As one can imagine from reading the previous sections of the Trauma Bang Bang series, there was more abuse that continued throughout my early adult years. I attracted very damaged men and gave them everything I could offer with no attention to my own emotional needs. I made unsafe and impaired decisions about money, friends, jobs, substances, places to live, and every other aspect of my life.

My mother did not transition well to an adult relationship with me. I learned helplessness under her control, and it was in her own best interests to keep me in that position. I was responsible for her emotions. I represented the launching pad and the landing zone for her reactions to everything that she believed happened in her life. In general, this was every terrible thing that other people had done to her while she deflected responsibility in presumption of her own complete innocence. My authentic self shrank and disappeared in a way that is difficult to describe.
Financial abuse was a large part of our relationship in my twenties. I paid rent to my mother because she was supposed to use the money to pay her mortgage loan that was held by my grandmother. She lied and maneuvered to take several hundred per month for herself. She prioritized her own needs and remained therefore blameless in her decisions. She manipulated my student loan amounts that I didn’t know about. The parking tickets she put under my name at my university almost kept me from graduating and I knew nothing about them. The money she did help me with was paid back with my unwilling participation in the fleecing of her customers. She opened her own business and began to harm others with her financial decisions as well. As usual, she also complained about me with my boyfriends, criticized my weight constantly, and never missed an opportunity to tell me I looked tired.

In retrospect, the abusive dynamic in my relationship with my mother continued throughout the early years of my adulthood because my identity had been warped, repressed, and ignored for most of my developmental years. I did not know anything different. I accepted what scraps of attention or food she offered as a caregiver, but more than that, I exalted her, as others did. She was talented, intelligent, and beautiful. Men desired her and they wanted to talk to me about it. Women were drawn to her bubbly and gossipy personality.

She had succeeded in becoming popular like she always wanted. The price was my safety and identity as she propped herself up with my stolen strength that had been turned into silence. I felt like the only one who knew how she really behaved and perceived others. I experienced her knee jerk reaction and triggers about everything and she was able to keep those hidden from her friends. Even her closest friends were superficial, and did not know about her abusive, alcoholic boyfriend or anything else that would scratch the façade.

When I tried to reach out to others who I thought were close to me, they seemed surprised and dismissive as I struggled with mom’s behavior. I was told that my mother loves me, and she’s trying her best, and I should be grateful. I know these things are true for most people in a way that we accept socially. These things are also what people say when they can’t accept or fathom the severity of the abuse that was inflicted by a parent who is supposed to care. We believe in a mother’s instinct or an automatic feeling of deep love any mother has for her child. In a very real way that was created and perpetuated by our generational trauma, my mother was not capable of love.

I started therapy as a salve for my depression. Most of the things that I have detailed on this blog were not a part of my conscious awareness at that point. My identity issues are so difficult to explain in part because there is not a large scope of understanding beyond those who have experienced acute dissociations. Simply put, it’s hard to see how I got that far away from myself.

I knew something was wrong because I was sad and angry all the time. When I got started with my first counselor as an adult, I thought my feelings were my fault because I had made so many bad decisions. At this time in my life, I knew I had been sexually abused by my grandfather, and I had counseling for it after it happened. For everything else, I truly believed my mother’s version of events. The cognitive dissonance and façade of perfect appearances were solidly locked in place. The lies, hypocrisies, and sexual dangers were deeply hidden behind my mask of frozen smiles and fawning nods.

My therapy began with a provider who was skilled in guided meditation and biofeedback techniques. She was very helpful with those but she had recently lost her own mother. She was not able to help me grieve and heal from the relationship with my own. She helped me realize and uncover years of sexual abuse by my stepfather. She also insisted that I maintain contact with and have family sessions with my mother despite the harm to me. I started learning from a more qualified clinical psychologist. Through those years, I got help to build a foundation for my self-esteem and I was supported in reflecting on painful memories. Little statements made huge impacts in those sessions. Once, it was, “Anything that made you feel sexually uncomfortable with him was sexual abuse.” Another time, it was, “Your mother was not taught the skills she needed to care for you, and that’s not your fault.” These truths hit my psyche like bolts of lightning carving out swaths of landscape.

On the day I broke open entirely, I had faced my therapist with concerns about control issues, medications, self-care, and despair. He said the right things to crack my shell. I may never know exactly how he did it, but he knew it was the right time to push it. My frustrated responses to his insistent questions caused a huge reaction in my body. I suddenly became a vulnerable, desperate, confused, and completely lost wreck of a human. I was overcome with tears, my face burned hot, and I had unmanageable snot and gasps in front of a near-stranger. It was my first time to show real emotion in front of another human as my authentic self. That was not approved by the family rules that keep the façade in place, and I was immediately terrified. After some soothing and regrouping at the end of the session, I stepped out into the world as me.

It was like a birth. I have been rebuilding and reparenting myself since that time. This blog is where I want to share more about how I was able to accomplish that. It has taken a lot of years and a lot of help. My hope is that people will read my story and find hope. Even if we are going through times that seem unthinkable with brains that seem warped, there is a way through.