Tag Archive: Abuse


You don’t define me. Ch. 2

Filed under: Life — 1 Comment
April 4, 2019

“Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.” – Dave Pelzer, A Child Called “It”

One of the worse things I learned about myself is that I’m an accident and an abortion survivor. I won’t lie it’s something I often myself thinking about, wondering if I should even be alive. Sometimes I feel like I’m some great cosmic mistake who’s not suppose to be here, which would explain why I’m so broken, why all my relationships inevitably fall apart any why I always end up alone. But it’s also why I value my friendships so much, because everyone else drifts away and I often find myself the outcast, even among my own family. I grew up being very close with my cousins and siblings and watched as they all drifted away, hanging out with each other more and more and me less. I watched events unfold as if I’m just a passenger, or a witness. Watching everyone else develop these close relationships, inner jokes without me, as they invite me out less and less, until they stopped all together.

The day I learned about being an accident, should have been one of the best days of my life. On the day I graduated High School, my mother finally finally confessed to never loving me, telling me that my dad was the only one who wanted me. She told me that no one would ever love me, because I was worthless and too pathetic for anyone to love, which at the time combined with me having my heart broken and finding out the reason my heart had been broken was because I was betrayed by a good friend who I had trusted without question, only to learn she had betrayed me out of petty jealously. That revelation, coupled with my mom telling me how no one would ever love me, lead me to attempting suicide the first time. Because I had enough, I was tired of being hurt, being lied to, being manipulated and just losing all the time. I know everyone always likes to say suicide is a permanent solution for a temporary problem, or how people who commit suicide are just selfish. But they’re wrong, I was hurting, I was in pain and I couldn’t see an end to it. I had been hurting for 16 years and I just finally had enough, I broke and I fell to pieces.

The following is how it all began, I don’t know how I survived, or why I’m still here. But I can I’m grateful to still be here. My life was no fairy-tale, still isn’t, but I had a pretty awesome father, met some incredible people, dated some fantastic girls who I still believed were way out of my league and made the best friends anyone could ask for, friends who became my extended family.

When my father met my mother she already had a son from a previous marriage, but my dad had always loved kids and had wanted a child of his own. That being said he did love my older brother as if he was his own, which is something I do deeply believe, because I watched how my dad treated other kids who weren’t his, including my step-brother and sister.  However my father had always wanted to someone to carry on his own name and talked my mother into trying to have another child. My mother was reluctant and didn’t really want to have more kids at the time, but did always want a daughter.

However after several months of trying to no avail, they gave up on trying. Months later I was finally conceived. In the months following my mother’s pregnancy I became a weapon. I’ve come to learn about this after my mother tried convincing me that my father was abusive and that he used to beat her. My dad would later admit to me that he did get rough with her on a few occasions, but only because whenever she would get mad or upset with my dad, she would begin punching herself in the stomach while asking him how he liked it. She even went as far as throwing herself down a flight of steps on her stomach, threatening to kill me if she didn’t get her way. So my dad did admit that he did eventually snap and pin her to the ground, where he began hitting her face with his fingers, asking her how it felt, going as far as threatening her in no uncertain terms of what he would do if she killed me, or caused me to have brain damage from the abuse she was trying to inflict upon my unborn self.

Of course years later my mother confirmed my dad’s side of the story, by telling him, she tried having me aborted and when that didn’t take, she tried having a miscarriage and that the only reason I was ever born was because of my dad, telling me he was the only one who ever wanted me and made her have me.

After the divorce my mother would often tell me that my farther didn’t really love me and that he was only good to me so that I would go live with him when I became old enough to decide. Telling me that my dad just didn’t want to pay child support and if I lived with him he would send me to military school so that he would never have to see me anymore. Which in hindsight I realize that her threat didn’t make much since. If my dad merely wanted to get out of paying for child support, sending me to military school would be counter productive. But she would still tell me all these terrible things about my father, trying her best to turn me against him and worse it almost it worked. She had me questioning everything, I didn’t know what was true or what wasn’t. I was beginning to wonder if I was loved by either of my parents at all. I felt like a weapon that both parents tried using to hurt the other.

Eventually I did ask my dad about the abuse allegations my mom had said about my dad and her, he said, “Yeah, I’m not proud of it, I used to smack her around, but that was because whenever we had a fight while she was pregnant with you, she would start punching herself in stomach, or throw herself down a flight of stairs on her stomach, once she even tried stabbing herself in the stomach, so sometimes I would lose it, I would smack her or wrestle whatever weapon she was welding to get her to drop it. I had to hold her down to keep her from hurting you and you haven’t even born yet. So I yeah I said and did some things I wasn’t proud of, but when I see something like that, it hurt me and I lost it. I mean you were my son, it killed me seeing her trying to hurt you just to spite me.”

So when my mother once told me how she always wished I would just kill myself, because I was a mistake she never wanted. It was a truth I always suspected in a sense,  but never wanted to believe it. Yeah I hated her at times, but I still loved her, she was my mother and I wanted her to love and accept me. I kept thinking about the few times she was kind to me and it tore me apart. I was in the mindset that I had to somehow earn her love, believing I just wasn’t good enough. I longed for her love, I starved for it. Everyday I had wished and hoped I would have the kind of mother I could talk to about anything, to be comforted by her, not broken down day after day.

My birth didn’t help matters much, for my mother had been a model and had wanted to have a natural birth, like she did with my older brother. But I got turned around and started to come out backwards, forcing the doctors to perform an emergency C-section on my mother in order to save my life. (Promptly ending my mother’s career as a swimsuit model and I suppose giving her one more reason to hate me)

From what my dad tells me, they started fighting more and more. It got so bad that my dad started working all the time just to avoid having to go home to her. He preferred to be so tired from work he wouldn’t care about whatever fight my mother would try to have with him. In the weeks and months that followed after my birth, things between my parents had become strained. From what my dad tells me, they started fighting more and more. It got so bad that my mother would call up my dad’s work just to fight. Which prompted my dad into tell his work not to take her calls anymore. Things worsen and they’ve begun talking about getting separated. My dad would then spend more and more nights at his mom’s instead of going home, because she was driving him nuts.

The following is my dad’s recount of these events that my mother later confirmed, by telling me my dad had kidnapped me. But wouldn’t tell me how he managed to kidnap me. Only tell me that he was crazy and how I didn’t know how scary he could be.

My dad says “I just gotten off work earlier that day your mother had called my work and almost got me fired by trying to start a fight me with over the phone, so I had to hang up on her and told work if she called back to tell her I was busy. So when my shift ended I really didn’t want to go home and put up with her mouth, so I got in my truck and was about to just head over to my mom’s and stay the night. But As I started driving I heard a voice say telling me to go home. But I didn’t want to.

“So I was like ‘No way, if I go home she’s going be there and she’s going to want to fight and I can’t deal with it anymore.” ( I don’t know anyone’s religious views, but my dad believes it was God speaking to him and so do I )
God responded, “I said go home!’ and my father argued back and forth with the Lord until finally my dad relented and said,
“Okay, okay, I’ll go home and just get some clothes then I’m going to leave, is that okay with you? “He asked and was answered by silence.

 

My dad drove home that day against his better judgment and found my mother had taken my older brother and left, but she left me sleeping at the top of the stairs in my sleeping carrier, apparently she hadn’t even bothered to strap me in. But there I was, all alone asleep at the top of the stairs. My dad then picked me up, gathered my things and packed some his clothes, then took me to my grandma’s house.

My dad still has the old home movies chronicling my extended stay with me and him at my Grandma’s. My dad was all torn up about how anyone could abandon their child, he couldn’t believe someone would just leave a baby who could barely walk alone in a house, not knowing if or when my dad would ever come home. It then took my mother a week to call my dad and ask if he had me. Because apparently my mother took my older brother and left for God knows where and ‘forgot’ me. Then it took her a week to call around to see if my dad even had me and it was then she started going to work on manipulating my father into letting her see me.

I’ve learned the following from stories told me by both my father and mother at different times, I had to put the pieces together myself. My mother never told me that she had abandoned me in our house when she took my brother and left home. She only told me my dad had me at his mothers, but would never tell me how he had managed to take me, or why he was keeping me away from her. When I asked her, she only told me that my dad was crazy and a maniac.

 

After my mother finally got around to contacting my father and inquiring about me, she began asking to see me. At first my dad had refused, but then my mother began playing her games. She knew my father still had feelings for her and used those feelings to her advantage. She began telling my dad she wanted to talk through things and try to make it work, even going as far as telling my dad that her and her sister Terry had gotten me some new clothes and baby stuff that they wanted to give me. Eventually my mother managed to talk my dad into meeting at her parents place, under the guise it would be a neutral location. My dad was lead to believe that there was no way my mother or her sister would try anything with her mom and very elderly grandmother being at the house.

Figuring it would be safe to agree to my mother’s terms he went along with it and when he got there my mother began acting super sweet and complacent. All the while she kept asking my dad to let her hold me, which he refused, because he had a feeling if he let her hold me, she would try to take off. Eventually she talked him into bringing me into the house, showing off the new things her and Terry had gotten me. One of which being a new carrier, that she kept trying to talk my dad into letting me try out.

Eventually my dad reluctantly came into my house and sat me down in the carrier with my mother’s mom watching me. My mother then lead my father upstairs to her grandmother’s bedroom to talk and attempted to convince my dad into putting my diaper bag down which he adamantly refused.

Mother then began trying to seduce my dad, trying to get him to take off his clothes, but he kept saying no and freaking out a bit knowing her mom and grandmother were right downstairs. My mother continued telling my dad how sorry she was for everything, how much she loved him, cared about him and how much she needed him.

My mother then began taking off his belt and pulling down his pants and again my dad tries to resist. But she manages to distract him just enough to get his pants down, which is when she finally strikes and rips my baby bag from my dad’s shoulder, then shoves down. In a seconds my mother was out the bedroom door and down the steps, shouting for grandmother to get up stairs. Because my mother knew that my mother’s grandmother was very frail (She was in her 70s at this time) and knew my dad wouldn’t shove her down the steps in order to get to me.

My dad now well aware that this was all a setup, gets to his feet in little time, pulling on his pants and giving chase. He knew she intended on taking me back, why he had no idea, but he couldn’t risk letting her having my life back in her hands. So my dad explodes out of the bedroom after her and she’s already down the stairs and my dad’s heart sinks as he nears the stairs and sees her grandmother coming up. (My mother and her sister had sent her up to serve as a road block) By the time my dad gets past her, my mom is already outside loading me into the car.

“How can you let her do this?” My father asks my mom’s family, sickened by how they were and willing to risk her elderly grandmother with their whole charade. If my dad was any other person he could have very well shoved her down the stairs, but thankfully he didn’t.
By the time my dad was out of the house my mom is already pulling away and determined to get me back, my dad races to his truck and begins to chase after her..
(My dad tells his side slightly more colorfully with how he’d swore he was going to kill her for abandoning me, then stealing me) So then begun the car chase.

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You don’t define me. Ch1

Filed under: Life — 1 Comment
March 10, 2019

No one has the right to just abandon their child, because no matter what happens, that or those kids will always blame themselves, will always feel broken. My mother was not the greatest; she was a manipulator and a monster. Now I’m not saying that she was terrible all the time. She had moments where she could be very cool, kind and motherly. She would often fix me a separate meal because I was a picky eater and on rare occasion she would sit with me and watch T.V, then sometimes, just sometimes, we would talk and even make each other laugh and it would be real. However most of the time my mother was just plain cruel towards me and it often made me wonder why me? Why didn’t she love me? What was wrong with me? And what do I do wrong?

 

I watched as she showed love to my older brother, I watched how much she loved my younger brothers, but not me, no matter how hard I tried, or wanted her to accept and love me, she never did. In the very end, when it was all said and done she let me go, as if she hadn’t begged me to forgive her, to give her a second, third and fourth chance. It almost felt like it was all some weird, twisted and messed up game.

 

Of course I know I’m better off without her in my life, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less, because at the end of the day I still lost my mother. It still hurts whenever I see someone being a good mother and I can’t help but wish I got to experience that myself. Worse is the fact I didn’t just lose a mother, I lost an entire family. Some of whom I loved very much. With this being said, let me just say if you don’t want kids, or if your partner doesn’t want kids, don’t try to talk them into it, don’t force them. Because if both parents don’t love that child, that child will spend their whole life feeling like they did something wrong and they’ll feeling broken for all of their life. This is of course why I often say, I’m morally opposed to abortion, but I support pro-choice. Because I know what it’s like being denied loved, of being abused and broken. I’m well in my thirties and I still feel incomplete and just broken. It still hurts when the wind blows through this brokenness that’s inside of me. I keep hoping someday, I’ll find someone who’ll shake this broken out of me. Of course I’ve heard in a million different ways, a million different times, that I will never find love until I’m able to love myself. I even had a friend once tell me how strange it was to see how much love I had to give and show others when I never seemed to love myself. But I’ve learned that self-love doesn’t always come first, or second, or sometimes not ever. But I’m hopefully that someday, I’ll love someone enough to give them all the love I couldn’t give myself and find a reason to breathe again, to face tomorrow and the day after. .

 

But for as long as I can remember I’ve always been a very imaginative and creative soul. Even to this day, I sometimes play pretend whenever I’m alone, imagining myself being or doing something heroic, imagining what it would be like to be a hero. I’ve dreamed and fantasized this almost every day, with this belief, that if I saved the day, stopped a bad guy, saved someone, that I would be something. I would be talked about and people would open their eyes and see the real me for who I am. That also in doing so I would be loved and accepted, so much so that even my mother would see the value in me.

 

Growing up, I never belonged to a group or a clique; I only ever had a very small group of friends that I could count on one hand. This was mainly because they took a chance on me when everyone else saw an outcast, a loser, a dweeb, or a freak. I had speech problems growing up, buckteeth and warts and I had been made fun of and mocked so many times by both my peers and family, that in time, I gradually began withdrawing from people. I grew shy and backwards because I saw people as cruel and mean.

 

I never really knew why I was the way I was, or at least I didn’t for very long time. It was only recently in my life that I discovered that I have C-PTSD, complex post traumatic stress disorder. Which I spoke about in my previous chapter.

 

Over the years, I’ve struggled. I believed I just had depression and anxiety. It wasn’t until friend suggested I get checked for C-PTSD because she had been diagnosed with the disorder and saw I had many of the similar symptoms as her. At first I was resistant, I had always assumed that PTSD is something reserved only for those who have seen or experienced combat of some kind. But as resistant as I was, I grew to accept that I do have C-PTSD, and it opened up my eyes. I recognized that a lot of my traits that I could never really understand before now made sense. For example, when I break down and cry during an argument, or when I’m stressed. Why I often rationalize taking my own life. Also why I sometimes over-reach out of a desire to be accepted and liked, such as at time times when I have been too nice. Wanting to buy gifts for people I just met, or wanting to do something special for people I meet to win their acceptance, or sometimes just me being overly friendly without seeing how it can seen from an outside perspective. Sometimes I wish I could just wear a sign, or a warning label that just reads.

“I’m a broken individual and emotionally damaged, I want to be accepted and just want everyone to like me.” Or something along those lines, or maybe I should just get business cards made just inform people of my diagnoses that say

“I’m not my depression, I’m not my anxiety, I’m not my C-PTSD, I’m just me and I’m trying my best, I want to be better, I’m trying.”

I have scars; we all do and having scars don’t say or define who we are. Maybe you used to cut yourself, maybe you still do. Maybe you were hurt, been in an accident, seen combat, or maybe you were physically, emotionally or sexually abused. These scars don’t say who we are, or even who we were. They simply tell a story of what we’ve been through. Some scars we’ll carry our entire lives, while others fade in time. But we all heal at different speeds and sometimes we’re cut deeper, which is why the worse thing anyone can say to someone who’s been hurt, is telling them how you dealt with an issue you believe to be similar. Because sometimes, what wounded us, cut us deeper, it doesn’t make those of us who were wounded any less, or weaker than you. Just means the situation was different for us. Which is why some wounds never fully heal and why some scars will always remain. I know most of my scars are hidden and impossible for anyone to really see, I’ve pretended I was okay when I wasn’t. I smiled and laughed on the outside while in reality I was dying inside. I’ve been out with family and friends, pretending I was happy all the while thinking about taking my own life. Because I’ve grown so tired of hurting, of being alone and feeling broken.

 

When I first attempted to talk about my struggles and my past, I admit I was scared. I was afraid no one would believe me, or they would just think less of me and see me as some sort of victim. I was also a little afraid that those who knew my mother would try to defame me in some way. Like when my older brother found my blog and wanted to deny everything I was saying, because he rarely ever saw the mother that I did.

 

I told him as much and I told him that, I think deep down he knows something was off about how she treated me. But he didn’t want to see it, because growing up, my mother always said the same thing to him, “

Your real dad and Robert (my dad) never loved you or wanted you, I’m the only one who wanted you and who loves you.” She also treated my brother very well, always defending him, talking to him when he acted out and always supported him. So I told Dominic, that he couldn’t see the truth because of what it would mean. The truth for him would mean that he ignored me the few times I told him how I believed our mother hated me, or the times he saw me crying, alone in our room. Admitting the truth would mean, he let it happen, he let it go on and he didn’t try to stop it, speak up or protect me. He never saw the correlation between the times he would tease and make fun of me and how our mother would laugh with him, or even join in on making fun of me. But whenever I made fun of him, our mother would beat and ground me.

You see, as anyone would tell you, the most unreliable witness in any circumstance is memory. The human brain is spectacular at playing tricks on itself to help people remember what they want to remember. It’s why some people will swear with all sincerity and zero doubt that a light was green; when it really wasn’t or recall details they couldn’t possibly have known. It’s not that any of these people are really wrong, or less intelligent then those who can remember every detail of a specific event, or moment in their life, it’s just basic neuroscience. Recollections often fade, like photos left in sunlight.
As for me, I’m broken and I’m in pain, I’ve been hurt by someone who should have loved me more than anything, but she broke me instead. I’m not special, I don’t have a photographic memory, I’m terrible with names and I’m just awful with dates. I can’t tell you what I wore two weeks ago. But I do have a knack for remembering events, conversations and the way things felt and how they affected me. I can’t tell you what the love of my life wore the day she broke up with me, I can only tell you the words she said and how I felt my world spiral and fall apart.

More often than sometimes, people ask me how I can remember the things that I do about the way something happened or how I recall past conversations with such clarity. So I tell them it’s not a trick, I just remember details and the way a particular event affected me. I was always a little bit strange in this aspect, because for as far back as I can remember, I would use any and every solitary moment in my life to reflect, contemplate and just think about everything that happened on that particular day. Such as when I surprised my dad recently when he asked if I ever saw him cry and I told him just once. He laughed and asked when and I told him, it was at Grandma’s house, I was playing on the couch with my ninja turtles and giant army tank, when I heard him tell my grandma that it was really over and he broke down crying, saying how much he loved her.  I quietly stopped what I was doing and went over to him, wrapped my arms around his neck and told him I loved him as I climbed up into his lap. I will always remember how he wrapped his arms around me and how my grandma soon joined in on this hug. It was the first time I ever really felt worried and hurt for someone other than myself, for someone who was real. Because yes, I would often cry from watching sad movies, reading sad stories and would often be called names because of this. But back then, I was still too young to really know what a divorce was, or what it meant. But I knew my dad was hurt and I knew he loved my mother despite how bad it was between them or how often they had fought.

Now I don’t know how I’ll turn out in my retelling of these events, victim, hero, villain, or simply a survivor. But I can tell you this is my story and I’m coming clean, I may not always be the hero, I know I didn’t always make the right choices. I don’t know who I am in my story; I’ll leave that to you. I know I’m not the hero, that station I reserve for those who helped me through it all. Some have been family, but the majority had been friends who have become my family.  In the past I’ve always been incredibly reluctant and guarded about my past, something born out of fear of being ostracized, accused of playing the victim, or simply crying out for attention, or worse, not being believed at all. A lot of I’ve come to learn is the result of me being gas lighted by mother. Who always told me I was making things worse than what they were, or tell me how I was brainwashed by my father and his family. She would always bring up how she made my separate meals because of how picky I was, then tell me how my father wouldn’t put with it and that he wanted to send me to military school, etc. Sometimes she would even break down crying, pretending she was hurt that I would even question if she loved me or not.
But I was also often threatened with what would happen if I ever told anyone about what happened when I was at home. Once she told me I would be put up for adoption and would be raped if I told anyone about what was going on at home. She then told me what rape was and I was a child. I was told time again, that family business shouldn’t be talked about or shared with anyone outside that immediate family unit, followed up with the thinly veiled threats, of all the things she would do and would happen to me if I did. This is my story, from beginning to end, told as honestly as I know how.

If you read this far. I could use your help in getting this series published into a book format. It’s my hope that as a book this would reach more people and hopefully help them. But I’m broke, lost my job just before Christmas and slowly getting back on my feet. So if you can help with the publishing cost, I will greatly appreciate it. I thought about trying the kickstarter thing, but I don’t have any rewards I could offer anyone who donated, because at the end of the day all I have are my words.
https://www.gofundme.com/getting-published-quotyou-don039t-define-mequot

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You don’t define me.

Filed under: Life — 4 Comments
March 4, 2019

The first time I attempted suicide I was eighteen years old and I had just graduated High School. I should have been looking forward to the future, getting a job, working, continuing my education and having the time of my life. Instead, what should have been one of the best days of my life, quickly turned to one of the worst days of life and for the longest time, things didn’t get any better.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from depression, anxiety and C-PTSD. Back then I really didn’t know what depression was, or what it meant to suffer from it. I only I was unhappy with my lot in life and had often hoped and prayed to be involved in a school shooting or an accident, just so that I would die. The only thing that kept me from killing myself up until I attempted to so was my faith, I didn’t want to risk going to hell and the fact I was terrified of the pain, as well as surviving having done serious damage to myself. I was suffering and didn’t know what to do and no one seemed to want to listen.

 

Whenever someone mentions being depressed, having anxiety, a form of PTSD, most people tend to just roll their eyes. Which is understandable, they’ve become such thrown about phrases that they’ve almost lost all meaning, no one knows if someone is just being dramatic, just wanting attention, or is honestly crying out for help. It’s this fear of not being taken seriously, or mocked that often prevent us from speaking up.

Worse though for me, is when people tell me to get over it, or try to compare their struggles with mine and how they’re fine. Telling me I need to buck up, toughen up and just let go as if it were that easy. In truth no one can really understand what it’s like being me unless you’re like me. This goes for everyone, I know everyone gets depressed from time to time, that everyone experiences anxiety in one form or another. But that’s different from being clinically depressed and living with anxiety every day.

 

Those of us who suffer as I do know that it doesn’t just go away, I wish it did, I really do. But I struggle with my demons every day; I have both good days, bad days and really bad days. They’re days when I want to avoid people, just because it’s so exhausting or just because I don’t even like being around myself. Then I have terrible days, those are the days when I need to be rescued more than ever. But almost every day I think about taking my own life. Yes, it’s because I have depression and I have C-PTSD, it’s also that most of the time, I’m just so tired of hurting, of being lonely, of struggling just to get by and just being let down. I once told someone that the only person, who disappointed me more than God, was them.

 

Truth is, depression isn’t cute or funny and it’s definitely not sexy. It’s a living thing. It exists by feeding on your darkest moods and emotions and it’s always hungry. It never really goes away. Anything that challenges it, anything that makes you feel good, anyone who brings you joy, it will drive them away so it can grow without interference. Its goal is to isolate you. At its worst, it will literally paralyze you, rather than allow you to feel anything at all. At its worst, you are numb and you are drained and immobilized by it. And it’s not that those of us who suffer from the disease want to push you away. For there have been times I could be in a room surrounded by friends and family and still feel no one else’s’ warmth or touch. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been surrounded by people and still felt alone, hurt and like a burden or a joke to all those I loved and care about.

 

I’ve always believed that everyone else would be so much happier if I just went away. You see depression sucks, I mean it literally sucks, it takes away your happiness, your joy, leaving you as nothing more than a hollowed out husk of the person you were before. But that’s how depression works; it’ll drive you to your knees with the soul crushing weight that no one should ever have to bare alone. It will prey on your darkest thoughts, telling you that no one loves you and it’ll tell you that every negative thought you ever had about yourself is true and how bleak your future really is.

 

I’ve come to learn however that depression lies. But I still wrestle with it. It’s an ongoing thing that never goes away. Yeah there’s medication out there, but that takes awhile to find the right dosage. Even then I had stop taking it, because the pills just made it hard for me to focus. It was like my head was in this thick fog and my creativity; my dreams and passions couldn’t find their way through. And the pills never really stopped the suicidal thoughts that still crept into my mind. So I try to combat it by keeping myself busy, staying active. But every day is still a struggle. Because depression doesn’t play fair, it’ll take any advantage it has to gain control, to grow and to eventually destroy you, worse is how seductive it can be sometimes. Like someone calling you to bed after a long hard day and telling you how you deserve a little rest and relaxation.

 

Having anxiety on top of depression often validates your depression. Anxiety is debilitating. It feels like a constant heaviness in your mind; like something isn’t quite right, although oftentimes you don’t know exactly what that something is. But it feels like acid in your stomach, burning and eating away at the emptiness and taking away any feelings of hunger. It’s like a tight knot that you can’t untwist. Anxiety feels like your mind is on fire, over thinking and over analyzing every little, irrelevant detail. Sometimes, it makes you feel restless, becoming constantly distracted. It feels as if your thoughts are running wild in a million different directions, bumping into each other along the way. Other times, it makes you feel detached, as if your mind has gone blank and you are no longer mentally present. You dissociate and feel as if you have left your own body. For me anxiety feels like there is a voice in the back of my mind telling me that everything is not okay, when everything in fact is. Sometimes the voice tells me that there is something wrong with me and that I’m different from everybody else, that I’m a failure, that everyone is judging me, or just pitying me. Other times, it feels like taking a test you’ve been studying for and when you look down at the questions nothing makes sense and you don’t know any of the answers, worse is it feels like your whole life, your future is determined by how you answer.
In short, It’s like this voice that tells you that your feelings are bad and that you’re a burden to the world and that you should isolate. It makes everyday tasks, such as making simple decisions, incredibly difficult. Anxiety can keep you up at night — tossing and turning. It’s like a light-bulb that comes on at the most inconvenient times and won’t switch off. Your body feels exhausted, but your mind feels wide awake and racing. You go through the events of your day, analyzing and agonizing over every specific detail. Much like depression, anxiety never really goes away. It sucks and I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.

So when I discovered I’ve also been dealing with C-PTSD from the years of childhood abuse I’ve endured. I was like “Wow…that’s swell.” I didn’t want to believe I had yet another psychological disorder. But understanding what it was I had, helped me understand more about myself, why I am the way I am. Because for years I’ve had people tell me I was just weak, how I should have went into the military to be toughened up. But in truth, I’m a bit of a badass, because I’m still here despite my issues.

You see In PTSD, your brain may replay a incident over and over again to help you process your emotions. It can become an endless loop that is actually more upsetting than the initial incident, as your unexpressed emotions continue to pile up.

 

C-PTSD is ongoing or repeated interpersonal trauma, where the victim is traumatized in captivity, and where there is no perceived way to escape. Ongoing child abuse is captivity abuse because the child cannot escape. Domestic violence is another example. Forced prostitution/sex trafficking is another.
The following are some of the symptoms and impact most felt by complex trauma survivors.

 

1. Deep Fear Of Trust People who endure ongoing abuse, particularly from significant people in their lives, develop an intense and understandable fear of trusting people. If the abuser were parents or caregivers, this intensifies. Ongoing trauma wires the brain for fear and distrust. It becomes the way the brain copes with any further potential abuse. Complex trauma survivors often find trusting people very difficult, and it takes very little for any trust built to be destroyed. The brain senses issues and this overwhelms the already severely-traumatized brain. This fear of trust is extremely impactful on a survivor’s life. Trust can be learned with support and an understanding of trusting people slowly and carefully. This takes times and patience. Believe me when I say, people like me are trying.

 

2. Terminal Aloneness
This is a phrase I used to describe to my Therapist — the terribly painful aloneness I have always felt little connection and trust with people, people like me often remain in a terrible state of aloneness, even when surrounded by people. I described it once as having a glass wall between myself and other people. I can see them, but I cannot connect with them. Another issue that increases this aloneness is feeling different to other people. Feeling damaged, broken and unable to be like other people can haunt a survivor, increasing the loneliness. It’s like feeling like a living ghost.

3. Emotion Regulation

Intense emotions are common with complex trauma survivors like myself. It is understandable that ongoing abuse can cause many different and intense emotions. This is normal for complex trauma survivors. Learning to manage and regulate emotions is vital in being able to manage all the other symptoms, but it’s not easy and incredibly difficult. Best way I can describe this is, imagine you’re on a strict, healthy diet, and every day you have to drive in a car, or sit at a table watch someone eat your favorite food, where they’re always asking you if you want some and you always have to say “No.” Now multiply that by like a thousand.

4. Emotional Flashbacks flashbacks are something all PTSD survivors can deal with, and there are three types:
Visual Flashbacks – where your mind is triggered and transported back to the trauma, and you feel as though you are reliving it.

 

Somatic Flashbacks – where the survivor feels sensations, pain and discomfort in areas of the body, affected by the trauma. This pain/sensations cannot be explained by any other health issues, and are triggered by something that creates the body to “feel” the trauma again.

 

Emotional Flashbacks – the least known and understood, and yet the type complex trauma survivors can experience the most and what I suffer from. These are where emotions from the past are triggered. Often the survivor does not understand these intense emotions are flashbacks, and it appears the survivor is being irrationally emotional. When I learned about emotional flashbacks, it was a huge light bulb moment of finally understanding why I have intense emotions. Why I tend to break down in tears when having an argument, or just trying to tell someone I can’t do something they were counting on me to do. This is because the emotions I felt back when I was a kid are being triggered all at once. But, there is no visual of the trauma – as with visual flashbacks. So, it takes a lot of work to start to understand when experiencing an emotional flashback.

 

5. Hypervigilance about People
Most people with PTSD have hypervigilance, where the person scans the environment for potential risks and likes to have their back to the wall.
But complex trauma survivors often have a deep subconscious need to “work people out.” Since childhood, I have been aware of people’s non-verbal cues; their body language, their tone of voice, their facial expressions. I also subconsciously learn people’s habits and store away what they say. Then if anything occurs that contradicts any of this, it will immediately flag as something potentially dangerous.
This can be exhausting. And it can create a deep skill set of discernment about people. The aim of healing fear-based hyper-vigilance is turning it into non-fear-based discernment
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6. Loss Of Faith
Complex trauma survivors often endure a loss of faith. I have struggled with my faith more times tan I care to admit. I often thought if I take my own life, God would have to apologize to me.
But this loss of faith doesn’t have to just be about religion, but faith in people, the world being good and about yourself. Complex trauma survivors often view the world as dangerous and people as all potentially abusive, which is understandable when having endured ongoing severe abuse.
Many complex trauma survivors walk away from their religious beliefs. For example, to believe in a good and loving God who allows suffering and heinous abuse to occur can feel like the ultimate betrayal. This is something needing considerable compassion.

7. Profoundly Hurt Inner Child
Childhood complex trauma survivors, often have a very hurt inner child that continues on to affect the survivor in adulthood. When a child’s emotional needs are not met and a child is repeatedly hurt and abused this deeply and profoundly affects the child’s development. A survivor will often continue on subconsciously wanting those unmet childhood needs in adulthood. Looking for safety, protection, being cherished and loved can often be normal unmet needs in childhood, and the survivor searches for these in other adults. This can be where survivors search for mother and father figures. Transference issues in counseling can occur and this is normal for childhood abuse survivors. I can’t tell you how many times I met a girlfriend’s parents and would often begin viewing their mother as a motherly figure for me. Even my last supervisor, I found myself thinking of her as a motherly figure and she inherently had a very motherly personality, where my department would often refer to her as the mother of the circulation department.

 

8. Helplessness and Toxic Shame
Due to enduring ongoing or repeated abuse, the survivor can develop a sense of hopelessness — that nothing will ever be OK. They can feel so profoundly damaged, they see no hope for anything getting better. When faced with long periods of abuse, it does feel like there is no hope of anything changing. And even when the abuse or trauma stops, the survivor can continue on having these deep core level beliefs of hopelessness. This is intensified by the terribly life-impacting symptoms of complex PTSD that keep the survivor stuck with the trauma, with little hope of this easing. Toxic shame is a common issue survivors of complex trauma endure. Often the perpetrators of the abuse make the survivor feel they deserved it, or they were the reason for it. Often survivors are made to feel they don’t deserve to be treated any better.

 

9. Repeated Search For A Rescuer
Subconsciously looking for someone to rescue them is something many survivors understandably think about during the ongoing trauma and this can continue on after the trauma has ceased. The survivor can feel helpless and yearn for someone to come and rescue them from the pain they feel and want them to make their lives better. This sadly often leads to the survivor seeking out the wrong types of people and being re-traumatized repeatedly.

 

10. Dissociation
When enduring ongoing abuse, the brain can utilize dissociation as a coping method. This can be from daydreaming to more life-impacting forms of dissociation such as dissociative identity disorder (DID). This is particularly experienced by child abuse survivors, who are emotionally unable to cope with trauma in the same way an adult can.

 

11. Persistent Sadness and Being Suicidal
Complex trauma survivors often experience ongoing states of sadness and severe depression. Mood disorders are often co-morbid with complex PTSD.
Complex trauma survivors are high risk for suicidal thoughts, suicide idealization and being actively suicidal. Suicide idealization can become a way of coping, where the survivor feels like they have a way to end the severe pain if it becomes any worse. Often the deep emotional pain survivors feel, can feel unbearable. This is when survivors are at risk of developing suicidal thoughts.

 

12. Muscle Armoring
Many complex trauma survivors, who have experienced ongoing abuse, develop body hyper-vigilance. This is where the body is continually tensed, as though the body is “braced” for potential trauma. This leads to pain issues as the muscles are being overworked. Chronic pain and other issues related such as chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia can result. Massage, guided muscle relaxation and other ways to manage this can help.

 

All of these issues are very normal for complex trauma survivors. Enduring complex trauma is not a normal life experience, and therefore the consequences it creates are different, yet very normal for what they have experienced and endured.

 

Not every survivor will endure all these, and there are other symptoms that can be endured. I always suggest trauma-informed counseling if that is accessible. There are medications available to help with symptoms such as anxiety and depression. But they tend to be fairly expensive.
Lastly, I advise that empathy, gentleness and compassion are required for complex trauma survivors. We are not people and trust me when I say, we are trying and doing our best.
Now all of this was a long way of be saying, I’m going to try to publish a book based off my series “Scars Of Who We Are.” but through the lens of now knowing that I have C-ptsd. I’ll also be going more in depth about what it was like growing up in an abusive home, developing c-ptsd, surviving bullies and my own suicide attempts when it all became too much for me to handle, but more importantly how I survived. If you like to help, please donate to my campaign, give as little as or as much as you’d like. Then maybe together we can work to end the stigmata and help those who need it, get the help they need. Thank you. https://www.gofundme.com/getting-published-quotyou-don039t-define-mequot&rcid=r01-155172294681-3f3710972b504c1c&pc=ot_co_campmgmt_w

Josh A. Cooper.

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You ask how I’m doing, I say I’m doing just fine, but it’s a lie.

Filed under: Life — 2 Comments
October 10, 2018

“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini

Lately I’ve been struggling a lot and not sure what direction I should go. I feel lost, broken and completely alone. I feel myself withdrawing and pulling away from people and getting lost in my own head more and more. I know this partly because I’m already tired of the therapy and medication that doesn’t really work. My therapist says I need to just be patient, but I’m tired of constantly trying to be okay, it’s exhausting pretending everything is fine. My therapist says, I’m too hard on myself and take on too much responsibility. I blame myself for things I shouldn’t and typically see the worse in myself, whereas I always try to see the best in others. But I can’t help it, I just don’t like myself very much. All I do is think about how badly I screwed things up with my honesty.

I know the so-called ‘psychologically depressed’ person who tries to kill themselves doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life isn’t fair, or out of selfishness and surely not because death seems appealing. Which I’ve come to realize is a major misconception about people who struggle with this invisible agony and when it reaches a certain unendurable level will kill themselves. Think of it like this, you’re in a high-rise building that’s on fire. The flames are slowly encroaching on you, the heat and smoke are becoming nearly unbearable and you jump out the window. The terror of falling to your death is terrifying and very different from you or me, standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames and the smoke: when the flames get close enough and the smoke making it harder and harder to breathe, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ or ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror that’s way beyond that of falling.

When I told my therapist about my suicide attempts, she asked me if I really wanted to die, and I responded,
“No one commits suicide because they want to die.”
“Then why do they do it?” She asked.
“Because they want to stop the pain,” I explained.
For me, it’s always been this weird back and forth. As I said in an earlier entry, I grew up in a mostly Christian household. I prayed for God’s grace and salvation for years. My faith in God never wavered, it didn’t matter how many times my mom would beat and ridicule me, how often my brother would mock and make fun of me while my mother laughed and laughed, encouraging him to dig at me harder and harder. Punishing me every time I tried make fun of him in return, or to say something hurtful to him. My goal wasn’t to hurt him, but only to show him how it feels. But no one else would see that and I would get beaten and grounded for standing up to him, or for fighting back. While he would parade in front of me, laughing as I got beaten. Even when I would go to school and get harassed and bullied almost daily. I held firm to this faith, that there was this just, loving, compassionate God up there, who knew what he was doing, so I put my trust in my faith.

No matter how hard things had gotten, I believed that it was all according to God’s plan. Sometimes I thought God was preparing me, strengthening me to make me a hero just like the tales of Joshua, or Samson, or Moses. Other times I convinced myself that God was testing my resolve, my faith. So I stayed strong, I endured, until I couldn’t anymore, until I broke.

There’s only so much pain, heartache and loneliness a person can take, and I’ve been lonely most of my life. It’s hard, it hurts and make you feel like you’ve being hollowed out. Several Christians have told me over the years that I need to crave companionship with God first and foremost. But where was God all those nights I spent crying myself to sleep, afraid to go home because it would mean I would have to deal with my mother, afraid of going to school, because I didn’t want to walk the halls and get harassed, ridiculed, or made fun of, or just made to feel like an outcast. Where was god when I was praying night after night for my mother to love me, or when I was begging God to give me just one good day, just one where I didn’t feel beaten down, where I didn’t get attacked just for existing. Where was he when thoughts of suicide slowly began seeping into my thoughts. When I stopped seeing myself in a mirror and only saw everything wrong with me staring back.

I don’t know if there’s a God or not, I don’t know which faith is the correct one, even in Christianity there’s so many other fractions, Catholics, Baptist, Pentecostal. Etc. How does one ever even decide? Who is right or does being right even matter?

The only thing I know for certain, is that people need to just stop being so ugly to each other, because at the end of the day, no one really knows what happens when we go. In all honesty, who really cares about one’s religion, when no one really knows if their faith is right or not. Because that’s faith, believing in something even when you have no proof or evidence to prove it, it’s just believing that there’s out there greater than yourself. Which I understand the importance of, I know it can be a good thing to have faith, especially if having faith, makes you a happier and a better person. Which I think should be of more importance to all faiths, the focus should be on spreading more good will in the world, leaving it a better place for when you go. Because all things die and fade with time, the hate people give, has a lasting negative impact on the world and it spreads like cancer. Being kind to someone though, can change a person’s world, maybe even their perspective.

For myself, I’ve always tried doing the right thing, even when it meant risking losing the very thing I wanted most or sacrificing my own happiness. Which hasn’t always been easy and as often been decisions I have grappled and wrestled with, hoping I was making the right decision in the end. Many of these past choices I have regretted and had wished I would have put myself first or been a little more selfish. But being selfish has never really been in my character. I’m not saying that to humble brag or any of the sort. My selflessness was something that grew from me watching my mother and knowing my step-mother. I saw firsthand the damage being selfish causes those around you and how it affects an individual, how it ages and how it damages you. I’m not saying you or anyone shouldn’t ever be selfish, I’ve learned that sometimes being a little selfish for the right reasons can be a good thing. You deserve to be happy too and should always fight what you want. But just don’t get carried away and just ask yourself, “Is this something I really need?” Sometimes at least for me, it’s often been more fun to share and having someone to celebrate with. I know now that it’s okay to be a selfish and put myself first, just as I’ve learned its okay to say no and to walk away from those who hurt you. Unfortunately, I’ve learned those lessons a little bit too late. But I still find myself at war with myself, between choosing something for myself, or what I want, or letting someone else take the win.


I taught myself forgiveness, even when forgiving was far from easy. But I’ve learned early on that when you forgive someone, you have no right to throw the past back at them. I’ve learned from experience how that can feel and makes you feel, I’ve learned it from my mother. Who would often bring up my past mistakes to accuse me of wrong doing in the present and for me it felt like I couldn’t escape my past mistakes. That no matter how hard I tried to change and better myself that it wasn’t good enough and I’d always been that person they either want me to be or that they hate without any just cause or reason.

Despite my upbringing and the bullies who hunted me in school, I was born with this kind and gentle heart. Which I often find myself hating, wishing more than anything I could make myself numb to some of the hurt. Wishing there was some way I could stop myself from seeing the best in people. I tend to see the potential in those around me and I long to see the good in them, which has sometimes caused me to be taken advantage of, which is a problem which also sucks.

Worse is I’ve always had a generous and giving nature, which has been magnified by my C-ptsd, but this part of me was initially born from me trying to distance myself as much as possible from my mother, because I saw how her selfishness affected her and those around her. I never wanted to be blinded by jealously and believe it’s what I’m owed for some clandestine reason. I like earning my keep and my share. I was partly inspired by my father whom I witnessed frequently loaning friends and family money, when I asked him why he always did this, because he’d seldom get paid back. He said,


“Yeah, it sucks a little bit when I don’t get paid back, but it feels worse feeling like I could have helped someone but didn’t. I know I’ll probably never be rich and I don’t think I ever want to be. I like to give when I can and hope for the best.”


When I heard this, I made this vow to give whenever the need was great, to put others before myself and this was also because I partly wanted to have a positive effect on the world. Then without even realizing it, I found myself getting more joy out of helping others than I have ever gotten from helping myself. I often felt guilty the few times I chose to put myself first, the times I chose to be selfish even though I know now it’s okay and perfectly acceptable to be a little selfish sometimes. But, it doesn’t make it any less difficult, or less of a struggle. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wrestled with a decision, wondering if the choice I made, or plan to make is the right one, or if I’m making a choice for the right reasons or not.

In all honesty I often feel like I’m at war with myself, with these voices in the back of my mind. My depression telling me how worthless I am, that I’m a burden to the world around me. My anxiety tells me I’m annoying and every choice I ever make is the wrong one and only annoy and hurt those around me, telling me I should just go away and let myself be forgotten. My heart is just tired of hurting, it used to be overflowing with hope, believing if I just stood my ground that things would get better, that it has too. But as times goes on, my heart just hurts, and it becomes filled with sorrow and pain and wanting it to just end.

Then I have this weird, defiant, stubborn voice that tells the other voices to shut the hell up and that I have to fight for thing things I want and never give up. To keep going, to keep getting back up no matter how many times I get knocked down, to keep trying. But it’s hard and it’s the hardest thing I ever have to do. Every day I have to make this choice to keep going and not end my life. When I was a kid, I would think of these arbitrary reasons to live. Like “I have to live just long enough to see this movie,” Or “Play that video game,” or “Go on this trip,” Etc. I was grasping at straws, trying to find a more solid reason to keep going.

It’s almost kind of funny, how a lot of people see me as an optimist and will comment on my positivity. When in truth, I’m just trying to make the most of every situation I find myself in. I have to try and force myself to have fun and enjoy myself as much as possible, because a part of me believes that when we die, we can only take the memories we make with us and I want to take as many good memories as I can. With the hope that maybe, when I die, I get to relive my favorite memories as often as I want. I can stay in those moments where I was my happiness, when I felt like I was at my best. For me it’s important to make the most of the time we have now and I’ve been learning to take more chances, to live in the moment. It can be exciting and life changing, as well as it can be heartbreaking. But I can at least look back and say “I tried, I took a risk, I gambled and I tried.”

So that’s all I can promise to do these days.
I’m trying.
Josh. C

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I’m still here, a continued C-PTSD journey to recovery.

Filed under: Life — Leave a comment
August 29, 2018

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”

― Judith Lewis Herman

During my time of growing, healing and recovering from my past traumas, I’ve come to the decision of my rewriting my blog series, “Scars of who we are” and attempt to break it down into novel format, in hopes of reaching others. My hope is to let people know they aren’t alone and don’t have to continuing being a victim, or victimized, or question themselves, their sanity and value.

I learned firsthand what it’s like to love someone who hurts you. Despite how badly my mother had treated me majority of the time, a part of me still loved her, cared about her and wanted more than anything for her to acknowledge me as her son. To show me just an ounce of the love she had shown any of my brothers. It sucks seeing someone you care about love and care for everyone else but you. Which lead me to having a bit of a break down when I was talking to my dad and had asked him, “Why didn’t she love me? What was wrong so wrong with me?”

I deeply longed for a good relationship with my mother, I wanted to be able to talk and confide in her, to trust her. I wanted her to love me as she had loved my older brother. Growing up I often thought if I was better, smarter, more talented, or thoughtful she would see me as her son and love me as such. Every day I prayed to God to just let her love me and to take away whatever it was that made her hate me. That being said, my mother wasn’t always horrible towards me, like many narcissistic abusers she would be kind to me sometimes. She could be silly and funny, which would always end a little strangely. It wasn’t ever that she was just goofing off with me, it was how abruptly it would end and she would be upset with me, or suddenly get very angry at me. It was almost as if she felt like I had somehow tricked her into not hating me for a little awhile. The shift was always sudden and seemed to come out of nowhere.

Still, I do remember when albeit vaguely how she used to read to me before bed when I was a kid and I think it’s what ignited my love for stories and expanded my imagination. My mother was also an amazing cook, she made the best brownies and chocolate chip cookies. She was also very creative and crafty in in her own right. Strangely enough, even though she rarely stayed up past 11pm, the few times she had she was cool. I don’t know what it was about the late-night hours that made her kinder and more motherly, but more often than not, whenever it was late at night, she would be kind of motherly towards me. She would actually talk to me like I was a person and not like someone she despised. Now it didn’t happen every time she stayed up late, but enough for me to realize it was a side of her I wished I saw more often.

Even still there is one moment when I was fifteen that always struck me as odd, something that not even my therapist really understands why this happened, knowing what she had learned about my mother, something that stuck with me. As you can imagine the older I got the worse my mother had treated me, with periodic episodes of kindness. (Also, whenever we were in public or around certain people my mother would be mother of the year. A façade that would quickly fall away once we either in the car or at home.) But there was this one night when I was fifteen, where I had awoken in the middle the night, shivering. I quickly discovered I had somehow managed to kick off my covers while I was asleep.
So still half asleep, I began blindly fumbling for my covers, when I heard someone at my bedroom door. Fearing it was my mother, I quickly laid back down and pretended to be asleep. Then through the slits of my eyes, I watched as my door slowly cracked open and I saw my mother poking her head into my room. I immediately felt my heart seize in my chest as I recalled all the times she dragged me out of bed, feeling her nails bite into my flesh as she would wrench me out of the bed by the arm. So I lay as still as I could, also remembering all the times she had caught me reading in med, or playing a handheld videogame, when I was supposed to be sleeping.

I kept hoping she would close my door and just go on down the hall away from my room, but she didn’t. Instead, I heard her silently pushing my door open and I could see her through the slits of my eyes silently stepping into my room, towards my bed. In my head I kept begging God to make her leave, to just turn around and walk out of my bedroom and to just leave me alone.
She didn’t leave, but then the strangest thing happened. I felt her untangling my blankets and then she proceeded to tuck me in. Needless to say I didn’t know what to think, I was completely stunned and didn’t fully understand or comprehend what she was doing, or why. She had never shown me this kind of tenderness or affection for as long as I could remember. Then I felt her lips gently kiss the top of my head and she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Then she caressed my cheek and gave me a gentle squeeze on my shoulder and silently slipped back out of my room. When I told my therapist about this event, even she was stumped. Much like it has been for me, this sudden act of love was something very rare, very random and I’m 98% certain that there was no way she could have known I was awake when she came into my room that night.

Of course I was so love deprived, that every night after that for a week, I would kick off my blankets on purpose and would go as far as leaving my bedroom door cracked open in hopes the same event would repeat itself. Sadly it never did and I never brought it up to my mother either. I guess in a way I was a little afraid that if I brought it up to her it would have broke whatever strange magic was at work that night. Unfortunately just a year later, I would be assaulted by her as I was attempting to take out the trash. It was on that night that I had finally had enough and shoved her off of me and told that I had finally had enough and was finally going to leave and live with my dad. My mother ended up falling into my room and began at hitting me, scratching me, shoving me. Then when I raised an arm to keep her from hitting me, she dared me to hit her. Begged me and tried provoking me to hit her. By shoving me, hitting me, taunting me as she said, “Go on hit me! It’s what I want you to do, I want you to hit me! It’s what I’ve always wanted you to do! Because I’ll finally be able to call Chris (My cop step-dad) And have him arrest your ass tonight, your aunt’s husband is rich, he knows judges and I can make it where you go Juvy, to prison and never see your dad, or anyone you love every again. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do to you!”

Luckily I didn’t hit her, but I did threaten to call the cops myself and let them see the marks that she had left on me. But when I went to the phone, she broke down crying, begged me not to call the police, told me how if I did, I would cause my brothers to lose their mother. She told me how my older brother had no one else and asked me if I could really take away the only parent he had. She then apologized profusely, promised me she’d never hit me again and that things would get better. I dumbly agreed and didn’t call the police like I should have, like I wished I would have done, what I should have done.

But…All I could do was think about all the times I overheard my mother telling my older brother how his father never wanted him and how my father didn’t want him either, how she was the only one who had wanted him. When in truth my father couldn’t fight for custody of my older brother, since he wasn’t his biological son and my dad’s lawyer had told him fighting for custody for my older brother would be a lost cause.

Though still, every now and again, I find myself thinking back to that might when my mother crept into my room, tucked me in and shown me genuine love. I can’t tell you how many times I sat and wondered why she apologized to me in that moment, when she thought I was asleep. Some people have told me their theories, everything from her being possessed and she managed to break free for that one moment. Others believe she had an epiphany and realized how badly she had treated me or had a moment of clarity and realized in that moment that she was mentally ill and couldn’t help how she treated me. Sadly I don’t have any answers, I can tell you that there have been times when I wondered if maybe she was preparing me for something, or knew something I didn’t about my future and maybe she thought treating me so horribly would make strong, or a better person. Truth is I don’t know the answer and I don’t think I ever will. I do know I struggle day to day and I’m always fighting my demons who’re always telling me I should kill myself, that I’m worthless, pathetic and a burden to all those around me. I know the reason I struggle with these demons is because of what my mother had put me through. No kid should ever be afraid of going home, of talking to their parents. No kid deserves to have a parent call them stupid, or ugly, or that they need to have plastic surgery. All I ever wanted was to feel and be a part of something, a family, to be and feel and be loved. It’s what everyone deserves.

 

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Leaving the gaslight on. (The journey to heal)

Filed under: Life — 6 Comments
August 14, 2018

  “It is not okay for someone you like to treat you poorly and then pretend it didn’t happen, making you question your own grasp on reality. This dynamic is called gaslighting. It’s a common tactic of abusers to shift the focus of the blame from their bad behavior onto the person they are victimizing. One important side effect of gaslighting is having your memory “black out” after a fight (because your brain is trying to protect you from the cruelty of the abuse), which results in not being able to remember how an argument started. You may start to internalize the idea that there is something wrong with you and that you did something to provoke the situation as you’re increasingly beaten down and confused.”  ― Shannon Weber

I don’t know how to ever really describe what it was like growing up with my mother and being around her family. It’s the question I get asked more often, which is “Why didn’t you ever say anything, or tell anyone? Over the years I gave a few reasons, which were all true. The first being I was afraid, I was afraid of the many threats my mother made to me. She used to also tell me if I told anyone they wouldn’t believe me and would just think less of me. I was also afraid of being believed and being made fun for being abused by my mother, I don’t know why, I guess I would have to blame media who portrayed fathers as being these, imposing and terrifying figures, as oppose to mothers who have often been a victim themselves or at worse a someone who denied the abuse was even occurring at home.

In therapy, I have learned one of the more prime reasons I didn’t say anything sooner, was because I was afraid of being called a liar, as the result of my mother’s gaslighting me for several years. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s beliefs. All of which my mother was a master at. My mother was so skilled at this, that when she overheard my older brother and I talking about how she used to backhand and beat us at the kitchen table if we chewed with our mouths full, put our elbows on the table, or made too much noise while taking a drink, my mother became livid. She denied ever hitting us at the dinner table, going as far as breaking down into tears for thinking she would have ever done that. She was so effective in her denial, that in two weeks, my older brother came to believe her. Later telling me that she had never hit either of us. When I still distinctly remembered being backhanded and beaten cause she saw me chew with my mouth open, or because my elbows touched the table. He had become so adamant about it not happening, it was unsettling. Thankfully, I knew and still remembered clearly the numerous times I was beaten at the table. Granted not a good memory at all, but in the way my brother and I had talked and joked about it, because we were commenting how my younger brothers would get time out and we would get beaten. Although yes, my older brother occasionally gotten beat, whereas I would get beat all the time.

Still it was strange seeing how quickly my brother not only seemed to forget but would deny ever happened. However, my dad remembered seeing her haul off and beat me or my brother at the dinner table at the slightest infraction. My dad even told me the first time he saw it and asked why she was beating me, she said it was because my elbows were on the table. So my dad had pointed out that I was four and then sat his elbows on the table and dared her to hit him, like she was hitting me. (I don’t remember this particular instance, but I do remember being hit a lot for stupid little things and the one time my dad got so furious over it, he threw his plate in the trash along with all the other food she had cooked, except for what was on mine and my brother’s plate.)

My mother is a narcissist who uses  gaslighting techniques to have power over others. Which is more effective than you may think. Anyone is susceptible to gaslighting, and it is a common technique used by abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders. It is done slowly, so the victim doesn’t realize how much they’ve been brainwashed. For example, the few times I tried calling my mother out on how she was treating me, she would tell me that I was crazy. She would insist that my dad was responsible and that he had brainwashed me into  believing she was this horrible person. Sometimes she would break down and cry, telling me she loved me because she always made me dinner and special meals just for me because of my being a picky eater, which I am. She used the gifts she had gotten me for my birthday, or Christmas to tell me it was proof that she loved me. Ironically she would always bash my father to me, telling me how my father was the one who always beat me, that he used to beat her and my older brother and how selfish he was. However my father never struck me out of anger and when he did used to give me whooping, it was two or three swats then he was done. My dad used to tell me how much he hated having to give me a paddling and it showed. Because when my mother would beat me with the paddle, she would hit me as hard as she could, several times, more if I cried out, or tried to wiggle away. Then she would beat me some more if I ended up crying afterwards. She didn’t just beat my ass, by my hands, lower back, the back of my thighs, etc and this was with a thick, wooden paddle.

The few times I’ve tried calling her out on her treatment of me, she would accuse me of being dramatic, tell me I was being crazy. Say I was exaggerating things, making things out to be worse than what they were. Which often made me wonder if she was right. I can’t tell you how many times I wondered if she was right, if I was really crazy or not. A part of me even acknowledged that she did make me my own little meals every day, she did on rare occasion treat me well.  However she would always use the good things she done as a way to tell me she loved me and that if she didn’t she would have done those nice things for me. Even though it didn’t change the fact that I slowly found myself becoming afraid of her. Because I never knew what she would do, or how she would react, but I did know that she liked to ruin me every chance she got. If I spent a summer with my dad and came home talking about all the things he and I did together, she would say, “Oh he’s not treating you like a son, he’s treating you more like a buddy. He only did those things, so you’d go live with him and stop him from having to pay child support, he doesn’t really love you or care about you. Not like I do. He’s just using you and trying to manipulate you.” And just like that, the euphoria I had over a summer well spent would be suddenly tarnished. I would be hurt and devastated and a part of me always wondered what if she was right?

Such was growing up with her. If I ever questioned her methods or tried calling her out on how she treated me, she would tell me I was crazy, tell me it was all in my head, insist on telling me how much worse things could be. Once she even told me if I ever told anyone about what was going on at home, the police would come and take me and my brother away, she told me my dad wouldn’t be able to get custody of me and I would go to an orphanage, where I would get molested and raped. And explained to me in a rudimentary way of what that entailed, because at the time of her telling me that I was still quite young and didn’t know what those words meant.

My mother even went out of her way telling the rest of her family and my older brother that I was crazy, how I had been brainwashed into disliking her by my father, how I would always overexaggerate, making things worse than what they were and how I always played the victim. So the few times I tried reaching out and asking for help, they would look at me and say “Oh yeah, your mother warned us you would say something like that, you know she doesn’t hate you, she buys you clothes and makes you food.” Which doesn’t prove one way or another that someone loves you. The best manipulators and abusers out there will do some good things for you. Just so they can make you doubt yourself just enough. Luckily for me, I did wonder if everything was in my head, so I got to the point where I wouldn’t say anything negative about my mother or her family. Then I would invite friends over or leave my phone on when she would yell and scream at me, insult me. It got so bad that one of my best friends had told his parents and they offered to adopt me, or to just let me live with them on more than one occasion. I also mentioned before how I once brought a girlfriend for her and her family to meet during the holidays and afterwards she told me how she didn’t like my mom or her family. When I asked why, she said,

“Because they all talk down to you and walk all over you and it was clear they were constantly trying to make you look bad the entire time. It was like they were going out of their way to do it too and it was horrible.” For me this was a revelation. It wasn’t easy for Rebekah to tell me the truth the way she had. Up until then, she didn’t know anything was wrong in my family, or back home. She helped me see that I wasn’t crazy and that the way they were treating me wasn’t just in my head. It let me know if you become suspicious about how you’re being treated. Don’t be afraid of going to a trusted person and asking them for help, or advice. 
It’s just not parents or a parent who can gaslight someone, I’ve seen people do it their boyfriend, girlfriend and spouses. So you have to be ever vigilant.

People who gaslight typically use the following techniques:

  1. They tell blatant lies.

You know it’s an outright lie. Yet they are telling you this lie with a straight face. Why are they so blatant? Because they’re setting up a precedent. Once they tell you a huge lie, you’re not sure if anything they say is true. Keeping you unsteady and off-kilter is the goal.

  1. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.

You know they said they would do something; you know you heard it. But they out and out deny it. It makes you start questioning your reality—maybe they never said that thing. And the more they do this, the more you question your reality and start accepting theirs.

  1. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.

They know how important your kids are to you, and they know how important your identity is to you. So those may be one of the first things they attack. If you have kids, they tell you that you should not have had those children. They will tell you’d be a worthy person if only you didn’t have a long list of negative traits. They attack the foundation of your being. For me, my mother would often attack my identity. She had a problem with everything about me. How I stood, how I walked, my hair, she would tell me horrible things about my father, tell me my friends weren’t really my friends and that they were all using me, or making fun of me behind my back. She would even tell me horrible things about my grandmother, who was more of a mother to me then her, or anyone else I’ve ever known.

  1. They wear you down over time.

This is one of the insidious things about gaslighting—it is done gradually, over time. A lie here, a lie there, a snide comment every so often…and then it starts ramping up. Even the brightest, most self-aware people can be sucked into gaslighting—it is that effective. It’s the “frog in the frying pan” analogy: The heat is turned up slowly, so the frog never realizes what’s happening to it.

  1. Their actions do not match their words.

When dealing with a person or entity that gaslights, look at what they are doing rather than what they are saying. What they are saying means nothing; it is just talk. What they are doing is the issue.

  1. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.

This person or entity that is cutting you down, telling you that you don’t have value, is now praising you for something you did. This adds an additional sense of uneasiness. You think, “Well maybe they aren’t so bad.” Yes, they are. This is a calculated attempt to keep you off-kilter—and again, to question your reality. Also look at what you were praised for; it is probably something that served the gaslighter.

  1. They know confusion weakens people.

 

Gaslighters know that people like having a sense of stability and normalcy. Their goal is to uproot this and make you constantly question everything. And humans’ natural tendency is to look to the person or entity that will help you feel more stable—and that happens to be the gaslighter.

 

  1. They project.

They are a drug user or a cheater, yet they are constantly accusing you of that. This is done so often that you start trying to defend yourself, and are distracted from the gaslighter’s own behavior.

 

  1. They try to align people against you.

Gaslighters are masters at manipulating and finding the people they know will stand by them no matter what—and they use these people against you. They will make comments such as, “This person knows that you’re not right,” or “This person knows you’re useless too.” Keep in mind it does not mean that these people actually said these things. A gaslighter is a constant liar. When the gaslighter uses this tactic it makes you feel like you don’t know who to trust or turn to—and that leads you right back to the gaslighter. And that’s exactly what they want: Isolation gives them more control.

  1. They tell you or others that you are crazy.

This is one of the most effective tools of the gaslighter, because it’s dismissive. The gaslighter knows if they question your sanity, people will not believe you when you tell them the gaslighter is abusive or out-of-control. It’s a master technique.

  1. They tell you everyone else is a liar.

By telling you that everyone else (your family, the media) is a liar, it again makes you question your reality. You’ve never known someone with the audacity to do this, so they must be telling the truth, right? No. It’s a manipulation technique. It makes people turn to the gaslighter for the “correct” information—which isn’t correct information at all.

 

The more you are aware of these techniques, the quicker you can identify them and avoid falling into the gaslighter’s trap.  So be careful out there.

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My very personal PSA

Filed under: About me. — 12 Comments
April 10, 2018

I have depression, anxiety and recently been diagnosed with C-PTSD.

Several people like to tell me I should get over it, or say “Oh I’ve been depressed a few times, but I did this thing and it stopped it.”

Truth is, depression isn’t cute or funny and it’s definitely not sexy. It’s a living thing. It exists by feeding on your darkest moods and emotions and it’s always hungry. It never really goes away. Anything that challenges it, anything that makes you feel good, anyone who brings you joy, it will drive them away so it can grow without interference. Its goal is to isolate you. At its worst, it will literally paralyze you, rather than allow you to feel anything at all. At its worst, you are numb and you are drained and immobilized by it. And it’s not that those of us who suffer from the disease want to push you away. For there have been times I could be in a room surrounded by friends and family and still feel no one else’s’ warmth or touch. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been surrounded by people and still felt alone, hurt and like a burden or a joke to all those I loved and care about. Always thinking that everyone else would be so much happier if I just went away. You see Depression sucks, I mean it literally sucks, it takes away your happiness, your joy, leaving you as nothing more than a hollowed out husk of the person you were before. But that’s how depression works; it’ll drive you to your knees with the soul crushing weight that no one should ever have to bare alone. It will prey on your darkest thoughts, telling you that no one loves you and it’ll you that every negative thought you ever had about yourself is true, and how bleak your future really is. I’ve come to learned that depression lies. But I still wrestle with my depression; I have good days, bad days, and worst days. I often try to combat it by keeping myself busy.

Having anxiety on top of depression often validates your depression. Anxiety is debilitating. It feels like a constant heaviness in your mind; like something isn’t quite right, although oftentimes you don’t know exactly what that something is. But it feels like acid in your stomach, burning and eating away at the emptiness and taking away any feelings of hunger. It’s like a tight knot that you can’t untwist. Anxiety feels like your mind is on fire, overthinking and over analyzing every little, irrelevant thing. Sometimes, it makes you feel restless and constantly distracted. It feels as if your thoughts are running wild in a million different directions, bumping into each other along the way. Other times, it makes you feel detached, as if your mind has gone blank and you are no longer mentally present. You dissociate and feel as if you have left your own body. For me anxiety feels like there is a voice in the back of my mind telling me that everything is not okay, when everything in fact is. Sometimes the voice tells me that there is something wrong with me and that you are different from everybody else.

It’s like this voice that tells you that your feelings are bad and that you’re a burden to the world and that you should isolate. It makes everyday tasks, such as making simple decisions, incredibly difficult. Anxiety can keep you up at night — tossing and turning.
It’s like a lightbulb that comes on at the most inconvenient times and won’t switch off. Your body feels exhausted, but your mind feels wide awake and racing. You go through the events of your day, analyzing and agonizing over every specific detail. Much like depression, anxiety never really goes away.

When I discovered I’ve also been dealing with C-PTSD from the years of childhood abuse I’ve endured. I was like “Wow…aren’t I lucky.” You see In PTSD, your brain may replay a incident over and over again to help you process your emotions. It can become an endless loop that is actually more upsetting than the initial incident, as your unexpressed emotions continue to pile up.

C-PTSD is ongoing or repeated interpersonal trauma, where the victim is traumatized in captivity, and where there is no perceived way to escape. Ongoing child abuse is captivity abuse because the child cannot escape. Domestic violence is another example. Forced prostitution/sex trafficking is another.

The following are some of the symptoms and impact most felt by complex trauma survivors.

1. Deep Fear Of Trust People who endure ongoing abuse, particularly from significant people in their lives, develop an intense and understandable fear of trusting people. If the abuse was parents or caregivers, this intensifies. Ongoing trauma wires the brain for fear and distrust. It becomes the way the brain copes with any further potential abuse. Complex trauma survivors often find trusting people very difficult, and it takes little for any trust built to be destroyed. The brain senses issues and this overwhelms the already severely-traumatized brain. This fear of trust is extremely impactful on a survivor’s life. Trust can be learned with support and an understanding of trusting people slowly and carefully. This takes times and patience. Believe me when I say, people like me are trying.

2. Terminal Aloneness
This is a phrase I used to describe to my Therapist — the terribly painful aloneness I have always felt as a complex trauma survivor. I often feel little connection and trust with people, people like me often remain in a terrible state of aloneness, even when surrounded by people. I described it once as having a glass wall between myself and other people. I can see them, but I cannot connect with them. Another issue that increases this aloneness is feeling different to other people. Feeling damaged, broken and unable to be like other people can haunt a survivor, increasing the loneliness.

3. Emotion Regulation
Intense emotions are common with complex trauma survivors like myself. It is understandable that ongoing abuse can cause many different and intense emotions. This is normal for complex trauma survivors. Learning to manage and regulate emotions is vital in being able to manage all the other symptoms, but it’s not easy and incredibly difficult. Best way I can describe this is, imagine you’re on a strict, healthy diet, and every day you have to drive in a car, or sit at a table watch someone eat your favorite food, where they’re always asking you if you want some and you always have to say “No.” Now multiply that by like a thousand.

4. Emotional Flashbacks
flashbacks are something all PTSD survivors can deal with, and there are three types:

Visual Flashbacks – where your mind is triggered and transported back to the trauma, and you feel as though you are reliving it.
Somatic Flashbacks – where the survivor feels sensations, pain and discomfort in areas of the body, affected by the trauma. This pain/sensations cannot be explained by any other health issues, and are triggered by something that creates the body to “feel” the trauma again.
Emotional Flashbacks – the least known and understood, and yet the type complex trauma survivors can experience the most. These are where emotions from the past are triggered. Often the survivor does not understand these intense emotions are flashbacks, and it appears the survivor is being irrationally emotional. When I learned about emotional flashbacks, it was a huge lightbulb moment of finally understanding why I have intense emotions, when they do not reflect the issue occurring now, but are in fact emotions felt during the trauma, being triggered. But, there is no visual of the trauma – as with visual flashbacks. So, it takes a lot of work to start to understand when experiencing an emotional flashback.

5. Hypervigilance about People
Most people with PTSD have hypervigilance, where the person scans the environment for potential risks and likes to have their back to the wall.
But complex trauma survivors often have a deep subconscious need to “work people out.” Since childhood, I have been aware of people’s non-verbal cues; their body language, their tone of voice, their facial expressions. I also subconsciously learn people’s habits and store away what they say. Then if anything occurs that contradicts any of this, it will immediately flag as something potentially dangerous.
This can be exhausting. And it can create a deep skillset of discernment about people. The aim of healing fear-based hyper-vigilance is turning it into non-fear-based discernment
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6. Loss Of Faith
Complex trauma survivors often endure a loss of faith. This can be about people, about the world being good, about religion, and a loss of faith about self.
Complex trauma survivors often view the world as dangerous and people as all potentially abusive, which is understandable when having endured ongoing severe abuse.
Many complex trauma survivors walk away from their religious beliefs. For example, to believe in a good and loving God who allows suffering and heinous abuse to occur can feel like the ultimate betrayal. This is something needing considerable compassion.

7. Profoundly Hurt Inner Child

Childhood complex trauma survivors, often have a very hurt inner child that continues on to affect the survivor in adulthood. When a child’s emotional needs are not met and a child is repeatedly hurt and abused this deeply and profoundly affects the child’s development. A survivor will often continue on subconsciously wanting those unmet childhood needs in adulthood. Looking for safety, protection, being cherished and loved can often be normal unmet needs in childhood, and the survivor searches for these in other adults. This can be where survivors search for mother and father figures. Transference issues in counseling can occur and this is normal for childhood abuse survivors. I can’t tell you how many times I met a girlfriend’s parents and would often begin viewing their mother as a motherly figure for me. Even my last supervisor, I found myself thinking of her as a motherly figure and she inherently had a very motherly personality, where my department would often refer to her as the mother of the circulation department.

8. Helplessness and Toxic Shame
Due to enduring ongoing or repeated abuse, the survivor can develop a sense of hopelessness — that nothing will ever be OK. They can feel so profoundly damaged, they see no hope for anything getting better. When faced with long periods of abuse, it does feel like there is no hope of anything changing. And even when the abuse or trauma stops, the survivor can continue on having these deep core level beliefs of hopelessness. This is intensified by the terribly life-impacting symptoms of complex PTSD that keep the survivor stuck with the trauma, with little hope of this easing.

Toxic shame is a common issue survivors of complex trauma endure. Often the perpetrators of the abuse make the survivor feel they deserved it, or they were the reason for it. Often survivors are made to feel they don’t deserve to be treated any better.

9. Repeated Search For A Rescuer
Subconsciously looking for someone to rescue them is something many survivors understandably think about during the ongoing trauma and this can continue on after the trauma has ceased. The survivor can feel helpless and yearn for someone to come and rescue them from the pain they feel and want them to make their lives better. This sadly often leads to the survivor seeking out the wrong types of people and being re-traumatized repeatedly.

10. Dissociation

When enduring ongoing abuse, the brain can utilize dissociation as a coping method. This can be from daydreaming to more life-impacting forms of dissociation such as dissociative identity disorder (DID). This is particularly experienced by child abuse survivors, who are emotionally unable to cope with trauma in the same way an adult can.

11. Persistent Sadness and Being Suicidal

Complex trauma survivors often experience ongoing states of sadness and severe depression. Mood disorders are often co-morbid with complex PTSD.

Complex trauma survivors are high risk for suicidal thoughts, suicide ideation and being actively suicidal. Suicide ideation can become a way of coping, where the survivor feels like they have a way to end the severe pain if it becomes any worse. Often the deep emotional pain survivors feel, can feel unbearable. This is when survivors are at risk of developing suicidal thoughts.

12. Muscle Armoring
Many complex trauma survivors, who have experienced ongoing abuse, develop body hyper-vigilance. This is where the body is continually tensed, as though the body is “braced” for potential trauma. This leads to pain issues as the muscles are being overworked. Chronic pain and other issues related such as chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia can result. Massage, guided muscle relaxation and other ways to manage this can help.

All of these issues are very normal for complex trauma survivors. Enduring complex trauma is not a normal life experience, and therefore the consequences it creates are different, yet very normal for what they have experienced and endured.

Not every survivor will endure all these, and there are other symptoms that can be endured. I always suggest trauma-informed counseling if that is accessible. There are medications available to help with symptoms such as anxiety and depression. But they tend to be fairly expensive.

Lastly, I advise that empathy, gentleness and compassion are required for complex trauma survivors. We are not people and trust me when I say, we are trying and doing our best.

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Scars of Who We Are: Scars fade & wounds heal.

Filed under: Life — Leave a comment
December 23, 2013

Chapter 17-Part 2.

~Maybe things don’t happen for a reason. Maybe we’re just grasping for ways to make sense of the chaos around us. Maybe we’re giving meaning to things that have no meaning. Maybe we’re clinging to hope so hard that we forget about reality. What if we’re wrong and nothing is meant to be? We’re just lost souls wandering endlessly, desperately, seeking comfort from the notion that things will work out in the end no matter what. What if we’ve tricked ourselves into believing that everything will be okay in the end just so we don’t have to face the reality that maybe it won’t?”-Unknown

Man goes through the morning mist

I was filled with such rage and anger as I exited my mother’s car, pulling my bag of clothes up higher on my shoulder, I was so angry I couldn’t even see straight and as I made it to the door, I realized that I was crying. Tears had blurred my vision as I fumbled for the door, I was falling apart. Everything compounded into itself in that moment, I realized it all been a lie. The family, the love, the change I had been hoping for…had been all for naught. All the fights and battles I had with my father who disapproved of me trying to have a relationship with my mother and everything I had said and done to put the past behind me had all become undone and with it I was unraveling at the seams.

I don’t remember even walking into my house and I found myself just sitting at the kitchen table in tears with my grandmother doing her best to console me. I was broken, my heart feeling as though it were dashed against the rocks, my very soul ached. In one fell swoop, I had lost so much. My mother, my younger brothers and the older brother who had become my best friend, I even lost my computer with a lifetime’s worth of work saved away on the memory banks. My whole life seemed to be wrapped up in the day and torn apart in the most unexpected of ways. I was wounded.

I told her and my father everything and then I tried my one last life line, I contacted Dominic in hopes he could help me, be the voice of reason and to at the very least try to get my computer returned to me. At the time he acted like he had no idea of what was going on, insisting that I try to at least try and talk to Chris one last time. But he wasn’t taking my calls.

A card I got from my neighbor after she heard about what happened.

A card I got from my neighbor after she heard about what happened.

Later my brother’s then girlfriend called me, upset just as much, if not more than me. She told me, that my brother knew of what was happening before I even did, because Chris had called him and not once did Dominic defend me. Leaving me feel even more hurt and betrayed. Then she told me as he was screaming in the background and banging on the door for her not to tell me, but she does. She tells me his plan was to play dumb if I contacted him. Then she told me something else that I should be aware of, while I could hear my brother banging more fiercely on the door where she was, telling her to shut-up and how I, (his brother) Had no business hearing about other family matters. But she presses on, assuring me that at least believes in me and saw how I was being picked on and bullied and pushed further into a corner. Because she had met me on numerous occasions and got a sense of who I was. Plus she had seen and heard me helping him out on numerous occasions. She knew of the times I loaned him money so he could pay his bills, she knew that I often gave him gas money which he never asked for whenever we hang out and she saw the window Air-conditioning unit I had given him when I found out his apartment didn’t have air.

Then she told me that a month or two prior Chris had went behind my mother’s back and secretly asked her sister to borrow five hundred bucks, which she declined and then told my mother. The secrecy of his actions and how he refused to tell her why he needed the money nearly resulted in their divorce. But they had somehow managed to patch things up. This was why she was leaving my brother and why she was calling me now, because she believed this to be the reason why this was happening to me now and how disappointed she was in my brother for turning his back on me now.

I found this card when I was going through a old shoe-box. She was in tears when she heard about what happened.

I found this card when I was going through a old shoe-box. She was in tears when she heard about what happened.

By Christmas day I fighting a losing a battle and more than once I had made calls to my brother, my mother and step-father. My last conversation with my mother was her telling me how careful Chris was with his money and how he had cashed his check and was going to put into the bank when he discovered he was missing the money. So naturally I called her out, telling her how that didn’t make any sense, because if I were to cash my check at a bank, I would deposit whatever money I needed to while I was there. I wouldn’t wait two or three days just because. But my mother ignored my words, instead she resorted back to her old ways, telling me about the things I had done wrong or lied about back when I was a kid. Then I told her she was leaving with little choice, but to file a police report against them. The last thing my mother told me before I hung up, was,

“Do whatever you have to do,” and I hung up on her and it was the last I had ever spoken to her.

That night, I got a message from my brother, telling me that Chris was talking about destroying my computer; he then told me I needed to call and talk to him. But Chris was screening my calls and when my younger brother picked up the phone and gave it to Chris; he hung up without ever hearing a word I had to say. So that night my father took me to the state-trooper’s office.

Where I met Sergeant Scott Davenport, when I first met Mr. Davenport and I started telling him my story, he cut me off and told me this was something I would have to take up with my mother. So with a heavy sigh, I shook my head, feeling defeated and believing Chris had been truthful about the whole domestic dispute thing and feeling frustrated, I told the sergeant that I had been trying, but they weren’t taking my calls. I even demonstrated this by attempting to call him then and there, handing him the phone so he could hear them picking up the phone and hanging it up.
It was then the Sergeant asked me to tell my story again and this time he listened intently, and when I told him my step-father was Chris Hankins recognition let his eyes, as he said,

On numerous occasions I babysat her kids, dog-sat for her and even house sat.

On numerous occasions I babysat her kids, dog-sat for her and even house sat on more than one occasion.

“Chris, yeah I know,” and his hopes immediately dashed my hopes as I thought,

(Oh of course you do)

But the Sergeant motioned me to continue and when I got to the part where I offered to get Chris 300 hundred dollars from my own checking account, he stopped me, and asked me to repeat what I had just said, so I did.

“Wait a minute,” He asks, “You accused you of stealing 300 hundred dollars, and you offered to get him that same amount and he refused?”

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“Hmm, well that changes everything now,” He exclaimed, shaking his head, “So why do you think he declined your offer?”

“Well because my computer is worth a lot more than three hundred bucks,” I told him.

The Sergeant who I think had to have seen and experience all manner of things, seemed genuinely taken aback by the revelation, telling me that I was a better man than him and he wouldn’t have offered him shit. He then tells me to sit tight and he was going to get a hold of Chris. But before he could go I stopped him and pulled my receipt for my computer out of my pocket and said,

“Hey, you may need this, in case he tries to claims it his.”

Mr. Davenport smiles and giving me a nod of approval he says,

“Wow, you keep good records and you’re right, this will help,” and with that he turns to return to his desk when I hear him making a few calls in order to get a hold of my step-father. It takes about ten minutes, and when he does I hear the following.
“Hello Chris, I have your step-son here and he says you stole something of his,”

A brief pause when I hear him say,

“Chris is an HP laptop?”

“Well then, I’m pretty sure it isn’t yours…..because your son has the receipt and I’m holding it right here and I’m looking right at it.”

“No, I don’t care what you THINK he did and you know the law, even if you had saw him did, took photos or even caught it on video, you can’t take someone’s else’s property and you know it’s illegal to do so.

(This apparently made Chris very angry, because then the officer’s next response was, )

“Well if you smash it, or damage it in any way, you’re liable for whatever happens and you’ll have to pay for whatever you break on that laptop and if that means you have buy him a brand new computer of equal cost you will and I’ll make sure of it.”

There was another brief pause, until I heard the Sergeant say,

“No, you’re half right, you will return it, but you’ll bring it here and I’ll give it to him, I don’t you want you to go anywhere near this kid,“ Then sarcastically he adds, “Oh and thank you for being so mature about this.”

Mr. Davenport returns to me shaking his head,

“Wow, your step-dad is a piece of work, but he will be dropping your computer off in the morning, but on the off chance he doesn’t call me,” He says handing me his card, “And I will personally go down and get your computer back.”

A snowman my cousin and I made a year later.

A snowman my cousin and I made a year later.

He then asked if I’d be willing to file an official report when I return to retrieve my property, which I agree to. I was tired of the all the childish games and wanted Chris to answer for at least a little of what he’s done.

The next day, I return with my father to state-troopers office and I discover that Chris is yet again refusing to return my property. Which infuriates and baffles me beyond belief, he had already been caught in a few lies, admitted to have stolen my computer, but was still acting like a child by refusing to do what he had been told to do. So I’m all too happy to oblige when the officers ask to take me for my statement. At this point I’m beginning to feel like a broken record as I go over my story again. They ask me the same questions as the Sergeant and they seem just as taken aback as he was and they seem just as annoyed with my step-fathers prepubescent childlike behavior as I was. So they go over his head, to the chief of Williams Town police to force Chris to return my computer or risk his job.
About fifteen minutes later Chris finally relents and comes in to speak to the officers, as well as to return my laptop, finally!

The officers are quick to escort me out and around the building afraid of what would happen if Chris saw me, or I him. My father is still in the waiting room as one of the officers leads me back to my dad’s car. He tells me they’re going to take his statement and that he’ll return with my computer.

Almost as soon as he disappears, I see my dad returning to the car with my computer in hand and relief washes over me. But I see he’s also angry and he opens the car door to hand me my laptop back, and tells me to make sure everything is there, heading back into the station.

The cop who had taken my statement returns then and climbs into the car with me, he tells me both Chris and Sergeant Davenport from the night before had confirmed everything I said, but Chris had no excuse as to why he refused my three hundred dollars when I had offered to him. The cop then asks me to turn on my computer and he sits with me as it boots up and as I check everything. Fortunately no damage had been done and everything was still in full working order. Then paranoid, I search through all the bags and compartments of my computer, making sure all my items were there and to be sure he hadn’t planted anything in my belongings, fortunately he hadn’t.

The officer then tells me that Chris wants me to take a lie detector test and I don’t think twice before answering, I agree because I had nothing to hide. Plus I figured it’d be more ammunition for the investigators to use against my step-father. The officer looks conflicted and tries telling me that I don’t have to, that if I decline it wouldn’t be by any means an admission of guilt. He tries to talking me out of my decision, but I stand firm. Because I’m angry and because I’m tired of always being made out to be the bad guy. I wanted to pull my mother’s and step-father’s truth out into the light and let everyone see the kind of people they really were.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken

Yet, my desire for to be vindicated and to have some sense of validation, would lead to more pain and discourse. I know now in hindsight that I had acted impulsively and without thinking.  I had even called my brother to update him on what happened, telling him I had agreed to the lie-detector, but all he could do was blame me for causing so much pain and turmoil in the family. It broke my heart hearing how he already made up his mind about me and he had forgotten everything he had known or had learned about me. He had me judged since the beginning, from before any of this even started. It’s true what they say, a lie will travel twice around the world, while the truth, is still putting on its shoes.

I found it odd how everyone could see the truth, everyone but my mother, my brother and the family who used to tell me how much they loved me growing up, their words I discovered had been hollow.

It took them weeks to finally get them around to giving me the polygraph, time that only caused all my negative thoughts and feeling to fester. Nightmares haunted me on most nights, while on others I dreamt of revenge, of making them regret everything they had done to me and put me through. I wanted my mother’s and step-father’s lives to fall apart, for my brothers to see the truth.

I suppose they had hoped the time between everything would cause me to calm down, but it did everything but. I was angry all the time, hurt, depressed and consumed by all these negative thoughts and feelings.

But when it rains it pours, the night before my polygraph was the beginning of the end for my grandmother who lived with my father and myself. She had fallen on her way to bed in the middle of the night and couldn’t get up. Fortunately my cousin Derek was there to hear her, who after failing to help her up, came and woke me. Together both he and I tried helping her back to her feet, but my grandmother God rest her spirit was obese and neither of us could get her up and I was afraid to pull too hard up on her in fear that I would tear her skin, because she was also a bit frail.

My proof that despite your struggles, you will find your smile again and with friends.

My proof that despite your struggles, you will find your smile again and with friends.

Out of options, I had to wake my father and then the three tried to get her up. Even with the three of us working together all we could do was get up, but just barely and but the strength had left my grandmother’s legs so even after we stood her up, she couldn’t stand or walk under her own.

Out of options, with my grandmother crying, we had no other choice but lay her back down, but on her back, instead of on her knees. Then much to my grandmother’s disapproval we had to call an ambulance, which only made her cry even more. She hated feeling so helpless.

Yet, I found myself overwhelmed by the outpouring of love our neighbors showed us, showed to me when they saw the ambulance loading my grandmother up into the back of their truck.

People I barely even knew were coming up to me, asking me if she was okay, hugging me and crying in my arms, while the paramedics took my grandmother to the hospital for observation,  leaving me wondering if she’ll be okay, or if she’ll ever be able to walk again.

Later that morning, I had to go in for my polygraph and on a whim; I asked the officer taking me what he thought my chances were of getting an apology if or when I pass. He shook his head and told me I shouldn’t hold my breath, then told me that no matter the outcome I should simply stay away, because a family shouldn’t ever do or put a son through everything they were putting me through. His words gave me something to consider….Realizing that he was right, all of this was wrong and never should have happened.

Now for those of who you never had a polygraph before, it’s not quite like what you see on TV. You get lead into a small room; they have a specialized chair for the polygraph against the wall, a pad on the floor to make sure you don’t move your feet in attempt to fool the polygraph. (Apparently shifting your feet while you’re hooked up to one of these can be an admission for guilt, so I was already getting nervous, by feeling like I’d have to be perfectly still or this thing would think I was lying.)

But before you’re hooked up into this chair, you’re briefly interviewed; my technician was an older gentleman, with an air of arrogance about him. When he asked if I had any questions or concerns about a polygraph, I told him my fear, which I think everyone has, which is telling the truth and have it think you’re lying. However the Technician was quick to explain all the technical stuff as if to assure me. When I along with everyone else knows that these machines aren’t admissible in court for a reason, we’ve heard it all our lives, or at least I had.  But according this gentleman the reason was just a technicality.

That's me in the Assassins Garb. Sometimes you just have to step outside yourself, lose yourself, have fun, even if think you'll a little foolish.

That’s me in the Assassins Garb. Sometimes you just have to step outside and focus more on the present and say to hell with anyone who may think you look a little foolish, happiness is found in the moment and memories last forever.

(It wasn’t until much later that I decided to do some homework, discovering the reason why polygraphs weren’t admissible in court. Which is they can give false positives and false negatives, especially when an even in question is emotionally stressful.

Then comes the interview.

Technician: “Have you ever taken a polygraph before?”

Me: “No.”
Tech: “Have you ever been arrested?”
Me: “Nope”

Tech “You ever gotten a ticket for speeding, parking or anything?”

Me: “Believe it or not, no, I tend to stay of trouble.”

Tech: “Well what about school, have you ever been in trouble at school, detention, or anything?”

Me: “Nope, I always kept my head down in school as well.
Tech: So, how honest of a person are you? One being you’re a compulsive liar, you can’t help but lie, with ten being you never told a lie.

Me: Well, I’m not perfect or anything, but I’m a pretty bad liar so I kind of got in the habit of telling the truth, so I’d say about a seven, or an eight?

Tech: “Oh? So I guess you’re just Mr. Perfect huh?” he says throwing his arms up in the air, “I guess you don’t even need to be here because you’re honest Abe, you never told a lie in your life. You’re just Mr. Honestly now aren’t you?”

Immediately I realize I’m in trouble, and that this guy was a royal douche. I realize I should have got up and left then, but I figured I had come this far, and it would make no sense for me to back out now. Plus I had promised my brother I would do this and I was determent to see this through to the bitter end.

So I immediately jump on the defensive explaining and reiterating what I had said and that I had occasionally lied to spare someone’s feelings, or to get out of work so I could hang out with my best friend who was on leave from the Marine Core, etc. (Just imagine that scene from Goonies when Chunk is confessing everything he did wrong to the Fratellis when they were threatening to put his hand in a blender. Because for a minute there I was channeling Chunk, confessing to every white lie I ever told and the reason I had.”the_fratellis-300x185

After the tech manages to shut me up, he asks me to sit in the chair and begins strapping in and I immediately begin freaking out. I know because he tells me as he looks at his instruments. He takes a few minutes telling me to relax and seems irritated by how long it takes for me to calm my frayed nerves.

Once calmed, he asks me a few practice questions and instructs me to intentionally lie at least once to calibrate his instruments. After a few more moments, he asks if I’m ready. I’m not, but I say yes anyway just to get this over with.

He proceeds asking me yes or no questions about that night and I find myself reliving it in my mind all over again, it’s like watching a bad movie on repeat. I feel my blood beginning to boil as he walks me through the night asking me yes or no questions about the day in question. My heart is pounding in my chest like a jackhammer. The tech asks me about the money and all I hear are Chris’s threats, his finger poking me in the chest, the force of him shoving me, throwing me against the wall. My voice is trembling as I answer.

The tech tells me to calm down, but I can’t and again he asks about the money and my thoughts race. I’m recalling every instance when I was a kid and had to take money from his wallet for lunch at school, or when I was younger how I would take a few pennies, (because I collected pennies) Then my thoughts were all over the place, I was psyching myself out, worse I couldn’t stop. My thoughts were everywhere, as my mind replayed the events over and over in my mind, making me feel sick and angry all at once.

Then it’s over and he’s unhooking me and he tells me he’s going to return with my results.

When he returns, he’s acting all cocky as he tells me I’ve failed the test and how he believes I was guilty. He tries making me confess, but I refuse insisting on my innocence, but he laughs and shakes his head, telling me how his machine says otherwise.

To help keep things light, here's me and my best friend & fellow writer on the catwalk.

To help keep things light, here’s me and my best friend & fellow writer on the catwalk.

My heart sinks, I don’t know what to think and I feel numb and that’s where I’ll end this story. I’ll leave it up to you to decide and choose what you believe or don’t. I will tell you that years later my brother and I briefly spoke and after he got done with his accusations and I informed him that I was innocent he asked me to take another test and prove it. Which to be honest I had thought about, but then I realized it was too late. I told him it would change or fix anything, even if I passed, you or them would insist I take it again, and again, because if the first one was wrong, so could be the second, or the third. Even if they accepted the results of a second or third test, it wouldn’t fix anything. It’s been six years, six years since I had any contact with any of them. (except for my brief heated exchanges with Dominic, or the one time little Christian contacted me to tell me how much he missed me and how much he wanted me to call to make peace with the family. But I couldn’t, not after all that’s happened. Not after I lost a family. I would forever be marked as the black sheep; I would never have their trust just as they will never have mine.

My mother and her family would only see the worst in me, judging me for everything I done wrong since the very day I was born. Truth is, I’ll never know if she really changed, if she had anything to do with what happened or not. Sadly I don’t think I’ll ever know, but I do sometimes wonder if I’ll ever hear from her again, if the truth about that day will ever come out and if I would hear about it if does.

I know my mother wasn’t perfect, and the situation sucked. But walking away was still one of the hardest choices I ever had to make. I lost my family days before Christmas and to this day the pain of losing everyone like that still hurts. That being said, I know my older brother was adamantly against me sharing this story, my story with the world. Nothing against him, he can be protective and loyal to a fault. But this needed to be shared and I needed to talk about it, to get the truth as I know it out. But it was C. Joybell, who said,
               “The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.”
Even when it was over, I was still miserable, drowning in a sea of depression, hearing everyone tell me,

“Hey, bad things happen,” or, “Hey, you’ll get over it.”

And Man, have I grown to hate that phrase, “You’ll get over it,” is a cliché that only causes trouble.

At the mall with friends who helped me heal.

At the mall with friends who helped me heal.

When you’re hurt, suffering from that pain of losing someone, or something that meant so much to you, there’s never any getting over it. Losing someone you love is to alter your life forever and you never get over it, because “it” is the person or persons you loved. Yeah, the hurt eventually stops, but it’s a long and hard road that cannot be rushed, or quickly forgotten. It takes time to heal, time to decide when to pick up the pieces and try to putting those pieces of your life back together. To regain some semblance of self, it takes time and patience.

I know you and others may have suffered worse loss, or pain, but that was your battle, for me, my battle and my loss had hit the hardest, because it was happening to me. When you become as broken as I was back then, it takes a long time stop feeling miserable, betrayed and depressed, time to stop thinking about killing yourself, and to finally stop being so angry all the time. And Eventually, I decided to stop being the victim and overcome my past and this horrible thing that happened just before Christmas.

At the park with another friend I've met along the way

At the park with another friend I’ve met along the way

But since then I’ve learned you have to let go. You have to release the hurt. Otherwise it will own you forever and you’ll never escape. You need to have the strength to fight back and take your life back. Dare, dare to take that first big step. Dare to take chances and to have hope, to dream, to be brave enough to live your life and remember the human heart can be disheartened by the most unreasonable self-judgments, because even when we take on giants, we too often confuse failure with fault, which I know all too well. The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. So when triumph comes at last, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning. I’ve experience true darkness and the pain of suffering in despair, which lead me down a path beyond my own moral ambiguity, where hatred and anger threatened to consume everything that I was. It took a long time for me to put the anger and my pain to rest. But the scars will always be there, reminding me of what was and what might have been, thinking back about my family I know it wasn’t always so bad, things happen, people change, some lie to themselves or accept half-truths because they fear what they will otherwise see, or find hidden there in their reflection. Becoming afraid of the avenues the truth would lead them and what it would mean when the truth is finally uncovered.

The rest of my new family

The rest of my new family

Matt and his lovely wife, who have become my family.

Matt and his lovely wife, who have become my family.

But yes new people had since come into my life, friends and other loved ones who refused to let me just drift away, which for a while, was something I tried to do. I couldn’t bring myself to grow close with anyone, out of fear of the hurt they may bring. Because the gap never closes, how could it? The particularness of having someone who matters enough to grieve over is not erased by anyone, or anything but death. I can tell you that this hole in my heart is in the shape of the family whom I lost but will never forget. Those I’ve opened my heart too and forgave time and again. Just so they could dig a little deeper, making the betrayal hurt all the more. To be honest, these holes, no one else will ever fill. Not Matt, his loving and adoring wife and not their three unbelievable and magnificent children who’ve grown to call me Uncle Josh. Who have their own place in my heart and as much as I love them, they will never fill the holes left by the family that once was. Why would I want them, or anyone else too? Because there is never getting over it, not really, of course, the wounds can and may eventually close and scab over becoming the very scars that make up who were are, reminding us of our journey on this crazy path called life.

Matt dealing me but a flesh wound Christmas 2012

Matt dealing me but a flesh wound Christmas 2012

My scars will always be there. Sometimes I lay awake at night, thinking about those I’ve lost, the ones who went away, who I’ll never see again, the ones I still love and wonder how they’re doing. I feel robbed of the chance to see my younger brothers grow up into men, and of being there for my older brother when he met the woman of his dreams. I’ve lost half my family in less than a day and for the longest time I did whatever it took to distract me from the pain of losing them.

But now, I try and live as much for tomorrow as I can and on some nights I still pray that someday my name will be cleared and I’ll receive that call and hear that heartfelt apology that follows. Imagining how we’ll talk, cry and catch up on all the things we missed in each other’s lives. I pray for the truth to finally come out. But all I really know for certain is what I’ve shared with you here. Which is all the truth I know and as well as I know it. But that was then, that was me looking to the past and now I’m tired of looking back, so from here on now and every day, I look back and think “look how far I’ve come.”And that’s what keeps me going.
-J Cooper.alone in the woods

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Scars of Who We Are: The final chapter.

Filed under: Life — Leave a comment
December 16, 2013

Scars of Who We Are chapter 17
~A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only requirement is the ability to remember every scar.-Stephen King

Man Sitting on a Step

Why you can never go home again: Remembering every scar:

There I was, staring up into the face of my step-father, his face twisting in rage.
“I had three hundred dollars in my wallet and I want you to give it back to me!” He screams shoving again, harder against the wall and panic grips my body as my mouth goes dry, fear is all I feel. So I say nothing, as he shouting his accusations into my face, drilling me with questions, never waiting for me to answer.
Picture2 (1)
He shoves me three or four more times and I can’t help but feel as if he’s trying to provoke me, my fear gives way to self-righteous indignation and I step into him and shout,
“I didn’t take your damn money, I never touched your fucking wallet, feel free to search me and go through my things, because I don’t have it, then once you’re finished, I’m done with you and this family, never again will pull this kind of crap on me.”

For a moment, he looks like he’s about to hit me and he draws his fist back, but I stand firm, making it a point not to so much as flinch. I’m ready for blow, but it never comes, dropping his fist, he instead jabs me in the chest with his finger.

“I want my money,” He shouts, bringing his face so close to mine I can feel his breath on me, as he says, “And I WILL search you and you’ll do whatever I tell you to do.”
He then orders me to put my hands behind my head and then proceeds to frisk me, even though all I’m wearing is a t-shirt and my boxers.
I comply, even though all I want to do is shove him away and tell him to go screw himself, but I don’t and I abide by the violation of his hands patting me down and searching for what I know is nothing. Seeing him uniform intimidates me more than I care to say.

“What the hell is this?” I ask equal parts offended and violated by the absurdity it all.
He ignores me and turns me to face the wall, I’m half expecting him to begin reading me my rights, but he doesn’t.

“You know I don’t have anything,” I tell him as he continues to frisk me, so angry that my heart feels like it’s about to burst from my chest.

“I had three hundred dollars in my wallet and it’s gone and you’re the only one who could have taken it.” (Every day when Chris got off work, he would come in from the garage and lay his wallet on a dry sink by the door leading to the garage, or upstairs on the kitchen counter. Something he’d been doing since I was a kid.

“Listen, I never touched your wallet, you’re a cop, see if my fingerprints are on anything!” And he responds by shoving my face into the wall as he orders me to shut-up, telling me the only thing he wanted to hear come from my mouth was a confession.

So I speak all the words he doesn’t want to hear.

“Why would I steal from you? I came down for Christmas!”

All of us together just two years prior.

All of us together just two years prior.

He turns and flips the mattress off the bed and finding nothing under the bed and begins running his fingers through the discarded sheets, finding nothing he begins going through the pillow cases.

“Are you sure mom didn’t take it, or that the kids by mistake, or that you didn’t lose it?” (I halfheartedly believed they may have need lunch money and our mother had told them to get what they needed out of Chris’s wallet, just as she had told me time and again back when I was growing up there.)

But he doesn’t care about anything I have to say I doubt he was even listening and he waits until I try to help by putting the mattress back on the bed, but he turns on me, shoving me, pushing me back up against the wall, he’s screaming at me again, calling me a liar, a thief a delinquent, telling me how I had always been a punk, even though I have never been in any kind of trouble before.

He threatens me with jail time, lecturing me how three hundred dollars is enough to qualify for a felony offense.
(I hereby apologize in advanced for the language and any I may have let slip earlier on, but I feel it’s required to be as accurate as possible)

“I didn’t take your God Damn money!” I shout back, with my hands trembling, I don’t believe I’ve ever been this angry before, I didn’t think it were possible.
“Oh yes you did,” He shouts rearing up towards me, hitting me with the hell of his hands, “You did!” He says again with another hard shove. I’m so angry I can barely see straight and I want to hit him, I want to hit back as hard I could, as many times as I could. But I don’t, I just grit my teeth and do my best to refrain from the violence and rage I felt coursing through my veins.

He takes a moment to stare into my eyes and I meet his gaze defiance, I had been bullied for most my life and a coward for almost half as long and I was tired of being afraid. After a beat he asks where my clothes were and I point to them as the hung on the closet door. He smiles and pulls them down, searching through the pockets and the folds in my clothes. Finding he nothing he throws them at me and orders me to get dressed. So I ask him to leave for a little and he whirls back like he’s going to hit me and again I stay still and unflinching as he drops his fist, telling me no, he says,

“No, I don’t trust you I’m taking my eyes off you until you’re out of my house.”

It’s hard not to be a little scared seeing my a cop in uniform harassing you, let alone one acting like how he was and with him being my step-father. I don’t like it, but still I dress as he watches, my hands never stop shaking. I want to hit something, I want to hit him, I’m angry, scared and frustrated by the absurdity of it all.

CIMG0020

Anyone can lose money, heck I lost money before, misplaced it even, or spent more than I thought. It happens.

“Hurry up I don’t want you staying in my house any longer than you have too.” He says, watching me fumble with my clothes, but I still can’t keep my hands from shaking I’m so angry now at the injustice of it all, with no outlet to channel my fury. Finding my voice I decide to try and reason with him by saying,

“Look, I’ve been nothing but cooperative and I think you know me better than this, I think you know I didn’t take your money, maybe, just maybe you just lost it?”

“I didn’t lose it! He screams, charging at me, grabbing me by the collar do the shirt and yanking me up and practically off my feet, with his voice almost screeching at me as he repeats, “I didn’t lose it, I didn’t!”

Now, I’m sure he’s going to hit me, perhaps even begin beating me to death, but he doesn’t and I just hold his gaze, with my teeth clenched and breathing heavily as I don’t know what to expect to come from him next.
“You’ve always been sneaky and a little liar, you’re a fucking punk and you’ve always been a little shit.”
I take his comments in stride and careful speak each word as I very calmly say,

“I never stole. I’ve never been in trouble-”
“Never been in trouble?” He interrupts, speaking in high, mocking tones, “But you dress up all in black and getting into fights at the the county fair!”

“That was over five years ago and that’s not what happened and you know it!”
“Oh I know and just as I know you took my money,” He tells me.

“You know what fine, let’s go down to the station and hook me up to a lie-detector test, I’ll show you I’m telling the truth,” I say, with the internal, emotional war raging beneath my breast making my words come out in an unsteady rush. My blood is boiling hot and I can’t help but feel hurt, betrayed, scared angrier than I had ever been. I honestly didn’t know if I’d find myself sitting inside a jail cell by myself for Christmas or not.

Sneering, he grabs my arm, wrenching me away from the bed, pulling me out into the hallway saying,
“Oh you won’t have a choice,” he says manically and with a smile that unnerves me to my very core, “So you bet your ass you’ll be taking a polygraph and I’ll be there to see you fail,” He says rather matter-of-factly.
Man looking out office window at night
I don’t say a word, it’s all I can do is to grit my teeth and and wait for release me, as I do every I can to keep from going on the offensive. I wanted to hurt him more than I care to admit, I wanted to knock that sick and smug smirk off his face, but I reminded myself that he was a cop and in uniform, so it was likely that was exactly what he wanted.

Letting me go, he snorts and orders me downstairs and I take the steps two at a time, with him following close behind me. Once downstairs I immediately see my laptop is gone. I begin looking frantically around the rest of my bags for it, but to no avail, then Chris asks what I’m doing.

“I’m looking for my computer,” I tell him, not giving me the benefit of seeing my face.

“Oh, it’s mine now, I took it and put it somewhere you’ll never get it,” He says derisively.
I turn on him then and I feel myself reaching my breaking point, with my heart feeling like it was fit to explode.

“That’s not right man, you can’t take my computer.”

“No he says,” stepping into me and once again invading my personal space as he leers at me, jabbing me in the chest with his fat finger as he says, “I can do whatever I want, you’re a guest in my house, you have no rights here.” He’s so pleased with himself that all I can see is red.
Fighting the urge to shove him away and start beating him with whatever object my hands could find, I swallow my rage, with my thoughts racing. All I can think about is turning the tables on him someway, somehow, to make him sorry for all of this.So I say the only thing I can think of saying,

“You’re crazy and if you don’t give me back my property…”

“You’ll what?”He asks, smiling, reminding me of every bully I ever met.

“I’ll call the police.” I figure the threat alone would be enough to bring him back to his senses and let him see reason. But instead he smiles and says,

“Why? They can’t do anything for you, there’s nothing you can do!” He laughs, taunting me,

“Besides who are you? You’re nobody, you’re no one, you don’t matter, I’m a cop, I’m a someone and there’s nothing the police can do for you. This is a domestic dispute and there’s nothing you, your father, or anyone else can do about it. This is my home and you’re in my house and I can do whatever I want to you and no one can say or do anything about it.”

At this point the thought of beating him to death really doesn’t seem all that bad, more to the point I’d at least wipe that sick toothy grin of his off his face. It was then I realize he was enjoying this and it felt like no matter what I did I was playing further into his sick little game.

Seeing that I had nothing else to say, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the pocket-watch I had gotten him for Christmas, (I gave both of him and my mother their presents a bit early, hoping it’ll cure whatever it was I was feeling. Plus I halfheartedly believed they might have thought that I was only visiting so that I could get presents, which was why they were acting so peculiar so I had figured if they saw I actually put a thought of thought on getting them all presents, it would prove otherwise. Evidently it had not.) Chris then hands me the pocket-watch and tells me he doesn’t need or want it anymore, so I should take it back.
I snap, gripping the watch tightly in my hand, I fling it across the room, nearly kill my mom’s parrot,(That was an accident and in my defense I wasn’t thinking or aiming) and the watch bounces hard of the wall, leaving a sizable indention in the wall where it struck.
Immature? Maybe, but it was enough to take that smug look off his face as he stormed across the room to examine the hole I put in the wall. I don’t apologize, even as he tells me how I’ll have to pay for it.

however to wipe the smirk off his face as he stormed across the room and flipped out about the hole I put in his wall. I don’t apologize, but he tells me I’d have to pay for it and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it at least a little bit.

“Look,” I manage to say with my voice stained as I fought to keep my hatred for him in check. “Search my bags, search everything you want, I don’t have your fucking money!” I spit the last few words out as I see his smile returning.

“I already searched your bags and went through all your things,” He says contemptuously, closing the distance between us and shoves me painfully against the dry sink as he smiles at me again. At this point i hear my mother pulling into the garage and so does he and he backs off, his grin disappears and begins shouting at the top of his lungs,

“But I know you have it, or that you hid the money somewhere in this house and I’m not giving you back your computer until you give me my money, I’ll tell you that much right now.” My mom slips into the house, silent as a mouse not saying anything and I look at my step-father, seething with rage at his belligerence and the air of arrogance about him.

So I think of the only solution that I can to bring about a solution of some kind.
“Fine…You win alright? I don’t have your money, I never took it, but if you want, we can go to the bank together and I’ll withdraw three hundred dollars and I’ll give it to you in return for my computer.”

“No!” He barks, “I don’t want your money, I want my money!”

I look to my mom, hoping she heard what I heard, saw what I saw, but she just stands there, staring solemnly back at me.
“What sense does that make? You’re accusing me of stealing three hundred bucks, I offer to get you three hundred bucks, but you say that’s not good enough?”

“No, I don’t want your stupid money, you don’t have any money, I want my money!” He says venomloulsy , as if repeating the statement would somehow make any more sense.
He then launches into a tirade, calling me every name he could think of and the whole time all I can do is stare back at my mother. I wait for her to step up, for her to be a mom, to defend me, to fight for me, to do or say something. But she doesn’t. Instead she quietly asks if I took the money and frustrated I tell her that I had not, but how I wished I had.

Chris then says something about not being to tolerate the sight of me and tells my mother to have me gone by the time he returns.
I look at her and try to plead with her to see some reason,

“You can’t let him take my computer, my life’s work is on that thing and I hadn’t backed anything up.”

“Josh if you took the money, just tell me and you can give it to me and I’ll tell him I took it.”

“I didn’t take his money, but he did take my computer, and in my computer bag has library books inside it too, I can’t afford to replace everything. “

She nods, and tells me she’ll talk to him. She then tells me to grab my things and she’d take me home.

“Mom,” I reason, “ look at me, you have to know I’m better than this and that I wouldn’t steal from you guys, or anyone else. Besides you know I’m a horrible liar and I’ve always admitted to any wrong I’ve done, granted when I was young I would try to hide it from you so that I wouldn’t get beat. But I always admitted to what I did and I didn’t do this, never this; this is too big…this is too bad, too wrong.” ( Although I’ve always been fairly honest, during the course of my life, I have always been a practical jokester, but one thing I would never do is mess with someone else’s money.)

“I don’t know what to believe,” She tells me.

“He searched me, went through my things, didn’t find anything, no proof or evidence and I offered to get you 300 hundred dollars in order to get my computer back and you sat there as he told it wasn’t good enough. Why? Because if I stole from you, it makes no difference whose three hundred dollars you’ll be getting, mine, or yours. This is wrong, all wrong, what do I have to do to get you to believe me?”

“Josh you always do this and get overly dramatic.”

“Are you serious? You people took something very important to me and you did it without just cause, without proof and I’m being dramatic? I’ve been harassed and bullied, with my every attempt to be reasonable ignored or shot down.”

“Well you could have hidden it somewhere,” She tells me and I throw my arms up in the air and shake my head.

“Really? That’s what you’re going to do, are you going to keep coming up with different things I could have done with his money? Do you have an excuse at the ready for everything I say or do?”

“Josh, you’ve always been very spiteful and you probably just thought you were owed it,”

“Are you kidding me? I forgave you, I came down on my weekends off work just to give you a free babysitting and all those times I never asked for anything, no compensation, nothing and all those times I came here I never once took anything, why would I suddenly do so now?”

“Josh if you give me the money I can just tell Chris I-” My mother began before I cut her off.

“There’s no money to be had, and despite whatever you may think, I didn’t take it and how stupid do you think I am? I don’t have a car, I have no getaway and I’m still here for a few more days, do you actually think I would be dumb enough to steal that kind of money and just sit back hoping you didn’t notice it was missing?”

“Josh, Chris has always been very careful and meticulous with his money,”

“So, that doesn’t mean anything, he can still lose, or misplace it just like everyone else.”

“Well why do you think he’s accusing you?” She asks, as we climb into her car.

“Because,” I tell her as I climb into the passenger seat beside her, “I’m an easy target, he knows our history and all about the bad blood between us. I’m the easy mark.”
My words must have had some effect, because she doesn’t say anything until we’re on the road and I’m watching the house fade away in the rear-view when she asks,

“Do you think you’re being setup?” There was such clarity and innocence in the way she asked, I caught myself staring at her for a long time before I could answer. For a while I was thinking she had something to do with all of this, but now I wasn’t so sure and to be honest, I’m still not certain.
But her words get me thinking and I think back about how he was asking about my laptop and how much it cost, how he refused the three hundred dollars I offered him and how quickly he was to accuse me of everything.

“Yeah…Yeah I do,” I tell her.
A few moments pass and she asks me why I thought he took my computer. So I tell her,
“Because my computer is worth a lot more than three hundred bucks, which is why he was so quick to declined my offer when I made it.”
Silence fills the car and after awhile I tell her everything that happened and how it happened since he woke me up. As I talk she’s silent and never says a word, even when I’m finished she just sits there driving, never uttering a word.

We drive the rest of the way in silence and I’ll be lying if I said I didn’t think about grabbing the wheel and steering it into oncoming traffic, or to send us careening into a semi-truck. I was in a place of such darkness and hatred, it was consuming me.

So by the time she pulled up into my driveway I reached for the door and hesitated,

“I’m giving you three days….” I whisper. “Three days to make this right, to return my computer to me. If you do this, we’ll be family; if you don’t….you’ll be dead to me.”

“Ok,” was all she said.

I opened the door and step out of the car and just as quietly I hear her say,
“I love you,”

“We’ll see,” I respond, grabbing my things and slamming the car door shut behind me.

(I know, I know, I said there were just two chapters left. But it had gotten a bit long. So I had to break the final Chapter up into two parts. The conclusion I promise will be coming soon. )

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Scars of Who We Are Chapter XV-Home

Filed under: Life — 13 Comments
November 8, 2013

And two chapters remain.

Chapter 15 ~For years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

 CIMG0250

Shortly after I introduced Rebekah to my mom’s family, I ended up cutting ties once more with my mother and began distancing myself from her and the rest of the family. In truth I just couldn’t take all the lies anymore and I was done with feeling like a belittled second class member of the family. I was done with the whole thing. I tried my best to make things work, but no matter how hard I would try, nothing ever worked, I would always leave feeling worse about myself than I did before I visited. Also sadly for reasons beyond my control, Rebekah and I ended up going our separate ways. I admit now that it had been stupid of me to break up with her, but there was drama that entered our lives from a most trusted friend who through jealously managed to create a rift between her and myself. For me the wound festered in paranoia, fear and crippling doubt, which forced me to break things off before the drama got any worse than it already had. All because a friend, a cousin who I loved as a brother, who’s betrayal had come unexpected, cutting me deeper than he’ll ever know. Torn, I ended my relationship with Rebekah and needless to say the New Year wasn’t that great for me.

My older brother and his dog Dozer

My older brother and his dog Dozer

Roughly, a year later I was beginning to feel alright again about my life and where it was heading. Slowly I began rebuilding my relationship with my cousin which wasn’t easy, knowing I’d never fully be able to trust him again, but we had been close since we were six and it was from this sentiment I decided not to let our relationship fall to the wayside, to be lost and scattered on the winds of time.  He made a mistake and I couldn’t exactly fault him for it, he had liked Rebekah for the same reasons that caused me fallen head over heels in love with her. Then as fate would have it, I ran into my older brother while working at the Kenton County Library in Newport. To my surprise we struck up a good rapport with each other, better than any we had ever had in the past. We ended up exchanging numbers for I had lost his and he mine and after a couple of days he and I began hanging out. It felt good to reconnect to his brother I barely knew. Growing up I barely even knew him, for he rarely ever wanted anything to do with me, other than tormenting or teasing me in some way. Then when he did finally want to get to know me, I didn’t really want to get close to him, because I knew a little of his involvement with drugs, drinking and his run ins with the police. All the things I didn’t care much for, or want any part of, also, I didn’t trust his friends and knew the kind of crowd he liked to runaround with. But during this time, he started going back to church and he left most of his old friends behind for the purpose of carving out a new life for himself. To my surprise I discovered he and I had a lot in common and shared similar interest in movies, the outdoors, martial arts and philosophical views. We were also both born again Christians, starting down a new path and it felt good to find myself going down the same path with my brother. In a few months I had the kind of relationship with my older brother that I used to always dream about having when I was a kid. We were as brothers should be. I trusted him without question, confided in him as you would your closest friend. After years of never knowing my brother, I had found him, just as he had with me. It only took us two decades to finally get there and to form that brotherly bond that all siblings should have.

My brother and I hiking at Red River Gorge

My brother and I hiking at Red River Gorge

In time, I grew to almost forget how he used to tease and make fun of me, making the past that once was feel not so much like a distant memory, but as something that had happened to someone else.  But after a time, he began asking me about my relationship with our mother and pushing for me to talk to her, to take the first steps in forgiveness and to forget about whatever differences we had in the past. Something I couldn’t bring myself to do, time and again I kept trying to explain to him without telling him exactly why I couldn’t do as he asked, I couldn’t go back down the road,because I knew all that would be waiting for me would be more pain and disappointment. I spent months, and a year building back up that wall around my heart and guarding myself from her. I was terrified of the prospect of letting my mother back into my heart just so that she could wreck it all over again. But no matter what I said, or how hard I tried to ignore and change the subject, he wouldn’t stop, insisting that I just talk to her and bury the hatchet, to make amends and forget the past to start anew. The more he talked, the more I found myself wanting to tell him everything and how weary it became keeping the truth locked up within the confines of my heart. But I feared the truth and what it would do to him. Maybe I was a little selfish in doing so, fearing that if I told him, it would cause the relationship we had been building to unravel completely,

My brother and me on the beach

My brother and me on the beach

because I doubted he would believe anything negative I had to say about his mother. I was also afraid of what would happen if he did believe me and what that it would cost him. Our mother was always good to him, bordering on spoiling him even, she had always been there for him, looked out for him and supported him when no one else did. How could I take that away from him and I did it wouldn’t make me any better than her. If my brother listened to me and took my side it would take away yet another pillar of support that he had and he didn’t have many since his real father had been a deadbeat. But no matter what I said, or how hard I tried to ignore and change the subject, he wouldn’t stop, insisting that I just talk to her and bury the hatchet, to make amends and forget the past to start anew. The more he talked, the more I found myself wanting to tell him everything and how weary it became keeping the truth locked up within the confines of my heart. But I feared the truth and what it would do to him. Maybe I was a little selfish in doing so, fearing that if I told him, it would cause the relationship we had been building to unravel completely, because I doubted he would believe anything negative I had to say about his mother. I was also afraid of what would happen if he did believe me and what that it would cost him. Our mother was always good to him, bordering on spoiling him even, she had always been there for him, looked out for him and supported him when no one else did. How could I take that away from him and I did it wouldn’t make me any better than her. If my brother listened to me and took my side it would take away yet another pillar of support that he had and he didn’t have many since his real father had been a deadbeat.

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Of course it didn’t help matters much that I also kinda figured that my my mother had already told and convinced my brother of her side of things and anything that I would say would be but lies in his eyes. Because I long since saw the power of a lie and how quickly it can travel around the world, while the truth is still at home putting on its shoes. People in my experience always seem to believe the first story they hear and it doesn’t that the lie can often be easier to digest than the truth, because the truth can often be far more painful to accept because of what it means. Many are all too eager to accept and believe in the lie, than see the logic behind the truth. So I feared I would lose my brother forever, or wound him beyond measure if my truth ended up costing him his relationship with his mother and it was in this I was willing to just leave things be. His relationship with our mother was his and his alone, it wasn’t mine. Plus I didn’t want to put him in that kind of situation that would put him between her and me, I respected and accepted the circumstances that his mother wasn’t mine, the woman I knew as our mother was completely different from the one he knew. That being said, no one deserves being put in a situation where they have to choose between family and I would never envy anyone in that position. Like myself, my brother can be infinitely stubborn and for whatever reason he wouldn’t give up on trying to get me to work with him on reestablishing this relationship with our mother, whenever we were out and there was any lull in the conversation, he’d start telling me how I had only one mother and how the bible says we should honor our mother and father. Once, I even came close to telling him the truth, by asking,

“But what if your mother or father doesn’t exactly honor or respect you?”

“She’s your mother and she gave you life,” He argued,

“Listen…I never told you this, but do you know what she told me when I was sixteen?” I asked, turning in my seat to look at him, not wanting to tell him that story, but at the same time felt so tired feeling like I was living a lie by not telling him the true nature of my relationship with our mother.

“Look, I know you two had your issues in the past, but it’s over and done with, you can say one thing, and she’ll say another, it’s time to get over it and remember you’re both family, forget the past, live for tomorrow instead.”

“Its not so easy,” I told him, knowing from his tone and the look he gave me that he didn’t want to hear my story about when I was sixteen. So I dropped the subject and for the moment so did he.

Once during this time I even dreamt about it, I dreamed I gave my mother another chance and once again it ended in pain and discord. In my dream I was back home. My mother was screaming at me, accusing me of something and telling me how I was this huge disappointment, an accident she wished that would have died in the womb. Having heard enough, I turned and went into into the room that used to be mine, but now it was mine again, filled with relics throughout my childhood. My old nightlight, my Batman doll, my spider-man action figures, my story time clock and in this dream I pulled this old burlap sack from my closet and began collecting these relics of my childhood, stuffing them down into this burlap sack, because I planned on taking it all with me, everything. All the while, my mother and step father screaming profanities at me, pulling and tearing at my clothes, shoving me as I ignored them and continued collecting everything from my childhood, before I finally turned on her shouting,

“I’ve had it, I’m done with you and all these games, I’m leaving and never coming back, you have wish and I’m never coming back!”

I awoke as my mother screamed and shoved me down the stairs, leaving me grasping at empty air as I fell still gripping my burlap sack. I awoke in a cold sweat and call Rebekah, who despite everything that happened between us, was still a good friend.

Me goofing off behind my sleeping step-father on the last vacation I'll ever share with them.

Me goofing off behind my sleeping step-father on the last vacation I’ll ever have with them.

My cousin derek, me, my brother and Jenifer

My cousin derek, me, my brother and Jenifer

I told her about my older brother and my dream, how I was struggling to find the right thing to do and her advice was for me to stand my ground. She believe the Lord was trying to warn me what would happen if I returned home, if I let my mother back into my life she would only break me again, she advised me told me to have a sit down with Dominic and just tell him everything.

Sadly I never had the chance, (I’m also a victim of always trying to find the right moment for such things) Because before I could, Dominic had asked me to a movie and when we pulled into the parking lot of the Danbury Theater, his phone rang as he parked his jeep he tossed me the phone saying,

“They want to talk to you,” and he jumped out of his jeep before I could ask who it was, but I should have guessed.

He shut the door and began pacing around the front of his jeep as I tentatively brought the phone to my ear and whispered, “Hello?”

The voice on the other ended mirrored my tone as they greeted me; my mother spoke as if she wasn’t sure how to proceed, asking me how I was, about my work and what I have been up to.

I answer, keeping my responses as short as possible, fearing my voice would betray me and hating how I still loved her even after everything that’s happened.

Like my brother, a part of me still wanted and longed for this family. Which I didn’t know until right then as I spoke with her that day on the phone, just hearing her voice made me realized how much I missed her, missed all of them  my little brothers I missed the most.

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She asked about my grievances, and then gave me apologies and excuses/explanations as I spoke. We ended our conversation with her telling me how much she missed and loved me; reluctantly I told her how I loved her too.

I wasn’t angry about what my brother did, at the time I actually felt a little better having talked with her. So in the weeks and months that followed I gradually allowed my brother to bring me around our mother. Naturally I was suspicious and wary at first, but gradually she managed to coax me out from behind my walls and for a while everything seemed fine. The past seemed good and gone and I began believing my mother had truly changed for the better. Yeah we still had our bumps in the road, but the ride wasn’t as rocky as it once was and I was happy to finally have my family back, even though my father had strongly disapproved of me trying to reestablished this relationship with my mother and her side of the family, but this was something I myself wanted and I wanted more than anything for it work, to be real, I needed it so that I could finally heal and maybe even forget about the past. Little did I know I was setting myself up to learn why it is they say you can never go home again.

CIMG0020

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