Dear Friend,
By the next morning, Thursday, I was turning into a wreck. All of the hypocrisy of so many people and the deliberate divisiveness combined with all,of this with my brothers had me eager to talk with my psychologist. I told her all about it and was crying really, really badly. I mean, really badly. At one point I told her that all I could think about was that at some point my mother was going to die and we were going to be at her funeral and they were going to be holding my hands and I was going to be thinking that they were monsters!!
She spent a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of why it was affecting me so badly and hurting me so much. And we finally got to it.
She phrased it something like this, "You have worked so hard your entire life to pull yourself out of the ugliness of the world you were in. And you have worked so hard to create a life completely different. A life of beauty and love and compassion. And they are dragging you back down into their world and you feel like you're being pulled back in and trapped and your soul is repulsed by this." She said it better, but that was the essence of it. We talked about options and I decided to tell them ... and the brother-in-law ... that it was not healthy for our relationship to continue on this line. So I would no longer discuss matters of politics, justice, or religion with them.
After I left her office, I sat in my car and sent them each an email telling them this. I asked my brother to quit sending me his group emails and the other two to not post on my Facebook page any more when this was the topic. And to please respect the boundaries I was setting.
I felt so GREAT! I felt a huge weight role off of me and like I had cleansed my soul of all this dirt that had caked it. I met my husband to see "Chappy" ... save your money, btw. During the movie, though, the relief I felt initially began to wear off and I started feeling a sort of dread coming over me. I had never, ever taken a stand like this. I had never EVER protected myself, much less told them to back off and lay down the law.
I don't know if you have any emotional framework to understand this with. But, as you know, my childhood was extremely traumatic. PTSD means that the emotions that y felt at the time of the trauma are stored in your brain in an area where they remain active. They aren't a memory that you can process and make into part of the fabric of your life. It's not lie that at all.
What it is is that the terror and horror and helplessness you felt at the time as a four-year-old child or a five-year-old child is RIGHT THERE. Right below the surface. It hasn't gone anywhere and all you need are the right set of circumstances to throw those gates open wide and experience that torrent of emotion again in the hear and now. I'm crying right now just explaining this.
So I can act like a grown, 58-year-old woman and tell my brothers to back the fuck off one moment. And then, the next, feel absolute terror at having done so. What will they do to me? Will they abandon me? Will they hurt me? Will they leave me all alone to endure the horror that was my mother by myself?
And I'm just lost. Completely lost in a current of a five-year-old girl's terror.
After the movie I saw that my oldest brother had already sent me an explosive email, apparently very angry at me and that I had not responded to anything he had said, and stuff like that. I just glanced at the first part and didn't read the rest. My husband and I went to a restaurant and I told him wha I had done and sat there in the restaurant unable to quit crying. He read my brother's email and then read the one his brother fired off at me and just immediately deleted it without saying anything about it. He could not have treated me better or more kindly. I cried off and on most of the night, at times practically hysterical, though I tried to be away from him when I was at my worst. My son called and we had a good talk about it.
It's a really horrible thing to go through, when you open up trauma. The ironic thing about being terrified that they would abandon me is that they completely abandon me when I was that age. I have one whole summer when my mother was hospitalized and my dad was at work that I was alone in the house with no one taking care of me or even feeding me. I was starving. I spent most of each day so weak I had to stay in bed, crying until I could fall back asleep. The starving is evident in pictures. My mother was so messed up mentally. She used to brag abut how she could make my dresses when I was nine-years-old out of the same patterns she used when I was TWO!! All she had to do, she would say, was lengthen the bodice and the hme, but otherwise, all the dress patterns still fit me. And she thought that that was great. She also used to talk for years, at least through sixth grade, about how much "better" I was than my cousins because when you held their hands, they felt hot! But when you held my hands, my hands were cold.
I kid you not. My school eventually came to my parents and told them that they were going to start having me eat lunch in the school cafeteria and to explain it to me, that I was to go through the line, but I didn't have to pay, and the cafeteria workers knew, so they wouldn't be asking for my money or anything.
So, back to the abandonment. My brothers didn't starve that summer. Neither were they at home. They were six and nine years older than me, so I presume they were going to friends' houses and eating there. They did abandon me.
So, Thursday was a really bad night, too.
Lisa
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