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wordshelp919 · 4 years

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Words Help.

It’s hard to admit to being the victim of abuse. Oftentimes it is the condition of the abusee to believe that they are not worthy of qualifying their experiences as ‘abuse’. Most likely due to repeated conditioning on the part of the abuser. That is the case for me.

I have spent my whole life trying to figure out how to be. Not who. How. My identity did not have the freedom to develop for my own sake, but always for others. As all people are different, it meant that I had to learn varying ways to accommodate all types of people. As a child, I was rarely angry. Even when other people were angry with me, I never lost my cool, at least without attempting to understand the situation. If I could just figure out why they were angry and then fix it, then there wouldn’t be a need for anyone to be upset. It is not always to the benefit of any individual to be so accommodating.

I was isolated in a house with only four people to love. I wanted a happy family, peace, and love and I worked for it as best as I could. In my undying attempt to love the first the members of the family, I neglected to love the fourth. Through my own constant self-adjustment, I somehow became the answer to all of their life’s grievances; their punching bag. My mom’s helplessness from being forced by her mom to beg for rice, being beat up by her dad, brother, uncles, aunts, tormented by her cousins, and every single black person in the all-black neighborhood that she grew up in was subconsciously redirected an iron fisted need for control for me and my sister. My sister is not as accommodating, and eventually her subconscious redirected most of her control therapy to just me.

I was a good kid. Easy-going, kind, and obedient. Unfortunately for me and Ella, the virtue of obedience grays when given to the wrong people.

I cried much too often, and still do. I am very sensitive by nature, but even for someone like that, young Donna cried way too much. I would earn an intense punished no less than once a week. By intense, I mean that it would last for over an hour with screaming and yelling and crying and snot. By third grade I mastered the art of hiding my puffy eyes by deepening my eyelid crease with a bobby pin. I didn’t think it was abnormal to be so puffy eyed from crying so often. I just didn’t want to look weird for school. It’s true, even good children need to be disciplined, but I don’t consider what happened discipline. I know that now because it never was to the benefit of my own virtue. All I learned from those countless hours of being yelled at was that my mom was a severely broken person. After the punishment ended and I was allowed to wash my face and go to bed, I would be left thinking about the knife-tongued words that would echo in my mind well into my early twenties. In an exhausted daze, I would wonder to myself.. why was I so bad at listening to her the first time? Why was I so disobedient? I never thought that I took her for granted or even felt a lack of gratitude towards either of my parents, but I mustn’t do this again because according to her, that is what this all equates to. I don’t want to be those things. But apparently I am. Was. Am. Won’t be starting now.

My dad has a lot of blanks in his life. It is his pride, I believe that is what keeps him from sharing any part of his life that is a story and not just numbers that equate to his grand self-earned worth. Also, probably the fear of someone hearing his story and thinking that it is not that bad. I have that same fear, but I learned about pride from a young age, and I try to do the opposite of whatever my pride tells me to. Pride, my dad, my sister; to disobey one is to disobey all. So fighting pride is not so difficult sometimes. I may be missing the stories of his life that fuel his type of abuse, I can look to my sister’s for the answers.

She learned about his pride from an even younger age than I and it’s through her responses to it that I can understand my dad. We learned about pride from the same live-in teacher, but the only difference between me and her is that she loved power more than people and instead of fighting pride, she became its prodigious student. If only her ease of learning was limited to art, music, and math. She was tainted by evil and became a jaded, angry adult at only 8 years old. The beautiful and innocent nature of children died when she discovered her love for pride and power over others. I asked her one night, bringing to surface the odd, powerful, mysterious quality in her, “what is your secret? How can I be like you?”. She told me she would tell me, but I had to swear that I wouldn’t tell our parents. I promised. “The secret to being like me is that I don’t love Mommy and Daddy all the time”. I was spooked. I broke my promise within the minute.

I am so proud of young Donna for that night. It’s odd, the memories that we choose to keep, but that night I clearly remember feeling terrible for the instinctual decision I made. I was scared and naturally gravitated towards my parents but I betrayed my sister. To think that that night young Donna went with her gut would be a proud moment for young adult Donna. Yet I can’t help feeling as though I failed her(y.d.) She could call out those wrong things with much more clarity than I can even now, all the while loving those wrong people much more than I do.

Anyways my sister’s secret to her twistedness was to withhold love. The opposite of love. Hate.

When you find out that Hester’s power came from Satan worship, you run.

I always thought she loved me differently than how she did our parents. It was clear how much more she loved me, although both her hatred and love was combined with elements of obsession and ownership. Unfortunately, she valued power more. She was fueled by hatred and was enormously jealous of me for the love I received which was so different from that which she did. She never thought once that the difference between us may have been because of the love that I gave. Her pride wouldn’t allow for that kind of thinking. It had to be my fault.

Instead of facing the obvious truth of why my parents loved me more sweetly than they did her, she decided to level the playing field on her own terms. I could not smile in certain ways because she thought I was trying to be cute and by extension, curry favor of people, and by extension, take it away from her. I wasn’t allowed to be sad, in case it would cause someone to comfort me. I was an attention grabber, a brat, selfish, and spoiled. According to her, that is. And most damaging of all, I was a crybaby. Her constant criticism worked for the most part. I don’t smile like that anymore. I not only aggressively hate myself for portraying her other definitions for me but I hate others for those very things as well.

One thing I could not ‘fix’ was the frequency of my tears. I tried holding them off for the first time in my life. I remember that first day clearly. I had given up. I decided not to fight her anymore, but just completely let her have her way and do nothing. I sighed a lot, and with every breath, I felt my energy leaving me. The attempt at complacency didn’t last.

Since that moment, I have cried an average of once a day. It has been 8 years. I guess crying is something that I never grew out of.

So that was a long segway to introduce my father’s story. It is the same, only the subjects are different, the reason for adopting pride is different, and the self-delusion is different. My dad was jealous. Is jealous. Of both me and my sister. It is only a theory, but if not jealousy there is comparison and transactional thinking taking place in his head. No words, just numbers. If there were any words in his brain, a conscious to speak the truth, he would have to hate himself as well. Luckily for him, no such thing has taken place and he can continue to believe that he is a perfect man. He is far from perfect. All too calculative, all too focused on the hurt in his life and not on the well-being of his children. And if my theory serves to be true, then it would be my sister who would have suffered the most from his jealousy. She was the one who was actually good at everything. My dad claims to have been the same. The only difference is that he endorsed for his children what his own father refused to. Not that they didn’t have the financial means to, but his own father chose his eldest son and no one else.

The abuse that comes from my dad is the most twisted and intricate and frightening of all three. I still don’t understand why he is so frightening other than the fact that he worships pride and loves hatred without realizing it. Those things are only momentary band-aids for deep wounds. He has 30 years of bandaids stacked in layers on his heart 10 miles high. What he needs is for those band-aids to be removed, the wound assessed, and then surgery performed to cut deep into the flesh to reveal the cancer that has sprouted and matured into every vague nook and crevice of his body.

My sister and I are treated the same when it comes to his manner of abuse, but my mom bears the brunt of it.

His ego is fueled by putting everyone down. Apparently he requires a lot of fuel because his ego has a half life of one hour.

No one is allowed to ask him a question he doesn’t know the answer to. How dare you make him feel inadequate. Poor kids and your inevitable need to question everything in the world. Poor kids and your tendency to ask for help. You should have known better before asking him a question from your third grade Wordly Wise workbook. Of course he wouldn’t know and of course you would get punished for making him feel stupid. I still remember telling my friends from school that he hit me on the head with a golf club. They were shocked and then I had to tell them it was plastic. As long as it’s plastic it’s okay. I didn’t mention that he screamed in my face and dragged me back by my feet into the study when I tried to run away, scraping my knees on the polished hardwood floor. I didn’t tell them that the golf club bruised my head. And I didn’t tell them that when I told my mom later that night, she didn’t care.

For us, it was a typical Friday night.

Poor kid, you should have just agreed that european is spelled europian. But by then you were already a student of pride.

Poor wife, there are no “should haves” for you. Your poor treatment is inevitable no matter how you change yourself for him. Your existence is for the purpose of being his cannon fodder. When the cannonball is released on enemy territory, it is far away from him, unable to do him any harm. Allegedly. Oddly, you are also enemy territory. It’s confusing, both the metaphor and the real life scenario that it illustrates.

He needs you to anger him so that his own anger and resentment towards his own family can escape him. It allows him to express pent up emotions in the form of hatred against you. The fact that you take his hatred to be constructive criticism is the result of your own abuse. That is not accomodation. Take it from me.

Not everyone has the privilege of learning what it feels like to be treated well.

#family #abuse #acknowlegement #healing

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