One More Perspective

“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.  Shame loves secrecy.  When something shameful happens to us and we keep it locked up, it festers and grows. It eats us alive from the inside.”  Brené Brown

For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried a heavy, exhausting feeling:  I am in trouble.  It didn’t matter how successful I became, how hard I worked, or how diligently I managed my life, the voice in the back of my mind always whispered that a penalty was coming, that I was inherently bad and in time, everyone  would discover it.  I believed I had to prove my worth just to be allowed in the room.

I used to think this anxiety was just a personal flaw I needed to fix with willpower and logic.  After years of writing, I finally see the common denominator.  That constant dread wasn’t a glitch in my adult life; it was the exact lesson I was taught by the people who were supposed to protect me when I was a child.

When I was between four and six years old, my brother, nine years older than I, repeatedly violated my body.  One afternoon, he was finally caught at my Grandmother’s house as he was laying next to me with his hands between my legs, touching the parts of me no one should have been. At that exact moment, the adults in my family owed me total protection, fierce comfort, and justice.  Instead, they chose to pretend nothing happened.

To protect the family’s fragile internal order, they swept the truth under the rug.  My brother wasn’t punished, no one talked to me about it, and over time, my parents flipped the blame onto me, treating my reality as a dangerous inconvenience, especially my mother.  I was punished with silent disapproval and shunning over and over for attempting to talk about it.  When a child is small and the adults demand that she pretend a crime never happened just to keep herself in their good graces, the young mind makes a terrible deal with itself:  Speaking the truth is dangerous.  The world is unsafe.  No one is punishing the bad thing, instead they are treating me as the perpetrator.  I am the one in trouble.

That rule of silence followed me out of the dark and into the light.
When I was ten, I was playing an everyday, innocent neighborhood game with some boys my age.  My stepmother took that harmless childhood play and twisted it, letting me know how immoral she thought I was.  More shaming.  A year later, discovering that I sometimes fell asleep next to my father watching television in bed, she decided to treat my eleven-year-old body like a crime scene.  She marched me to a doctor for an excruciatingly painful gynecological exam just to verify my virginity.  That forced exam wasn’t medical care.  It was an interrogation of a little girl’s body to satisfy an adult’s paranoia.  When my brother was molesting me, I was the only one who bore the consequences.  When my father wasn’t, I was once again who was put through hell.  It sent a terrifying message to my system:  Your body does not belong to you. Anyone with authority can breach your boundaries at any time, and you are guilty.  My mother was not only a continent away, she in later years didn’t want to hear about these stories.  She much preferred we put these things behind us.  She frequently told me she didn’t want to talk about sad things, either denying my reality or condemning me for insisting upon fighting for it. 

To survive a childhood environment that felt like a minefield, I had to build a massive psychological shield.  I became hyper-vigilant.  I learned to read every room, analyze every facial expression, and fiercely guard my perimeter.  My Imago Octopus was born.  I came to believe that if I could produce evidence and data, I could save myself. 

That survival mechanism shaped my marriages.  I subconsciously chose partners who at first appeared strong, protective, and solid; people I hoped could finally hold the shield for me so I could rest.  …but once the marriages began, the everyday realities cracked the facades.  My spouses became passive and fragile, pulling away and shutting down whenever things got difficult.  Just like my family, my spouses demanded we pretend conflicts didn’t exist and forced a reset back to a happy face without ever fixing the hurt.  This demand for a compliant reset is like a video game respawn, an artificial button that drops a person back at the baseline with a clean slate, pretending the crash never occurred.  …but relationships are not digital simulations.  When you respawn instead of engaging in raw, agonizing repair, the old damage doesn’t disappear; it just gets buried under the floorboards of the new facade.  I repeatedly married the exact environment that wounded me in the first place.  This was not by accident; this psychological inevitability is what Imago Relationship Therapy is all about.

When I finally started examining my own patterns and relating those back to my childhood, my mind put up a massive fight.  I could remember the cold facts of what my brother and stepmother did, I even wrote on this very website about them, but my brain violently rejected the actual words:  violated, unprotected, abandoned.  My mind recycled frantic internal arguments, debating definitions, and trying to convince me that it wasn’t really that bad.  My brain did this with my marriages, too.  Minimization always feels safer than raw grief.  My mind was terrified that if I admitted how deeply I had been hurt, the pain would swallow me whole. 

The rules of silence aren’t just policed inside our own heads; they are enforced by a family syndicate.  When the matrix is threatened by raw data, the enforcers recruit a club, enlisting former spouses, friends, and in my case, even grooming my own children to build a collective narrative that the truth-teller is the dangerous one.  It is a brilliant strategy designed to absolve the original perpetrators of their negligence and keep the system locked down.  …but my internal debate is finally over.  The anger I feel when my mind (or anyone else) tries to minimize my past isn’t a symptom of being broken, it is my adult strength waking up.  It is me standing at the door of my history and saying, “I know the facts.  No one gets to change the data to make the ghosts comfortable anymore.”

I am finally ready to shine my light, and to consciously coexist with the whole of my experiences.  I now live in my own space where the boundaries are absolute and entirely mine.  The people who failed to protect me, weaponized my good will, and demanded my silence have no place here.  The hyper-vigilant protector…the Octopus I had to become to survive my childhood doesn’t need to be destroyed; she just needs a permanent retirement.  She did a brilliant job keeping me alive, but I don’t need to fight a war that ended decades ago.  That little girl was left completely unprotected, but the woman running my life today has absolute sovereignty.  The silence is broken.  The truth sticks.  Not on their watch, but on mine.  …and this is the upstream.  This is where I needed to go so I could have a chance at reaching, validating and nurturing my eight-year-old self pacing in agony alone on the sidewalk outside my mother’s building.