Dear Zida, I admire your bold exploration at a granular level of the abuse you survived. Intriguingly, when I read your piece and slept on it, finer details of the abuse in my childhood emerged (from my mother & step father). I was the oldest of 3 girls - they were twins, half-sisters and 4 years younger than me. I was put into the role as baby-sitter and care giver (little mommy). So it was a different dynamic than yours in that respect.
It’s horrifying what your sibs did to you. Having said that, I imagine if your sister & brother were tolerating the same parental abuse that you were, their vicious reactive anger was thrust on you - being the younger and defenseless. With that level of rage, it’d be hard to imagine their lives would be anything other than a hot mess (if they’re still alive).
That's neither here nor there when talking about you as the focus of their cruelty. But I wonder if their cruel streak is/was as traumatizing to them as their aggression was to you.
Thank you, Becca. I agree that my siblings' anger was surely a result of how they were treated. My favorite statement of truth is: "We don't create ourselves." I have often wondered whether their cruelty was traumatizing to them. I don't know, but I've read that criminals dissociate what they do sometimes, so it's possible my siblings don't remember what they did. I also don't know how much they've suffered as adults. All interesting questions, but not ones I can answer. Have you read anything about this that you found insightful? I wish them happiness, but . . . There's a line from Fiddler on the Roof. "May God bless and keep the czar . . . far away from us." That's how I feel about the remnants of my family. Perhaps they feel the same about me!
I hope that what emerged for you was something helpful/enlarging. I know that reading the accounts of others can bring stuff up. I don't think there's ever an end to it, until we die.
Zida, thanks for your response. What came up personally for me from reading your observations didn't elicit any triggering, as it likely would have years ago. I now ponder (instead of being in shocking disgust) at just how wounded humans can be and how they take it out on others as well as themselves.
I contemplate all that emotional pain ... and am drawn to knowing more about how people cope in their misery. For example, I suggest that your evil sibs were coping by torturing you. Others might turn their pain in on themselves, with cutting and the like. But their hurt drove them to inflict hurt on you. And then where does that leave you .. after all, you were not only fielding the full force of your caregivers' abuse, which would have been quite enough, thank you very much. But then, after the adults were done with you, the enraged sibs stepped in. How does one recover from that? You mention you don't think there's ever an end to it [stuff coming up]. I wonder how recovery looks to you and how do you know that you've healed a little more (and a little more and a little more)?
On another front, you mention the credo: "We don't create ourselves."
But I tend to believe differently ... in that we have the opportunity to become so emotionally resilient that we enjoy "surfing the waves of uncertainty" (and create a new me).
However, I would suggest that a small fraction of humans at any given time, achieve this. Yet, once on a path of authentic awakening, it is our greatest assignment – to learn how to work with our (difficult) emotions. With cultivated awareness and strength, we can face our deep hurts/traumas, process them, and ultimately release them ... this is a long game but what else do we have to do with our lives.
I think we may agree on all of this. ". . . just how wounded humans can be and how they take it out on others as well as themselves." Oh, God, yes. And though I believe "we don't create ourselves" I don't mean that we can't change ourselves. I mean that we are created by our genes/upbringing, etc and then if we are the kind of person who wants to change (and have the support/resources) then we might be able to change. It may be impossible without support, so it is always partly luck (as well as character.) Right?
Hi Zida, this can get very cosmically edgy really fast:) Within the context of my belief paradigm which embraces the infinite exchange of energy ... i.e. we come out of the ocean of energy, we go back into the ocean of energy, rinse and repeat. (What happens in between is The Great Mystery.) So within the framework of my emotional release work, I see our difficult emotions as tethered to our intuition, our deep inner knowing, our soul – serving to unfold a path of healing and awakening that moves with us through the energy ocean.
I choose to believe we live within the organizing principles of a benevolent Universe where stuff like the miracle of birth, the metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly, planets expanding and colliding, destroying old worlds, creating new ones are examples of this order. Why then, bathed in this intelligence, would we have to run from, medicate away, distract and numb the difficult emotions that plague us. Perhaps they (our "pesky" emotions) serve a purpose that got lost somewhere in the split of science and spirituality. Based on this premise, when we can follow a step-by-step protocol to work with our emotions (often with the judicial use of plant medicines) to process and release these emotions, the pieces fall into place. I do support people in learning how to do this – but, yes absolutely, a person needs the will and commitment to want to do it. Doing this work to release the trauma that plagued me was difficult and painful. It's taken years, with daily practice, releasing layer-by-layer. The more profound the trauma, the longer it takes to go the depths to release it. But, as I like to say, what else do we have to do with our life? I see it as our most important assignment during this human experience.
I don't share your 'belief paradigm' but we are in agreement that we need to process and release emotions and that we need a daily practice to do that (and I agree psychedelics can help though cannabis just makes me very negative.) It's interesting that Kent in his Beddhism Substack also has found his own practice for doing this--maybe you would be interested in reading his last post which lays it out in detail.
One wants to know what you can do about this, now that you know, so you don't die early!
I have a bad memory also. But as far as I can tell, mine is just a bad memory. My memory problems may be sort of the reverse of yours: many of the things I remember most clearly from childhood are the moments of my greatest unhappiness. (Am I just built to assume that the world is supposed to be OK, so what I register is the moments that fail to support that?)
From the healthline page you linked to: "According to research, one of the biggest factors determining whether or not an ACE will have a detrimental impact on a child's development is their personal level of resilience." And, um, yeah. Have you ever read a less helpful sentence in your life? A true classic of virtus dormitiva. (https://wordhistories.net/2016/10/31/virtus-dormitiva/) Why do some people seem to be more OK than others after suffering abuse? Because they have a higher level of resilience. What's resilience? Oh, that's the ability to be OK after suffering abuse! *deep sigh*
"I would rather die than remember" --> now *this* is where the rubber hits the road. Is this thought protective of your deepest self, or is it a symptom of the disease that has your deepest self trapped? I spent hours and days and months agonizing over this question. I was terrified of my own terror! It seemed so much safer to just let it be, rather than confront it. I had to heal for more than a year before I could even seriously contemplate taking the step of confronting my own unhappiness. Then months thereafter working up the courage to do it ... and then more months figuring out *how* to do it.
Kent! We think so much the same and also so different!. I love your virtue dormitiva. Is that the same as a tautology? Similar? The tautology that I find most frustrating is “You will remember when you’re ready.” So how do you know that you’re ready? Because you remember! Otherwise you’re not ready. Undeniably true which makes it a tautology. (Right?) But it’s used a lot because we don’t really know why some people spontaneously remember—often after decades of dissociation—and other people don’t. A fascinating subject, it seems to me, and you might think thousands of scientists would want to study it, but no. There are some patterns, it’s true. Like people often remember childhood abuse when they have children.
You say “ Is this thought protective of your deepest self, or is it a symptom of the disease that has your deepest self trapped?” I don’t like the word disease or illness. I’d say I have the condition of dissociation or that I suffer from the aftereffects of abuse. These seems more accurate. But you say disease. Why? I imagine you have a good, or at least interesting reason. I don’t think that this thought is really protecting me; I believe it’s what I believed when I was young, and it persists. (What is repressed, persists.) I am trying to change it and perhaps I will someday. But yes, "this is where the rubber hits the road."
Thanks so much for your thoughts. Always interesting!
Your question as to why I use the word "disease" is a very interesting one.
I can't write about my experiences, at all, without invoking words suggesting "good" and "bad," "better" and "worse," "illness" and "health." I don't know if it's because of my background as a professor of ethics (so many years ago)? Or maybe because my experience with mental health was so dramatic and abrupt -- things in my life went from "more or less OK-ish" to "absolutely not at all OK" in the space of a couple of weeks.
But given the context of this particular piece of yours, talking about how ACE's can shorten lifespans, I feel like the word "disease" makes a lot of sense. If some sort of residue can come to exist in one's body as a result of emotional abuse, and if that residue has the potential to shorten one's life, then why would one not want to call it an illness or a disease? Why should one treat it as a fundamentally different *sort of thing* from cancer or MS or lupus or whatever?
One certainly could call it a disease, but I think it’s better to be more specific about what we call a disease. Also, I don’t want to say of my entire self that I’m diseased! I’d say that the ACE is a cause (along with other causes), the state of the body and mind is the state or condition of the body and mind, and the disease is something specific like lupus or addiction or heart disease. Then you have stuff like depression or anxiety or suicidality which I might say are somewhere in between a condition and an illness. (Big question mark here! Just some thoughts. Who can say?)
Also, ACEs lead to early death in many different ways, both physiological (inflammation?) and behavioral (drug use, suicide, etc)
I can't argue with any of that! Words are so tricky and I'm often unsure if they help or hinder our understanding of the deeper reality. If I use a word like "disease" and it makes you feel bad, but it helps me understand my condition better, then maybe it's a useful word for me and not for you.
Dear Zida, I admire your bold exploration at a granular level of the abuse you survived. Intriguingly, when I read your piece and slept on it, finer details of the abuse in my childhood emerged (from my mother & step father). I was the oldest of 3 girls - they were twins, half-sisters and 4 years younger than me. I was put into the role as baby-sitter and care giver (little mommy). So it was a different dynamic than yours in that respect.
It’s horrifying what your sibs did to you. Having said that, I imagine if your sister & brother were tolerating the same parental abuse that you were, their vicious reactive anger was thrust on you - being the younger and defenseless. With that level of rage, it’d be hard to imagine their lives would be anything other than a hot mess (if they’re still alive).
That's neither here nor there when talking about you as the focus of their cruelty. But I wonder if their cruel streak is/was as traumatizing to them as their aggression was to you.
I wish you deep emotional healing.
Thank you, Becca. I agree that my siblings' anger was surely a result of how they were treated. My favorite statement of truth is: "We don't create ourselves." I have often wondered whether their cruelty was traumatizing to them. I don't know, but I've read that criminals dissociate what they do sometimes, so it's possible my siblings don't remember what they did. I also don't know how much they've suffered as adults. All interesting questions, but not ones I can answer. Have you read anything about this that you found insightful? I wish them happiness, but . . . There's a line from Fiddler on the Roof. "May God bless and keep the czar . . . far away from us." That's how I feel about the remnants of my family. Perhaps they feel the same about me!
I hope that what emerged for you was something helpful/enlarging. I know that reading the accounts of others can bring stuff up. I don't think there's ever an end to it, until we die.
Zida, thanks for your response. What came up personally for me from reading your observations didn't elicit any triggering, as it likely would have years ago. I now ponder (instead of being in shocking disgust) at just how wounded humans can be and how they take it out on others as well as themselves.
I contemplate all that emotional pain ... and am drawn to knowing more about how people cope in their misery. For example, I suggest that your evil sibs were coping by torturing you. Others might turn their pain in on themselves, with cutting and the like. But their hurt drove them to inflict hurt on you. And then where does that leave you .. after all, you were not only fielding the full force of your caregivers' abuse, which would have been quite enough, thank you very much. But then, after the adults were done with you, the enraged sibs stepped in. How does one recover from that? You mention you don't think there's ever an end to it [stuff coming up]. I wonder how recovery looks to you and how do you know that you've healed a little more (and a little more and a little more)?
On another front, you mention the credo: "We don't create ourselves."
But I tend to believe differently ... in that we have the opportunity to become so emotionally resilient that we enjoy "surfing the waves of uncertainty" (and create a new me).
However, I would suggest that a small fraction of humans at any given time, achieve this. Yet, once on a path of authentic awakening, it is our greatest assignment – to learn how to work with our (difficult) emotions. With cultivated awareness and strength, we can face our deep hurts/traumas, process them, and ultimately release them ... this is a long game but what else do we have to do with our lives.
I think we may agree on all of this. ". . . just how wounded humans can be and how they take it out on others as well as themselves." Oh, God, yes. And though I believe "we don't create ourselves" I don't mean that we can't change ourselves. I mean that we are created by our genes/upbringing, etc and then if we are the kind of person who wants to change (and have the support/resources) then we might be able to change. It may be impossible without support, so it is always partly luck (as well as character.) Right?
Thanks Zida!
Hi Zida, this can get very cosmically edgy really fast:) Within the context of my belief paradigm which embraces the infinite exchange of energy ... i.e. we come out of the ocean of energy, we go back into the ocean of energy, rinse and repeat. (What happens in between is The Great Mystery.) So within the framework of my emotional release work, I see our difficult emotions as tethered to our intuition, our deep inner knowing, our soul – serving to unfold a path of healing and awakening that moves with us through the energy ocean.
I choose to believe we live within the organizing principles of a benevolent Universe where stuff like the miracle of birth, the metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly, planets expanding and colliding, destroying old worlds, creating new ones are examples of this order. Why then, bathed in this intelligence, would we have to run from, medicate away, distract and numb the difficult emotions that plague us. Perhaps they (our "pesky" emotions) serve a purpose that got lost somewhere in the split of science and spirituality. Based on this premise, when we can follow a step-by-step protocol to work with our emotions (often with the judicial use of plant medicines) to process and release these emotions, the pieces fall into place. I do support people in learning how to do this – but, yes absolutely, a person needs the will and commitment to want to do it. Doing this work to release the trauma that plagued me was difficult and painful. It's taken years, with daily practice, releasing layer-by-layer. The more profound the trauma, the longer it takes to go the depths to release it. But, as I like to say, what else do we have to do with our life? I see it as our most important assignment during this human experience.
I don't share your 'belief paradigm' but we are in agreement that we need to process and release emotions and that we need a daily practice to do that (and I agree psychedelics can help though cannabis just makes me very negative.) It's interesting that Kent in his Beddhism Substack also has found his own practice for doing this--maybe you would be interested in reading his last post which lays it out in detail.
One wants to know what you can do about this, now that you know, so you don't die early!
I have a bad memory also. But as far as I can tell, mine is just a bad memory. My memory problems may be sort of the reverse of yours: many of the things I remember most clearly from childhood are the moments of my greatest unhappiness. (Am I just built to assume that the world is supposed to be OK, so what I register is the moments that fail to support that?)
From the healthline page you linked to: "According to research, one of the biggest factors determining whether or not an ACE will have a detrimental impact on a child's development is their personal level of resilience." And, um, yeah. Have you ever read a less helpful sentence in your life? A true classic of virtus dormitiva. (https://wordhistories.net/2016/10/31/virtus-dormitiva/) Why do some people seem to be more OK than others after suffering abuse? Because they have a higher level of resilience. What's resilience? Oh, that's the ability to be OK after suffering abuse! *deep sigh*
"I would rather die than remember" --> now *this* is where the rubber hits the road. Is this thought protective of your deepest self, or is it a symptom of the disease that has your deepest self trapped? I spent hours and days and months agonizing over this question. I was terrified of my own terror! It seemed so much safer to just let it be, rather than confront it. I had to heal for more than a year before I could even seriously contemplate taking the step of confronting my own unhappiness. Then months thereafter working up the courage to do it ... and then more months figuring out *how* to do it.
Kent! We think so much the same and also so different!. I love your virtue dormitiva. Is that the same as a tautology? Similar? The tautology that I find most frustrating is “You will remember when you’re ready.” So how do you know that you’re ready? Because you remember! Otherwise you’re not ready. Undeniably true which makes it a tautology. (Right?) But it’s used a lot because we don’t really know why some people spontaneously remember—often after decades of dissociation—and other people don’t. A fascinating subject, it seems to me, and you might think thousands of scientists would want to study it, but no. There are some patterns, it’s true. Like people often remember childhood abuse when they have children.
You say “ Is this thought protective of your deepest self, or is it a symptom of the disease that has your deepest self trapped?” I don’t like the word disease or illness. I’d say I have the condition of dissociation or that I suffer from the aftereffects of abuse. These seems more accurate. But you say disease. Why? I imagine you have a good, or at least interesting reason. I don’t think that this thought is really protecting me; I believe it’s what I believed when I was young, and it persists. (What is repressed, persists.) I am trying to change it and perhaps I will someday. But yes, "this is where the rubber hits the road."
Thanks so much for your thoughts. Always interesting!
Your question as to why I use the word "disease" is a very interesting one.
I can't write about my experiences, at all, without invoking words suggesting "good" and "bad," "better" and "worse," "illness" and "health." I don't know if it's because of my background as a professor of ethics (so many years ago)? Or maybe because my experience with mental health was so dramatic and abrupt -- things in my life went from "more or less OK-ish" to "absolutely not at all OK" in the space of a couple of weeks.
But given the context of this particular piece of yours, talking about how ACE's can shorten lifespans, I feel like the word "disease" makes a lot of sense. If some sort of residue can come to exist in one's body as a result of emotional abuse, and if that residue has the potential to shorten one's life, then why would one not want to call it an illness or a disease? Why should one treat it as a fundamentally different *sort of thing* from cancer or MS or lupus or whatever?
One certainly could call it a disease, but I think it’s better to be more specific about what we call a disease. Also, I don’t want to say of my entire self that I’m diseased! I’d say that the ACE is a cause (along with other causes), the state of the body and mind is the state or condition of the body and mind, and the disease is something specific like lupus or addiction or heart disease. Then you have stuff like depression or anxiety or suicidality which I might say are somewhere in between a condition and an illness. (Big question mark here! Just some thoughts. Who can say?)
Also, ACEs lead to early death in many different ways, both physiological (inflammation?) and behavioral (drug use, suicide, etc)
I can't argue with any of that! Words are so tricky and I'm often unsure if they help or hinder our understanding of the deeper reality. If I use a word like "disease" and it makes you feel bad, but it helps me understand my condition better, then maybe it's a useful word for me and not for you.