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.
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