Category Archives: The Courage to Heal

Bad decisions

In life there are trade offs.  You only have so many resources at any given point in time.  I feel like an awful lot of the problems in life are because of the fact that there are insufficient resources.  And I don’t mean oil–I’m talking about time and attention.  I’m talking about the fact that I don’t keep up with my friends as well as I wish I could because I cannot handle the fact that I am already touched and pawed at all day long.

A friend else-net got very drunk last night.  She’s at a hard spot in her life and she wanted to drink to forget.  Of course she now believes this has destroyed her value as a person.  On the kind of nights where you drink to forget you tend to believe your value was gone before you started.  I make bad decisions.  I don’t want to add an adverb describing when or how often. Because the reality is I probably make bad decisions about as often as average and maybe less.  Do you want to know why I say that?  Because something being a bad decision or not depends on your perspective.

Getting shit faced drunk and passing out seems like a bad decision.  Until you realize that the alternative may very well be ending your life.  When you realize that choosing to get shit faced drunk so that you can make it through the one bad night is actually a good choice.  At the crisis point, get drunk.  That’s ok.  Really.  It’s not a bad decision.  If that is how you are going to still be alive in the morning it is a good decision.  It’s a bad decision to do it every night.  It is a bad decision to make it a lifestyle.  Anesthetics have their place in life.  I believe it is ok to self-medicate.  But be very careful.

Does that mean it is the safest choice?  Of course not.  Drinking until you pass out is dangerous and I don’t really think people should be doing it.  Much like cutting.  It’s not a great thing to do.  I don’t recommend it as a coping strategy for people who are looking for new tools.  Sometimes people do make mistakes while cutting and accidentally die.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A lot of my friends point out that their lives “weren’t that bad” so they shouldn’t be upset.  I honestly don’t know a lot of people who experienced more abuse than me… and I still don’t feel entitled to be upset.  Not really.  To me that means that it doesn’t matter whether I am entitled to the upset or not.  I am upset.  I need to not worry about whether or not I should be.  I need to not focus on how my being upset affects other people.  I need to look at how being upset affects me.  It’s hard because for all that I have been talking constantly about being narcissistic… I’m truly not.  I have a hard time paying adequate attention to myself.  I worry constantly about the happiness of those around me.  I work extensively to build up other people.  That’s just an insecurity.

It’s just as true for everyone else though.  Ok, there are people who are actually narcissistic.  Most people are just existing though.  You get upset.  It’s ok to deal with being upset.  If that upset goes on for weeks, months, years… you use up your resources.  When you are low on resources sometimes you hit the bottom of the barrel.  It’s ok.  That’s why it is there.  It is still a tool.  The bottom exists for a reason.

Why am I babbling about this.  Because I can say this emphatically when I am speaking with my friend in my head.  When I picture my beautiful, wonderful friend who is going through a very hard time and there is nothing I can do to help… that feels like I am failing in my life.  I don’t want my friends to suffer.  I want to take it away and make everything better.  I want to help build my friends up so big and so strong that they cannot be hurt any more.

I’ve been reading more in TCTH (The Courage to Heal–I’m sick of typing it out.)  I think it is funny that every time I read it I get to a few pages past where I feel emotionally that day.  When I come back and catch up I get to read on the page these testimonies from all these women describing their emotional processes and I could have written them.  It feels really hilarious and predictable.  This experience of going through this book is ensuring that I know I am not a special fucking snow flake.  Ha.  It’s nice though.  I now have this invisible group of women who know what I have been through. Healing from incest is a fairly predictable path.  I’m not lost and wandering and doing it wrong.  I am working the steps.  I really and truly am doing something that is worth doing.  As hard as this is sometimes, as bad as some of my mistakes are… I am improving.

My momentary bad decisions do not negate the fact that I am a good person.  That it is worth getting up every single day and continuing for as long as my body will let me because I add good to the world.  Far, far, far more good than bad.  I haven’t been sleeping enough and my emotions are very close to the surface.  I feel very upset when I see my friends self-flagellating in ways I also do.  It hits home for me what I need to start working on doing and that’s hard.  I kind of don’t need more pressure to work, you know?  I’m very tired.  I feel so flawed.  I feel like I will never be good enough.

And TCTH tells me that is part of the process.  It will pass.  This day will end.  Today I will get good and stoned and I will wander around the house puttering and singing and talking with my babies.  If I just putter around absent mindedly all the rest of the cleaning will magically happen.  But I have to be very stoned.  Or I will be a stress monkey and twitch and be unable to complete tasks and cry and probably scream at both kids.  I have a choice, right this minute.  I can continue to distract myself with the internet because I believe smoking marijuana is a bad choice and I am a bad person for doing it, or… I can shut up and do it.  And have a really nice day.  Bye y’all.

Disclosure and Confrontations chapter

I’m back to reading The Courage to Heal (screw you italics, who says you should get all the action) because it seems like a good time.  I’m in the Disclosures and Confrontations chapter.  I’m having some strong feelings.  I feel kind of weird about how I did my public confrontation.  I feel like I needed to make sure the door of my entire family was slammed shut on me telling the truth.  I had to know for sure that absolutely not one of my blood relatives loves me enough to choose me over my abusers.  Not one.  Not one of my blood relatives loves me enough to say that it is heinous and terrible that I was abused the way I was and they will cease contact with my abusers.  No one.  No one will pick me over them.  They either simply don’t believe me that it happened at all and they think I am a liar or they somehow think it was ok that it happened.  I had to understand in the pit of my stomach how little they think of me so that I never ever go back and try to make amends.  I know how much I love my family.  I know how much I miss them.  It is terribly hard for me not to go cry to my mother.  I feel sad.  They have to die for me.  Jimmy was partially right.  I did tell everyone in a way that had shock value.  I did it to put everyone into a moment of stress to see how they reacted.  Guess what I found out.  If I have to go back and keep my silence and suck up for years before someone might be able to tell me in quiet whispers that they believe me but I musn’t speak of it… No.  Just no.  I’m worth more than that.  Anyone is.

I confronted my family because I needed to clearly know that there is no space for me in my family.  They don’t want me.  I am an inconvenient liability to their continued happiness because I insist on talking about things that make them feel guilty.  I need to have a clear line where I will never allow my experiences to be minimized by my family again.  They do not get to tell me what is or is not important.  My cousin told me: “You have serious mental problems. I really feel sorry for your children. Please, Please get professional help before you do damage to those poor babies that can not be reversed. OMG I can not believe the vile things that you make up. I really do feel sorry for you and hope that you get help. Do not write anymore of your vile lies to me or Nicole. You have hurt her enough as it is.”

I’m telling you, I couldn’t make this shit up.  So take that nasty witch from the writing class!  It’s believable because I couldn’t possibly make all of this up!  She can’t believe the vile things I make up.  Right.  To be fair when I talk about my mother and my sister contributing to my sexual assault history it’s kind of ambiguous.  I was sent off to be raped by people.  They would leave me alone with my brother so that he could attack me.  They sent me for weekends at my father’s house.  My sister had sex in front of me.  With men who would masturbate on me and ask me if I was willing to fuck them… well before I was 15.  It’s not like she pulled up a chair, but they wouldn’t bother to close doors.  Pornography was the reading material in the house.  All historical romance novels are not created equal.  There’s a lot of silly fluff that’s not real sexual.  Bertrice Small is big on rape, sodomy, animal play, beatings, bestiality, incest… These are ridiculously graphic.  And my mom was fine with me reading them when I was 8.

It’s hard to explain this.  I come from the kind of family where my niece can tell me that my sister taught her (my niece) about oral sex on my nephew and I nod and believe her.  That doesn’t make me blink.  Perverse sexuality was absolutely the cultural norm.  Even though my mom gave up having sex like 20 years ago.

I finished the chapter and got to the writing exercise part.  Ok,

Dear Denise,

I cannot forgive you.  I am not capable of forgiving the things you have done in your life.  You allowed me to be hurt in so many ways so many times because you were so busy chasing down your latest fuck that you could not behave like a decent person.  I sit here and a litany of things go through my mind.  You talking to me in depth about how awesome anal sex is when I was very young.  You bringing men into our house who harassed me.  You refusing to care for me and instead abandoning me to get high or drunk.  You sexually assaulted our brother.  You contributed to the rape of your son.  You contributed to the sexual assault of your daughter.  I cannot forgive you.  You did not rape me.  Not by even the most liberal definition.  Never the less you helped me grow up in a world where I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that if I wasn’t getting fucked I was nothing.  You taught me that it is ok to abandon your children for years because you wanted to do drugs and fuck a convict.  You got your bad boy.  You married him, kind of.  Oops.  Turns out he was still married to his first wife so your marriage isn’t legal.  Even though you traveled all the way out to the prison to marry him through the glass wall.  Congratulations you fucking loser.

Why am I bringing up old stuff?  Because you pretend like it didn’t happen.  Because you think you get to set the terms on reality.  You don’t.  There are things that are objectively true.  I wish to God I had worked harder to get your kids taken by CPS when they were young.  Although I think that I was too late.  I’m pretty sure you had already made your daughter suck off your son.  How can you live with yourself?  Dude, my demons haunt me and I have never done anything on your level.  How can you continue to take breath?  I bet you think you are a good person who has just made some mistakes.  You will blame drugs or alcohol, perhaps.  I don’t know how much drugs you have been doing for the past 5 years and I don’t really want to know.  I know it’s an all night party every night and you don’t work.  I know you babysit the children of teenage mothers.  Folks who really don’t have a lot of experience with healthy environments.  You fit right in.  What are you doing to their kids?  Are you giving them alcohol?  Drugs?  You have been around people who start as little kids and they turned out fine, right?  Just because they are addicts who can’t hold down a job or keep a stable place to live… well… that’s just hard luck.

I feel revulsion when I think of you.  I know that you had it much worse from our father.  It went on for years and years and you lived with him your entire life.  I’m sure it was horrifically bad.  And you never did a god damn thing to protect me.  Fuck you.  How could you.  You selfish bitch.  I believe that you are the lowest kind of person.  I think you would fuck someone over if it made you a dollar all the while loudly announcing how loyal you are.  Oh you make me sick.  Where was your fucking loyalty to me.
You did not support me prosecuting our father.  You withdrew.  You were angry and you made that very clear.  Fuck you.  Because now you claim that you always loved and supported me.  No you didn’t.  You went out and got high.  You had nothing to do with me.  Even when I specifically called you and asked for help because I was in bad positions you flat turned me down.  My only importance to you is to be a dog for you to kick.

When I think of you I think of the small old women in Japanese movies who chase people around and hit them with sticks.  You want power.  Having power means having people to dominate.  I will not let you dominate me.  Not even if you threaten to beat me up at my baby shower.  Seriously?  Who does that.  How Jerry Springer, pathetic are you?  When you are a guest in my home don’t you dare sit there and start lecturing me about how I need to respect you because you are the up and coming matriarch because you are the only one who gets things done.  Kiss my ass.  You are good at bullying other people into working.  You are mean spirited and lazy.  I have no respect for you.

But I remember the good times too.  You taught me how to stick up for myself.  When you saw me as on your side you occasionally dropped good nuggets for self protection.  You taught me a lot about how to manipulate people and the system.  You were an odd combination of occasional spurts where you were functional and inspiring with being absolutely a burden on society.  I am in favor of welfare reform because of you.  Whenever anyone tells me that welfare fraud doesn’t exist I start to laugh.  I know that you did pull yourself out of the system more than once.  You can do it.  Sometimes you just don’t want to bother because you are too lazy.

I remember school vacations where I stayed at your house for a week with your kids while you went off to party.  I was a teenager.  I was babysitting.  Yeah, and cleaning up health hazards in your kitchen because you were so disgusting.  I had to do any shit work you didn’t want to do.  And if I didn’t do it you screamed at me.  You didn’t actually “hit” me.  As you were fond of telling me.  You’d just shove a little.  Bump me.  You were big and aggressive.  All of my life you used physical force to instill fear.  I hate that you taught me to be like you.

I was willing to eliminate any possibility of relationships with my entire extended family because I am so repulsed that people think you are a good person.  I hope you rot in hell.

Sincerely, your sister.

From The Courage to Heal page 44:
“Write about the ways you’re still affected by the abuse.  What are you still carrying in terms of your feelings of self-worth, your work, your relationships, your sexuality?  How is your life still pained, still limited?
Write about the strengths you’ve developed because of the abuse.  Think what it’s taken for you to survive.  What are the qualities that enabled you to make it?  Perseverance?  Flexibility?  Self-sufficiency?  Write about your strengths with pride.”

Well right this minute I am hiding in my garage alone in the house.  Noah took the kids off to a fun sounding party and I was not up for it at all.  I feel incredible anxiety about going there.  I feel like I could probably handle being around people who are already close to me but the circle has to be insanely close to me.  I don’t trust that people aren’t going to hurt me or the kids.  I am not able to connect with new people at all.  I cannot assess current threat.  That’s really the problem.  I feel like I am being revictimized pretty much all the time right now.  I feel like I am living inside my nightmare.  And I’m trying to recognize that it is right now.  This came hard and fast.  This is not always.  This is not usual.  This is not my whole life.

I am not this broken person hiding in the garage.  But I am.  This is awful.  Right now I am full of hate.  Hate hate hate hate hate.  I can hate everyone.  That is one of the big ways I am still affected by the abuse.  I am afraid to learn more about magic.  I am afraid of being a neophyte in public.  I am afraid that if I take agency and change things that everything will go to shit.

What strengths do I have?  Well, there isn’t a whole lot in the world that scares me.  It’s kind of funny, actually.  My father held a gun to my head when I was 9 years old.  He forced me to suck his cock.  What in the hell else is likely to go wrong in modern America that will rivel that?  Acts of nature?  Bah.  Acts of terrorism, well if you must.  Do I deserve to live?  Yes, mother fucker, I deserve to live.

I deserve to live and you don’t.  I am glad you are dead you piece of shit.  And I hope my mom grows a set and offs herself soon.  Because then I will be over this god damn sword of Damocles.  I am ready to move on with my life.

Oh stages of grief, how I know you well.  I want to rush through you.  Can I fake it till I make it?

And the most important reason I am doing well and my mother is not?  I tell the truth.