We've never met, but can you help me?

Hi, I'm Grace ~ we've never met....I can't really talk to you but I need to know if you can help me.  This is what I was thinking to myself as I sat on the hard wooden bench outside the office of the therapist I had picked from the preferred provider list my insurance company posted online.  I knew I need help, but I didn’t know how I was going to get that help when I wasn’t willing to talk to a stranger.  Really, she was a stranger, just someone whose name I picked from a list. 

Hi, I'm Grace ~ I am married with 2 children, 1 boy, 1 girl ~ in that order.  I'm a dog person...I like cats but the hus is allergic.  My favorite color is pink and I am a taurus (which should alert you to my tendency toward stubbornness).  I prefer down pillows and lots of 'em!  I am intelligent and creative...and very independent.  I tend to be overprotective of my children - my son calls it my 'worry meter', but they mean everything to me and I want to protect them from everything that could hurt them.  I love to sing, out loud, especially in the car.  I have never been out of the United States but would love to go to Greece someday.  I love the musical Phantom of the Opera and have seen it live... I hate onions and hominy and pretty much all meat - and right now my favorite food is cheese quesadillas.  Every night I sing "Baby Mine" to my daughter when I tuck her into bed.  I have a past, everyone does, right?  But I don't talk about anything that happened before college, and not much until age 23.

I've been in therapy before - many times before.  But I have this incredibly hard exterior that has never been penetrated by a 'professional'.  Not one.  Some therapists have told me I have a lot of anger...depression - in college - one therapist told me after 3 sessions that I was fine and she didn't even know why I was there ~ and that was after I told her I had seriously considered killing myself in the shower with a razor...I was 19.

I don't know why I'm here today.  Well, I do, but I can't talk about it.

I have major trust issues ~ I'm hypervigilent and always on guard and I will search for reasons not to trust you.  If you hurt me I will pull away from you and I won't let you back in.  I would like to ask you if you can help me, that's why I called but because I cannot trust you I can't really tell you anything right now...but I really need to know if you can help me...because if I can't find someone to help me I don't know what will happen to me but I do know that I can't do this alone anymore.

But I can't tell you that.  Because I don't know you…I don’t know you and I don't trust you.  So I will not let you see the weak and frightened Grace.  I cannot take the lid off of the box that contains the first 14 years of my life because it will all spill out and I am afraid I won't be able to put it back in...and it is scary, and ugly, and shameful, and bad.  It's very bad.  And I can't talk about it.  But it’s overwhelming me now and I need to talk about it, but I can’t.

I really need to know if you can help me...my thoughts were interrupted when she opened her office door.

Always maintain plausible deniability because the truth is a journey into madness.

I have found myself entangled in untold numbers of dysfunctional situations that, since I knew of no other choice, were by their merely being endured incorporated into my experience database, so to speak. Having never been given the opportunity to engage  and integrate normal life-affirming morals and values from the very beginning of life I have come to believe that the extremely unconventional condition I find myself in may involve  some of the following past situations.

I was born to parents who did not want me or love me. The bastard child of a deadbeat drunk is not an enviable position to find oneself in, especially when she is an uncaring alcoholic.  I have never met my biological father, but I cannot fathom he was worse than my step-father.  All of my mother's actions toward me were conditioned on the sheer shameful fact or evidence of my existence and of course that  I was an unwanted outcome to their undignified and eventually much regretted coupling.  That my brothers and I were allowed to survive at all I seem to think was a product of the  lawful consequences of allowing a child in your care to die, and not concerned with upbringing.

I was never introduced to the concepts of love or happiness except by way of books and even then far too late to make any kind of psychologically important impression.  The same could be said for the concepts of friendship, parent, wife, mother, or any number of other life affirming ideological constructs. 

I was cruelly abused, physically, sexually, and emotionally, in one way or another by

almost all I happen to encounter till I was around 14 years old when I found I might be able to ward off at least some of the abusers. There must have been exceptions but the impressions they have made have been forgotten and overwhelmed by the sheer volume and unrelenting nature of the abuse. And I am sure that since my experience was primarily as being abused, I would not have recognized kindness as such if it had been offered anyway.  The same holds

true of me now.

Shame and humiliation was so early on directed at and heaped upon my brothers and I that we seemed to have made the leap in logic that that was what life was supposed to be for us.  Can you imagine a life where shame and humiliation are so prevalent and unremitting, that a child, at least on a conscious level, could not conceive of any other condition to apply to themselves? I am still wrestling with those ghosts. The wheels of my mental machinery are still not able to come to comforting answers to questions I am hardly able to frame.

Years later I could never admit to anyone what had happened to me. I led a life of denial, deflecting my denial, pain, and my perceived humiliation and shame. With a past full of unspeakable repressed nightmares and a future of more of the same awaiting, at the age of 35 I found myself caught in a toxic existential conundrum of self-doubt, loneliness, self-hate, and hopelessness.

It is much like running from something in the dark that you can't see but is always chasing you. It's like running from something that you can never admit to running from because no one else knows it is chasing you. I do believe that if I had stopped to look at and confront what   was out there I would have been the worse off. Better to run and deny than stop and face a thing that I was not able to face, understand, or defend against, without a psychotic break.

That is not to say that I was unaffected by the unconscious knowledge of the truth of that denial and flight; it was always dogging my heels. I was reminded of and reinforced in understanding my position in society, day in and day out.  Survival meant the absolute denial of any other reality in the face of unflagging contempt.  And I did what I could to survive.