect the plunge downward.

When You Believe Them: The Self-Perception Abusers Give You

Abuse has two layers; there is the immediate moment, the abusive act presently happening, and then there is the framework that is being laid for future abuse, the identity your abuser is trying to give you so you will stay with them, believe them, and take the abuse to heart.

Abusers want to believe that their abuse is justified, and they want you, the person they’re abusing, to believe that what they are doing or saying to you is honest, truthful, acceptable, deserved, necessary even.

When you wake up in the morning, when you get out of bed and start your day, you do so on the basis of what you believe about yourself. You have an identity, a narrative of who you are, and the relationship between self and body which tells you how to feel out your own skin and see yourself in your minds eye.

The more I’ve worked on my book, the more I put my mother’s voice in my head, my minds eye becoming how she trained me to see myself. She argues with me every step of the way: is it fair that I call her abusive when she was hurt herself? mental-mother asks me when I write about how my father abused her. The abusive-mother-in-my-head wants to separate out what she did and what must have always been my own inherent brokenness; is it her fault that I was fragile, stupid, and pre-built to take such abuse to heart?

I stopped blogging because I stopped being able to convince myself that anything I had to say mattered. The words “evil” “stupid” “laughable” “mockable” “boring” “pointless” “nothing” became solidified in my head, not as lies given to me by trauma, but as truths, as ways to feel my own skin and see myself. Most of my journals are filled with the word nothing.

Before, when I lived at home, I had this enemy I could fight. My mother’s words were real, present, immediate, and I could talk about them with friends, post about them online, and get feedback. People could counter these words and because they were words, still fresh, still not fully solidified, it helped.

But now that I’m no longer in an abusive environment, it seems like I’m dealing with the second layer more than ever: as the years have passed I have isolated myself with the words, “evil,” “nothing,” “stupid,” and the more I isolate myself, the more real they become and the more real they become, the more I isolate myself.

My mother (and conservative Christianity, honestly) trained into me the sense that criticism, hateful and disparaging remarks are more honest than compliments. That someone is being truthful when they tell me I’m bad, and mis-seeing me if they tell me I’m good. And trauma, that overwhelming, exhausting thing that I live with, makes it difficult to fight this reasoning. The less fight I have, the less I can battle it, the less I can battle it, the more I believe it, the more I believe it, the less fight I have.

I can’t write because I can’t believe that what I write isn’t stupid. I can’t reach out to others because I am so convinced that I am the villain of the story, manipulating others into believing that it is my family that hurt me when really I deserved it. What is the only way to prove my goodness then, but to not subject others to how evil I am?

Many mornings, before I’m even fully conscious the words, I wish I was dead are already playing out in my head, like I dreamed them all night and am coming to. I beg the world for a miracle I can’t have because I don’t know what I want. The catharsis is gone because I’ve lost the sense that I deserve catharsis.

Many times, when you hit rock bottom, suicide becomes an idea you flirt with because it’s the last bit of catharsis you have when nothing else is there. The point of suicide is the idea of escape, it’s something your brain reaches for in the hopes that it will, at least temporarily, provide an outlet for how bad everything feels. But my failure to see myself as a sympathetic figure in any context even has removed that idea as an escape. There is no allowable escape, no way to conceive of a way out. Any attempt to do so gets churned through the layers of self-hatred and spit back out as nothing, Tor, you’re nothing. I think I have in a notebook somewhere, “I don’t deserve suicide, because it’s a way out and I don’t deserve a way out.”

The aftereffects of abuse are difficult for me to write about. It was almost easier when I lived at home, or when I first moved out, because I could write about concrete things. I could see myself as I was abused and it was wrong, and I could believe that these things that I experienced were injustice.

Now years later, it’s almost as though the abuse is so long ago, I don’t know how to map them together. I think I am bad, and I no longer have the connective tissue to tell myself that that is a lie from abuse. I only know how to think I am evil and then logically conclude that if I’m thinking it, it must be for a reason, and if there is a reason, it must be true.

I don’t have an answer to this yet, or even a strategy in place, all my stragies just get chewed up by this cruel sense of myself; anything that could possibly feel good or make me feel better gets ruined by my brain that can pick at it, twist it around until I remember that I am evil, I am stupid, I am nothing. I am writing this only becaue I am sick of this, I am tired of feeling empty and alone and unhappy, without any way out. But if I want something that makes me feel better, at the very least, refusing to let myelf stay isolated, let these ideas fester inside my head, growing larger in the silence, maybe I should just say them. The aftereffects of abuse when you’re no longer being abused are their own kind of horrible that I’ve never seen anyone explain how to fight. Maybe we can figure it out together.

Breaking Kids God’s Way

When my girlfriend read through the draft of my book, she had a comment about how I mention Growing Kids God’s Way only in passing.

And I realized that I had never explained it, not to her, not to anyone really, anything about Growing Kids God’s Way. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned on the blogs I read — not that no one is talking about it’s just not something I see with any frequency. Many of the critiques online for GKGW are actually critiques of On Becoming Babywise, a far more well-known book for its controversy related to faithilure to thrive.

Growing Kids God’s Way by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo was a parenting class/book that was popular in the ’90s and it promises, as is obvious by the title, that if you implement their methods, you’ll be implementing godly methods of raising your children. And as I sat down to write it, all the various aspects of it came flooding back. First-time obedience. Cheerful obedience. My mothers voice explaining to us, delayed obedience is disobedience. You come when you are called, you respond instantly to your parents voice, and in everything they ask you to do, you show that you are glad to do it. If you absolutely cannot do something, your only recourse is to look your parent in the eye and politely state, “May I make an appeal?”

This was the prize of the Christian parent, the example that you set for the world. Well-behaved children were proof of your faith itself. The world would compare your family to their own unspanked, disruptive, screaming, arguing children, and be moved by your testimony of God’s holiness in how you raise your children. Or so it goes. Children were trophies you paraded out on Sunday mornings; everyone knew who the good Christians were, the ones who had children never talked back, never were cranky, never once showed anything but instantly obedience and a polite, cheerful demeanor.

I haven’t talked about this, mostly because it always felt like background noise. As I got older, my mother stopped specifically mentioning GKGW, and it felt like it vanished, like it had never been much of a big deal to begin with.

All this time I’ve been writing, what nagged in the back of my mind was the how. How did my mother turn me into a person who felt like I had no sense of identity a part from her? How did I become a person that didn’t rebel, didn’t form a sense of identity, didn’t become anything that I didn’t think would meet with her approval? I couldn’t seem to find the beginning of what happened to make me so compliant.

And then I started writing about Growing Kids God’s Way, and all of a sudden the answer was right in front of me: as a young child, my mother started training me to be the kind of person that was nothing a part from obedience. That my moral goodness was tied to how happy of a front I presented. Disobedience was sin and obedience — to parents, and to God — was the highest moral imperative.

The reason I haven’t posted this past month is because just a cursory look at all of these things slammed my brain into the ground hard. It opened up old wounds I didn’t know I had, and left me in a kind of depressive, anxiety haze that required me to put everything down for a bit. I’m slowly pulling myself out, a process inhibited by the fact that I still keep making myself sit down with this book, sift through it all, and remember.

My mother used to brag to other parents that I had smartly gleaned the consequences for disobedience from watching my brothers punishments, and knew to avoid it. She’d brag that I was the one child she knew she had raised right. Only occasionally she’d tell me she worried that one day I would have the standard teenage rebellion, far later and with a vengeance.

But instead, I have to fight not to obey. When obedience is the only thing rewarded, when the only praise you ever received is praise for obeying, how are you to know what your own desires are? Your motivations are tied to obedience. When other people are pleased with you, you are pleased with yourself. When others think you are good, you know you have done right. So how do you manage to have a sense of self apart from that obedience? Recently, I told my girlfriend that I should practice declarative sentences, that the only way I would ever be able to feel like I had any real power is if I could say I want or I need without qualification. And then I told her what I wanted for dinner, and proceeded to burst into tears. Something as small as dinner felt like claws raking their way through my brain; I had violated the deep underlying core of my training.

It is possible to make people obedient. It is possible to train children into cheerful, willing obedience, to make it seem as though their own personal self strives and desires for nothing else; as though they weren’t dog-trained into it, but rather that they are responding out of their own want to obey. It just requires breaking someone down, scooping out any sense of self and personhood they might have, and replacing all of it with obedience. And if you change the word “obedience” in that sentence to “Jesus,” I’m not sure the Christian faith I grew up in would find anything wrong or horrifying about it at all. And that is why it was so easy to do.

“Teach him [your child] to obey according to the character of true obedience-immediately, completely, without challenge, and without complaint.” (Growing Kids God’s Way, page 169 of the 2002 edition).

Abuse: When Happiness isn’t Allowed Either

I often write about the ways that in abusive families, you’re not allowed to have “bad” emotions. You can’t show anger or hurt or fear. But really, it’s more than that. Because you’re also not allowed to have good emotions either.

Genuine happiness is a weapon. Interests, personality, and a sense of self is a weapon. Anything you love can be taken away from you, or deemed frivolous. To actually show that you care about something allows abusers a way to hurt you. And having an interest that is not approved by your abusers? That’s impossible.

So you’re required to perform happiness, but not to actually experience it.

And when the entirety of the love you receive from your parents is based on parental-approved behaviors, interests, and opinions, you become a person crafted into the very image they want – an illusion, but an illusion created so much out of so much fear and necessity that it starts to simply be your default. You don’t feel good but you certainly wouldn’t be able to explain what feeling good is, or what it means.

It’s like daily, residual pain. After awhile it becomes background noise, something that’s simply there. You don’t ever feel pain-free, you also no longer grasp the ability to understand it as pain.

It’s incredibly difficult to look at my childhood and know what was real. What did I enjoy? What did I hate? Who knows?

All children perform, to a certain extent. They seek out approval, they model the behavior of their parents, they internalize and copy as a way to learn. But that copying is all I understand of who I was as a child – many of the things I did I distinctly remember being things I was already told my parents had done at my age. When I was afraid I still laughed, when I was bored I still feigned enjoyment, and when I actually enjoyed things I wasn’t supposed to, I hid it or squashed down the feelings so hard, they no longer existed.

Because abusive parents can tell you that your happiness is wrong. That your laughter is wrong, that the things you love are wrong. It’s how my brother learned he wasn’t supposed to sing, how I learned that I wasn’t supposed to show I liked other people, how we all collectively learned, as children and teenagers, how to perform only approved enjoyment, and only to the degree that was allowed.

And when all emotions are required to be approved by your parents, when it’s possible to experience bad good emotions, when you have to filter what you could potentially enjoy by what would be safe to be happy about, then everything becomes performance. Everything becomes a game of figuring out what your parents want you to think and feel, and then complying with that. You spend more time reading your parents emotions for approval than you do actually considering what you think, what you feel, and who you are.

It’s one of the hardest things to explain to others – that on top of learning how to experience negative emotions, how to express wants and needs that might not be what others want, I also have had to learn how to express good emotions. How to show excitement over something I love, how to say, “I really like this,” and believe that I am allowed to like something and I am allowed to like things even if other’s around you don’t.

And yet, a lot of my emotions, I only let myself experience by myself. I hold certain mundane parts of myself close, in secret, just in case. Just in case someone thinks I would be stupid or wrong or awful, just in case the things I think or feel or am are not actually allowed. Just in case I show too much happiness or delight or fear or sadness, and that’s not okay. I still am terrified of showing too much of myself, of not being the kind of person that meets other people’s approval.

And on top of that, now I’m left always wondering what about myself is real and what only feels real because I don’t think I’m allowed to be anything else. What things about me only exists because I’m afraid of the pain and the damage that might arise if I were different. And I will probably spend the rest of my life undoing this damage.