Content Warning: Contains themes of early childhood abuse, substance abuse and neglect.
I am a 40 year old social worker. On the surface, it would look like I have everything together. I maintain a stable home, pay my bills on time, have a lucrative career in a field I love, have interests and hobbies I enjoy, I am ok, right? Wrong! I am not ok.
Truth is my life is a series of open conflicts. I am a God-fearing man. I also struggle with same sex attractions. I love my family. But I also have a distant relationship with them. I am an introspective extrovert which means I love socializing with others and yet there are days when I want to be alone with just my thoughts, my pen and the open space of a blank page. Some would say I am a beautiful contradiction twisting around in a whirlwind of stable chaos. On the outside, I am able to organize the scribble of my life into some logical order but on the inside, the scribble threatens to swallow me whole and sometimes, I wish it would.
In an effort to understand the origins of such organized confusion, I went back to my childhood. Long story short, my father was an opiate addict who left when I was three. He made guest appearances in my life usually during critical periods such as me learning to tie my shoe, me learning to ride a bike, things like that. He would come plant his bearded kisses on my cheek, offer me some off-brand version of Now Laters called “Jingles” and off he went into the empty wishlist of my desperate imagination. My mother was an alcoholic and drug user who struggled with raising both my sister and I. Truth be told, growing up was difficult. There’s just so much that happens when you’re raised by inadequate caretakers with substance abuse issues. There were glimpses of stability often rocked by periods of chronic alcohol use, drug use and disappearance. There would be times when my mother would not come home for days, sometimes weeks. There were times when I would cry myself to sleep because I did not know if she would even return to me. Sometimes I thought she was dead and I just laid in my bed and cried till the sun bled over the horizon. Growing up hurt because it was always so unpredictable, always something I felt that was out of my control. I felt powerless over the addiction of my parents. I could not steer them to sobriety no matter how many good grades I pulled, no matter how much vomit I cleaned up, no matter how I made the recovery soup and didn’t complain about the holes in my shoes. It was never enough therefore I was never enough. Afflicted with this thought made me strive to always do the most, be the best, be strong, be on top of things, be the man of the house, the one who my mother could lean on. I learned how to be a beautiful crutch. I designed myself this way. I didn’t complain. Just learned how to be everything to everyone and nothing to myself. This became my thing and at the same time, my undoing.
Psychologists who study trauma explore the responses that emerge from out of the well of adverse experience. There are four common trauma responses that emerge from out of the abyss of traumatic experience: Flight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn. I am a Fawner. What does that mean? That means that I learned growing up that my survival hinges upon how well I take care of others. I learned that my needs come second to theirs and that in order to ensure I am loved, protected and cared for, I have to always make sure that others like me and are pleased with me because if they are not, I am bad, worthless, evil, selfish and not to be loved.
I remember many times growing up my mother would constantly say things to me like “I could have lived in midtown if I didn’t have you kids” and “your father left because he said “when they grow up they aren’t giving up their lives for me so why should I give up my life for them”. Hearing these things made me feel like a burden to my mother, like I somehow was to blame for holding her back and stifling her dreams. I always felt indebted, like I should have been thankful for her love and for her staying. In my home I got the message that love was something to be earned and not given freely. Love was a debt that I had to payback not something that was given, something that was naturally mines. I felt like my father left because I did not do something right, like I needed to do more. So I learned how to overcompensate for everyone else’s failings and always carry the weight of everyone else’s mistakes.
I have since realized that I was raised by extremely emotionally immature parents who did not have the capacity to love me the way that I deserved to be loved. I realize that it was never my responsibility to raise my parents but rather to be raised by them. They had me I did not have them. I also realize that there were serious boundary violations in my home that resulted in unhealthy dynamics and unrealistic expectations. But some days these realizations seem to just sit in my heart like an anchor and they do nothing but weigh me down and at times make me act out in very self-destructive ways. I do not cut, I do not drink a lot, I do not do drugs, I fuck. I fuck till it hurts and then I fuck some more. I am a good fuck, the best dick you could ever have. I make men with male orgasmic disorder cum like clockwork, I could work the cum out of bleached dry bones. Basically I do not stop until I am blessed with oozing nut.
I ask myself all the time how this childhood trauma affected my life. I mean I am by this worlds standards, a success professionally. On paper I am solid and writing my dreams to reality every single day. I have managed to escape the aftershocks of trauma right? I have managed to evade the crippling ripples of a traumatic life, right? Wrong! I am not ok. I am just very good at putting up a good front. The following is a list of how my childhood trauma has negatively impacted me and how it continues to manifest itself in my life. It is by no means an exhaustive list but rather one I use to illustrate the few ways I’ve noticed trauma has affected my life.
1. I border between perfectionist and disorganized mess. Everything has to be in its place, the socks with the socks, underwear with the underwear. If not arranged perfectly, it must be destroyed immediately and I end up sulking in the midst of a big mess. Growing up we were always living on the edge, mom having to play catch up with the rent due to an alcohol or crack binge, eviction notices pending, no food in the fridge. This is a fear-based reaction, always trying to make sure things are perfect so as to avoid potential devastation.
2. I do not have friends. I struggle with trusting people and are always overly wary of their intentions. Growing up, I could not tell “the family secret”, that being my mother was an alcoholic so I learned to keep her secret, to close myself off from others, to be guarded and evasive to avoid being taken away by BCW (Bureau of Child Welfare) again.
3. I do not want marriage especially with a woman because I feel I will have to be responsible for her feelings which activates a response in me due to me being expected to always care take my mothers feelings growing up. (trauma has impacted my desire to carry on our family legacy).
4. I seek out relationships that let me be a kid again. Unfortunately I gravitate towards relationships where I am protected and claimed usually by cruel, narcissistic and abusive men.
5. I am attracted to emotionally unavailable men, men like my father: present but absent at the same time. I find myself working so hard in these relationships just for crumbs of their attention.
6. My reaction to things can at times be inappropriate to a particular situation. For example, if I feel like someone is trying to undermine my intuition or gaslight me, I fly off the handle and spiral out into a blind rage. This is due to my mother always denying my intuition regarding her drinking. How she would swear on a stack of bibles that she was not high or drunk but was in fact high and drunk.
7. I have no children. Apart of me is afraid to replicate the cycles of abuse I sustained and so I got with men to avoid the possibility of getting a woman pregnant, of having to not only be responsible for her needs but also the pervasive needs of a child.
8. I struggle with taking healthy risks. I like safe. I like things I can set my watch to. I need predictability in my relationships.
9. I am passive. I let too many things slide. I always try to keep the peace at the expense of my real feelings. I want life to come with a happy ending. A pretty little bow on top of the package no matter how damaged the goods are inside the box.
10. I struggle with arrested development and delayed action with most things. I take a wait-and-see approach. I feel like I am late to the party. A proverbial late bloomer, it takes me years to catch up to the world. Goes back to fear of taking risks and chances.
11. I at times get the tendency to do very self-destructive things like drive into a wall, drive off a bridge, engage in sex with random strangers with no protection.
12. I constantly self-abandon, play small and struggle with talking about myself in various spaces. This includes promoting myself and bolstering my own achievements. I always think people don’t want to hear about me and so I remain silent.
13. I always question whether or not what I have to say is important or if it will be received well by others.
14. I am always scanning the room, checking for signs of danger, constantly questioning the intentions and motives of others.
15. People Pleasing. Being all too willing to set myself on fire to keep others warm.
16. Overgiving, oversharing, overloving, overdoing, overperforming, overinvesting in the stories of others and not investing in my own story.
17. I cosign and enable the poor behavior of others. I allow people to treat me poorly. I do not immediately address inappropriate behavior because I am afraid people won’t like me and if they don’t like me they won’t help me and if they won’t help me I’ll be vulnerable and at risk.
18. I attach my survival to other people’s love and approval.
19. I hunger for validation from others because I do not always trust myself enough.
20. I let too many things slide under the guise of being nice and then when my kindness has reached full capacity, I rage out inappropriately. I do not speak my peace. Conversely, I hold my peace for so long till it breaks me to pieces.
On the flipside I realize that there are certain gifts in traumatic experience, ones that do not readily lend themselves to immediate awareness. Such gifts are:
1. An increased ability to recognize and lean into the experience of others.
2. Empathy
3. A heightened awareness of social and environmental cues.
4. An intuitive ability to know how to assist others.
5. Resilience and the ability to bounce back after various tragedies.
6. Superb attending skills
7. Advanced knowledge of helpful resources
8. Ability to be extremely resourceful
9. Increased creativity
10. Witnessing the power of God and thereby increasing your faith in his purpose.
I am not gonna lie and say I am fine because I am not fine. I am the product of a very abusive and traumatic upbringing. There are days when I struggle to maintain. And there are days when I feel motivated to share these things to help other human beings bring themselves to the dock of peace. I encourage everyone to write their stories as there is power in truth telling. My only wish is that we all heal and create/recreate new ways of being from out of the wreckage of our broken pasts. This is where I am currently at in my journey to the land of wholeness. I pray that I achieve this with each day’s abundance.
Many blessings my dear readers and may the God who grants peace return you to your desired purpose and healing.
