This may sound a bit strange to some but tonight, for the first time in I don't know how long, I was comfortable with myself and my thoughts. Enough so that I fell asleep on my couch just thinking!
This is like a rebirth for me because for the last several years, my thoughts have held me hostage. Hostage to a past I could not change. Hostage to a pain for which there is no cure. Hostage. Held in place with no answers and no future. But at the same time this unyield9ng hope that somehow I could beak free. I will explore that hope at a later time. Right now I want to talk about thought and thinking. Since 2012, I haven't read a book for pleasure. That's when I started to go to college and I thought that the books I would read would only hinder me and if I was serious about this education, I could at least sacrifice books. One of my first classes was Statistics. An accelerated summer course. I remember thinking that it was a poor choice to start with, something so demanding. I Aced the class and it surprised me. Another class that surprised me was a history course that required heavy reading about things you never heard of in high school (at least not high school in the 80's). I wrote six papers on the books I read and I got five A's and a B. Throughout my college career I have strived to do very well. But in the back of my mind, there was that voice telling me it should have been an A plus; That B should have been an A. There was always that voice saying I should have done better. It wasn't until my Algebra course that I learned to call that voice a liar. Algebra literally had me in tears because I just couldn't' get some of the concepts. The professor was not much help. When I asked why one parenthetical set in an equation should be multiplied but not the others, he said because two times three times four is twenty-four. He gave that same answer five times and I even as I type, I still don't get his answer. I came so close to quitting. But I discovered a thought process in the back of my mind. It always said I can't understand this. Having understood this, I changed that thought to "just because I don't understand it, it does not mean that I can't understand it. I went to the internet and found purplemath.com. I passed Algebra with a B. You may be thinking what all this has to do with me being comfortable with my own thoughts. For all intents and purposes, I have overcome my own thoughts based on the above. However, what is different is that for the first time (probably a first in my 45 years) in my memory, I did NOT HAVE ONE NEGATIVE THOUGHT ABOUT MYSELF! I thought about possibilities, philosophies and Truth. I thought about tomorrow and that old fear didn't creep in. I was comfortable to sleep on my couch alone and I was not afraid. I even smiled when I woke up and saw that I was still on the couch. I can say today that while I may hesitate; while I may still get scared, I will no longer condemn myself with my own thoughts. That small voice in the back of my head that I thought was my conscious is nothing more that the lie created to keep me in a place I never wanted to be. Freedom of the mind. It is liberating! Know the Truth and the Truth will make you Free. Just finished Flight by Sherman Alexie and once again that feeling of jealousy has crept up, the same as did when I finished reading Call Me Tuesday by Leigh Byrne. Feeling this same thing for a second time brought me to the revelation of why adults who were abused as children don’t want sympathy from others. We’ve spent most of our lives feeling sorry for ourselves.
We’re sorry for being abused; we’re sorry for the anger; we’re sorry we were (and sometimes still are) unable to fight for ourselves; we’re sorry for hating our abusers; we’re sorry for loving our abusers; we’re sorry for wanting our abusers to love us. We’re just sorry about it all. That’s not the kind of sorry that’s easily overcome. There are so many mixed feelings and the self-hatred associated with it goes directly against our desire to survive. It’s a life of great paradoxes and for most of us, if we’re even able to articulate, it makes no sense. Do we love them or hate them? Yes. Do we love ourselves or hate ourselves? Yes. I have found no satisfactory explanation for this. What I have found is that part of what keeps us going lies somewhere between the paradoxes. It’s a place of survival. It’s called secret. We survive on secrecy because the paradox is too great to explain. As long as we live with the secret, nobody can see the great confusion and diagnose us with bipolar disorder or manic depression or paranoid schizophrenia or whatever other mental disorder they can come up with. But once the secret is revealed, we have no place hide. That’s when sympathy begins pouring in. We understand it, but want to be as far away from it as possible. When knowing eyes look at us, we feel ugly and full of shame. Then there’s the accusing eyes—why do you love them so much when they hurt you so much? What’s wrong with you? Childhood abuse hasn’t made us crazy. We’re not case studies. We’re just people who survived. People who want to be loved and respected like everyone else. The paradox of the abused child is mostly misunderstood by social workers, sociologists and psychologist who assume that living with that kind of paradox is wrong and/or something that needs to be fixed. They seem to be missing the fact that it’s our spirit that’s broken, not our minds. But science cannot fix the spirit. Only God can. Our minds have protected us and will continue to do so as we grow and learn. And as God works on fixing our spirits, our thoughts and thought processes will change, not because they’re broken or wrong, but because we’re learning. Coworker: You know how your mom always said “eat all your vegetables’?
Me: No, can’t say that I do. Coworker: Come on, your mom had some saying you remember! Me: No. No she didn’t Coworker: She didn’t say ‘don’t talk with your mouth full’ or….? Me: My mom left when I was 5. She didn’t say anything Coworker: Oh. End of conversation and awkward silence. This is just an example of how we really don’t know how to handle these memories. All I did was make my coworker uncomfortable. My coworker sensed my anger. Why am I angry? For having to reveal my childhood pain. Her comments made me feel different, like somehow there was something wrong with me because my mother didn’t give me any of those sayings. Was it my coworker’s fault that I felt this way? Of course not. We had been having a pleasant conversation up to that point. So how do you handle these kinds of situations? I’m not sure, but I intend to find out. And so we begin. Stay tuned for updates as I learn about how to disclose (or not disclose) past hurts without making the situation uncomfortable for others. I’m sure, that like a mental disorder, childhood pains are something we need to be aware of. We need to be aware that while we are living in the present, the memories don’t go away and when someone unintentionally brings those memories to mind it’s not their fault that we must deal with them again. The trick is to deal with them in a way that is healing to us and not offensive to others. |
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December 2016
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