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Dr. P
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Jul. 18th, 2009 @ 03:05 pm
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Well as I expected, Dr P was his usual decent, forthright, blunt, kind and yet distant self.
When I asked him if he would get sexually aroused at things I might tell him about sexual abuse or my body, he didn't flinch. He didn't seem turned on at all. He didn't seem appalled. He thought about it and said no. And He said I was his daughter's age and he was no longer sixteen. He said he only felt those feelings at his age in the context of a relationship, like with his wife. |
I'll be seeing Dr.P later this afternoon. I'm scared because I suspect that he might not be the therapist for me and I'll get confirmation of that.
I really want to see him. A major part of that is that I'm bored as hell and he's entertaining.
His wife Dr. H is a lot more serious and seems way more focused.
D's therapist who knows them both says that Dr. H is more organized, less philosophical, less free-form and she specializes in working with abuse survivors. She works a whole lot with triggers and how to deal with them.
Dr.P is way more philosophical, more free-form, less organized, more entertaining.
Dr.H has the potential to be dull as hell.
This puts me in a familiar quandary from when I was a kid: being hectored and blasted by my mom for doing what I wanted to do instead of doing what I should do. Life was about duty for her. She blasted me all the time about being irresponsible and uncaring and lazy and lackadaisical. She frequently called me an "irresponsible brat". I was a small child, she yelled at me this way when I was 4 or 5 years old. What a bitch. I believed her at the time of course. Now I wonder what the hell she was kicking up such a fuss about. As I do most things about her. My mother's life story is about magnifying minor, even utterly insignificant things and blowing them up to catastrophic proportions.
I feel like I would be an irresponsible brat for picking Dr. P to work with. Dr.H is clearly the more responsible choice.
The question is for me, who would be the more effective choice? Dr H or Dr.P?
I have had three dreams with Dr.P in them in the last week. It took me years and years to have even one dream with my old therapist F in them.
the first one was the most notable: I was watching myself walking into a room with Dr.P sitting by the door. "You're 10 minutes late", he remarked matter of factly with no rancor or malice. I didn't say anything much or maybe I nodded or something but whatever I did to acknowledge it, it wasn't much. i didn't have to. Without even being aware of it, I felt like he would know that I had heard him. Then I walked inside to his office while he followed me inside.
Looking back. there was no sexual tension. No anger. No tension of any kind. It was all very straight-forward and matter of fact. But I was very very puzzled as to why he was sitting by the door instead of inside his office. I think I kind of liked it. I didn't ask him that even tho I felt puzzled.
Maybe I need to ask him that. Why wasn't he sitting in his office? Why was he sitting by the door?
Now, I feel something very strong that keeps telling me to not see him. I could see him for 6 months and give it a try.
What it comes down to is that I'm not interested in learning how to work with triggers. I am much more interested in figuring out the broad patterns of my life and the way my mind works.
I am also more comfortable with Dr.P than I am with Dr.H.
But Dr.H specializes in treating abuse survivors. Dr.P treats them a lot but doesn't specialize in them.
But something extraordinarily persistent is telling me not to see Dr.P.
I don't have very strong feelings either way about Dr.H. I feel like I should see her because she seems smart and competent and specializes in working with abuse survivors. She hasn't worked much with foreign-born or immigrant people.
She is the clear, obvious choice if it wasn't for the fact that I find work with triggers boring.
Let me look at the evidence:
Dr.P rambled on and on about himself the first time I talked to him on the phone. He did say that he was very sorry to hear about the abuse that I've been thru. He didn't give me clear yes and no answers.
Dr.P said some really interesting things about time and how many repetitive behaviors are designed to stop time because the person fears the future, when i met him in person. He was under the impression that I wanted a female therapist and said that he just wanted to drop down for a chat. He also said some very interesting things about positive attention vs negative attention vs indifference.
I opened up to him a LOT. He said one needed two things from one's therapist: feeling safe so that one could be honest. And feeling like one was getting the help one needed.
The second time I met him, he did not ramble at all. He was way more focused. He was very honest and clear and really not complicated when I asked him how would he handle it if he thought I was attractive. I didn't find myself being frightened. On the contrary, I wanted to cry with relief, and sadness for what I had missed out on with my father. I was encountering what should have been. He explained his thoughts on my mother's delusions. He explained his thoughts hon ow abuse survivors fear the future and see the future as a continuation of the past.
At this meeting, I realized I was sitting in a much more open and relaxed posture than I usually sit. Also I was very comfortable opening up to him because I felt like he would understand. He also told me that he believed that I needed to work on my issues with men and feeling attracted to them and feeling their attraction to me. This time he gave me clear yes and no answers.
He was 10 minutes late and didn't say anything about it. He did stay for the full hour though.
His wife Dr.H has been rock-steady from day one. She gives me clear yes and no answers. She sees enormous strengths in me. She listed three :1. my ability to finish my schooling and get a degree 2.my long-term relationship with my husband 3.the fact that I advocate for myself.
She is methodical and steady.
The main thing about her is that I am concerned that I will not get a clear picture of what was happening in my life and what is happening now. With Dr.P I don't have that fear at all.
With Dr.P I'm worried that I'll get a lot of brilliant insights that won't get me any closer to being able to drive or go out more in public.
The best thing to do is to ask him directly about it. Which I'll do this evening.
Whew.
I think I should make a list of my fears and ask him each one of them.
What he says and how he says it will tell me what I need to know. |
I met with two very interesting and intelligent therapists Dr P and Dr H. They are married.
Dr H specializes in treating people who have been been thru extraordinary abuse. She works a lot with triggers and how to respond to them.
Dr. P is a very interesting, freewheeling kind of guy. he sorta looks like a tired, older and somehow more child-like Michael Douglas. He's very honest, forthright and very nice. I found myself being strangely comfortable with him and I told him stuff about myself that I was surprised later that I said. He told me stuff that I found very thought-provoking and intelligent.
Dr.P has worked in maximum security prisons, maximum security detention facilities, he has been burned with a cigarette by one furious inmate and stabbed in the leg by another.
Dr.P is more interesting, more fun and it will be more challenging in some ways to see him because he's a man.
I started out thinking Dr.P was sort of a long-winded, disorganized eccentric when I talked to him on the phone. Then I met him in person and he said a couple of really interesting things. Then I met him once more to clarify them and ask how he would handle feeling like I was an attractive woman. I was impressed with his honesty and his comfort with his own feelings. I was also intrigued by his clarifications. He talked about abused people fearing the future because they saw the future as a repetition of the past. The way a beaten child would fear tomorrow because tomorrow was another day when she could be beaten. He explained a little about my mother's delusions. He said that a person convinced that an international criminal syndicate was watching her every move was someone with abysmally low self-esteem who felt invisible and insignificant. She compensated for feeling insignificant by making a world where she was significant enough to be watched all the time.
It was shocking and heart-breaking to realize how horrible my mother's childhood must have been. And stunning to realize that this woman who seemed so invincible and cold like an impregnable fortress was actually far more ashamed of herself than even I was as a child.
I like Dr P. I find myself opening up to him way more than with his wife. I found myself sitting in a very relaxed and open posture around him. And I was surprised at that.
I feel like I'll be making a horrible mistake if I was to see him. I feel like I'm fucking up big time. I feel like I'm totally screwing up. Is this my intuition talking or is this my fear? |
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An End
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Mar. 5th, 2009 @ 11:05 am
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Dear F
You know, you're right. I have transferred and projected a bunch of things onto you. I have been terrified to trust you. I have only seen your flaws a lot of times. I am emotionally disregulated. I have ascribed terrible motives to you.
And you have handled a lot of it really badly. You haven't known how to treat a lot of my problems because they were new and unfamiliar to you. And out of what has been familiar to you, you have handled some of it really really well and some of it so-so and quite a bit of it really badly. So I'm left with a small portion of my issues addressed and taken care of and a lot of them completely neglected. And you have mishandled still others quite badly.
I still don't understand why you continued to believe that you could treat me after it became clear to you that the abuse that I have had is the worst that you have encountered. You have been treating , for five years:
someone who has the worst abuse history you have encountered,
someone born and raised in a foreign country- you don't have experience with immigrants,
a woman sexually abused by her own mother- you don't have experience with this,
Someone belonging to a non-black minority race-you don't have a lot of experience with this. You said you have treated a few latino people
Someone with a severely delusional parent: you don't have experience with psychosis and delusions
Someone with a very distant, cold mother: something you admitted that you couldn't relate to
Someone from India: a culture that you don't know much about and you learned about from watching Slumdog Millionaire
There is a lot here about me, big important things that you simply cannot treat. Of the remaining things, you really haven't handled a lot of those well either. There are some things you have handled really amazingly well. And that's just not enough. I need more. And I need better.
Which brings me to my second point:
When you say things to me like in your twenty years of experience, you have never had to refer someone to another therapist, it pisses me off.
It doesn't sit right with me. I don't know for sure what you feel about all of this. I think you feel guilty and like most people who feel guilty, you feel resentful towards the person around whom you feel guilty. And I think you're taking it out on me. The line between the personal and the professional has always been blurred with you and me. And now it has been crossed. I so believe it's been crossed before but this time I'm not going to take it any more. I'm not going to expose myself any more to your weird passive-aggressive criticism. If you don't mean it in a bad way and you have good motives, it doesn't matter. Also you cannot say things like this and also like the other time when you said any other therapist would have just referred me to someone else, and then say I'm wrong for feeling like you see me as a very difficult patient. You can't have it both ways. If you see me as someone who's not a difficult person, you need to talk to me that way.
I am not going to be exposing myself to you any more when you're in this state. Until you are able to put some distance between you and your emotions, I'll be putting some distance between me and you. I am not going to see you any more. You're in very unfamiliar territory here because you're doing something that you have never done before in two decades and you're set in your ways. I think you really want to handle our parting well and gracefully. And for a time I was amazed at how great it all was. But with this continued hand-wringing and repetition of how inexplicable it all seems to you and how you just can't understand what went wrong and then the thing about never having to refer someone to another therapist ever, in the last couple of sessions, you're sliding steadily into a place of passive-aggressive blame. And even if you don't intend to blame me and this is all just a miscommunication, I still don't need to hear things like this. And you're communicating in a very ambiguous way at a time when all communication needs to be clear.
I have paid a lot of money and I have spent a lot of time and effort into this. I know you have put in tremendous time and effort as well. But you were getting paid to help me. And the fact that you had to put in so much time and effort to try and keep up with my issues is in itself an indication that you didn't have all the experience that you needed to treat me.
I am not going to pay for you to blame me any more. I've been there, I've done that. You can blame me all you want and defend your credentials all you want on your own time, not mine.
Bye. |
I canceled my upcoming appointment with my therapist. I can't stand to be around her. And in a way I don't think I ever have. She has always made me feel frightened and uneasy. She blames it on my past. But that's not all of it. She doesn't seem to get that she does a lot of things that really bother me. When I do bring it up, it always gets thrown back in my face. I am very tired of her believing that she's doing her very best and she's trying hard and she's working hard.
I don't give a shit about how hard she's trying. I feel like I'm only in the relationship just because I believe that if I was to leave I would feel guilty and ashamed later and I would have to call her up and apologize and she would do this horrible thing of hers where she seems really smug, even tho she may not really be that way.
Usually when people find me frustrating and exasperating and/or feel like they can't communicate with me and they just can't reach me, there's a very good reason for that: They're one hundred percent wrong for me.
Which doesn't mean that they're useless and pointless and bad. It means that there's a very good reason why I'm blocking them out and I don't want to do what they want me to do. even if it's well-intentioned.
I think a lot of times my therapist just seemed so distraught, so overwhelmed at what I would tell her about my life that I got fed up. And contemptuous of her. I have a lot of contempt for people who claim that they want to help me and then get all upset and anxious when I tell them what was going on.
If my past is overwhelming and the other person can't deal with it, then fine. Okay. Just don't promise me help and then withdraw when the going gets tough. |
| » Sometimes It Takes Five Years To Say Goodbye |
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It's amazing how you can look back on something you felt years ago and realize that what you felt then is pretty much how you feel now even though so many other things have changed:
http://deadlypuppy.livejournal.com/14529.html from 2006:
"I am so mad at my therapist. I feel like she has simply not been giving me what I really need all this time. I feel angry at her. I confronted her on a bunch of it today. It felt good ! I felt that I wasn't getting straight answers from her. On the other hand, I wonder if what she's saying has validity to it and the place where I'm at emotionally right now makes me see things this way.
What makes me absolutely furious is feeling like I'm not getting the answers I need, about the world and myself.
Because I have been abused so badly, I have a lot of misconceptions about other people and myself and the way the world works. I find that those misconceptions are better clarified when I read books on the problems facing adult children of alcoholics, when I talk with my husband D, when I talk with other people and listen to their occasional theories about other people and the way people are, when I read books on abuse survivors....than when i talk to her."
Yup.
And even now though she has quit that pointless maddening frustrating focus of hers where she tried to teach me to be more effective, more pragmatic, leave encounters feeling good about myself etc., she never lets me go deeper into the places that I want to explore and understand.
She is visibly intensely uncomfortable when I bring up any details about sexual abuse. She says that it is her natural reaction and she can take whatever I have to say. But I don't respect a woman who spends a lot of time touting her 20 years of experience (dear God! how often have I heard that?! I'm sick of hearing about her 20 years of experience) and then grimaces and shudders like a 19 year old sheltered small town girl every time I mention how my father would kiss me and fondle me.
Fuck you, lady. I had to endure it. I hate talking about it too but I need to. And for all my effort and your fucking 20 years of experience, all I get is this prissy-ass delicate flower histrionic performance replete with hand-gestures, groans, grimaces and shudders.
Disgusting. Grow the fuck up.
If you want to treat a person who has endured sexual abuse, descriptions of terrible things are the norm. If you can't stand the heat, get the fuck out of the kitchen.
And to use another metaphor with her, either shit or get off the pot. I'm tired of waiting and hoping for the breakthrough piece of understanding that never comes from her or from me when I'm around her. She simply doesn't ask enough questions for that to happen.
D's therapist on the other hand has his weird quirks. His bizarre laughs at inappropriate times. His bad habit of interrupting occasionally. But man, is the guy intelligent and a damn good listener. And it's funny how I see them as his quirks. And not as an indication of possible feelings of disrespect
I have spent five years processing this shit from my therapist. And now I realize that love is not enough, affection is not enough. It doesn't matter if this woman even loves me. Her love alone cannot make up for the love I didn't get as a child.
What I need more than anything, maybe even more than love, is understanding. No amount of affection from a person I see twice a week for an hour every time can replace that relief and peace that comes from feeling like I understand what is going on in me and around me.
And I think my therapist only saw my resistance of her, my fears that she had contempt for me, my fears that she wanted to shame and humiliate me, that she saw me as a nut.
She didn't see the other parts of me that were dying for clarity. She didn't see the parts of me that were dying to be understood.
She wanted to comfort me and make me feel safe by giving me a lot of affection.
That didn't work and she still doesn't get that. I don't think she believes that her whole maternal warmth thing is not really doing it for me.
Funny, isn't it? You would think that I, a person with a cold cruel violent mother, would love a warm, affectionate woman.
Wrong.
It turns out that I want to understand more than I want to keep getting my therapist's affection.
The thing is I've always known that my therapist can never give me the full, constant, reliable love I want. I can't call my therapist whenever I want. I cannot see her as long as I want: when the hour is up I have to leave. So it was painful to be around that affection of hers because I knew it had limits. Big limits. And outside of those limits, I was bereft, abandoned and alone.
And in those times, those long cold times between sessions and when I couldn't call her, what kept me going? Understanding.
Understanding what was going on inside of me, and what happened to make me feel this way: this is what sustains me. This is what helps me soothe and comfort myself when I am lonely and frightened. No amount of hugging and telling me how fond she is of me cuts it in the dark nights when I'm scared shitless. But what helps is to feel like I understand what I truly feel. And that in turn helps me absorb that I am safe now and the awfulness is behind me.
But my therapist never got that. And she never will. From her point of view, I am only seeing her flaws and I'm not seeing what she has to offer: her nurturing, her warmth and her affection, her fondness for me, her admiration and respect for me. From her point of view, I'm afraid to trust her and I'm putting up defences against her affection.
Al the above is true. But it is not the whole picture. There's a whole other picture which is that I'm not getting the deep understanding I need.
And she can't give me that understanding because she doesn't understand it herself.
She understands parts of it. She doesn't understand my mother. She doesn't understand my mother sexually abusing me.
She helped me understand my father. It's funny how both she and my mostly useless previous therapist, a woman, really helped me understand my father. And yet even there, D's therapist is going deeper than mine ever went.
I want to learn how to fish so that I can eat for a lifetime. And she doesn't wouldn't teach me. She would teach me to drive a truck, read Anna Karenina in the original Russian, eat according to the rules of royal etiquette, everything except teaching me how to actually fish.
And for me learning how to fish is the same as getting a deeper understanding of my life and me and my parents and how my mind works and what I do because I was abused.
I have waited five years to feel comfortable saying goodbye to her. I want to thank her for everything she did. But I don't feel grateful. I feel like she was just doing her job. I was paying her the whole time.
But more importantly, I feel angry: I feel exhausted and fed up. For five years I have been dissatisfied, confused and exasperated. And every time I brought things up with her, she blamed it right back on me. For all her warmth and affection, she sure did blame me a heck of a lot. I am tired of her. I am tired of being constantly told that I was just transferring stuff.
My therapist's clients are mostly like her: middle-aged middle-class Southern white women who have trouble figuring out what to say and what to do with backgrounds that have some bad abuse but nothing that stands out. Women who have trouble being assertive with their bosses and need coaching on what to say. Women who don't know how to talk to their teenage sons about drunk driving.
She told me repeatedly that I am the worst abused person she has ever met.
So she has no experience really working with severely abused people from foreign countries whose delusional mothers have sexually abused them.
Yeah, I don't need this shit. I got as much out of this relationship that I could and I feel like I have resolved a lot of things. And I feel like it is time to move on. For all these years, I was terrified to leave and now I'm actually looking forward to it.
It turns out that what I was terrified of was finding a new therapist all on my own. I wasn't terrified of leaving her. I was terrified of having to do something strange and new where it felt like I was groping blindly in the dark.
I feel like I am an ungrateful wretch for not wanting to say a tearful goodbye or talk about how much I'll miss her. But I was paying for all of it. All of it. Even when D and I were super low on cash.
And I could have gotten better. Even with all the work she put into it. I guess she was just not willing to admit to herself that for all her twenty years of experience, her experience didn't cover severe abuse that happened to a foreign-born woman with a sexually abusive mother and who helped take care of her mother and father.
I guess for a woman who prided herself on her twenty years of experience, she wasn't prepared for something that she didn't understand and she didn't know that she had limitations. Big ones. I am so mad at her. She could have just referred me to someone who had more experience than she did with severely abused people.
All in all, I'd say we're even. Maybe I'm down. That's okay. I just want to get out. I guess I feel like Yossarian at the end of Catch-22. Tired, and not caring about being the winner or the loser, and I just want it to end.
Mar. 3rd, 2009 @ 10:40 am
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| » On Progress |
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I have made a LOT of progress. I have made enough progress to realize that things are really broken. I really need to learn to figure out how to regulate my emotions and get a better sense of my identity. I have been resisting DBT for a long time and I think the time has come to give it another shot.
I need a stronger sense of my own identity and I need to do more with my life than keenly observe things and collate data in my head and arrive at an accurate conclusion about someone's pathology. I need more now. Now I need to use this knowledge to build things. ANd that's where the loose sense of identity and the emotional disregulation make it very hard for me to make decisions, take criticism and feel motivated to do things and stay calm while doing them.
This is very hard stuff. I do not want to end up like the blank bland emotion-less zombies from the Sai Baba cult. These people always espoused control over one's emotions and aspired to be in a constant state of detachment from the world. I don't want that. I want to feel. I want to feel anger, sorrow, fear, greed, lust, hunger, thirst, joy, humor. I want to feel all the things that I naturally feel. I just don't want to be inconvenienced by them when it isn't good for me. My father was another one who was really into this Buddhist state of calmly watching one's emotions. Not that he consistently practised it. And the times that he did practise it, he became an annoying self-righteous pedantic douchebag.
So i have a lot of anxieties around learning mindfulness. I will have to talk to each of the prospective new therapists to figure this out.
That's the other thing: switching therapists. Is that the right thing to do at this point? Is it wrong? Is it both?
Why am I switching therapists? I don't really know. I want to work with someone who has way more experience in working with severely abused people. I want to work with someone who will help me discover more about my past.
Invariably, the more I discover what happened in my past, the beliefs that were inculcated in me, the patterns that were laid out, the calmer and more in control I feel.
Now, am I rationalizing away my rejection of my current therapist? Possibly. The question is how much am I rejecting my therapist because of my own complications and how much is her mistakes?
I do feel like she was micro-managing my reactions to other people. And I did ask her over and over again to stop and focus more on helping me understand my past and how that's affecting what I do and feel now in the present.
This tells me another thing: the way I communicate my needs to other people is really unclear. When I read out my letter to D in front of his therapist and saw both their stunned expressions, I realized that there is something about my communication that isn't working. I think I come off way too strong. It's not enough to not curse and shout and not be verbally abusive. There's more stuff in there that's quite off-putting and scary even for the other person to hear.
So perhaps I was not communicating clearly. But then my therapist should have tried to understand me and not have dismissed my requests as transference, me seeing only her flaws, toxic stuff that needed to come out etc.
Yet now that she is seeing my issues with her more clearly, should I be leaving her after 5 years?
God I have such big problems communicating with people. I am so verbal and I write well and yet it is so freaking hard to communicate: to get my message across when it is about me and my feelings and my needs, and my frustrations. When i get frustrated with the other person, i don't fucking know what to do.
Or is that only partly true?
Who knows?
Well, more work to be done. More hard work. I'm tired of working so hard. When will it end? For some reason, I'm just fed up with all this work. What's the point of it? When am I going to feel a little comfortable with my life? When am I going to have feel enjoyment of work that I do to earn an income? When will I feel comfortable in my skin? When will I stop feeling this yawning emptiness?
I realize now that I have been in denial of how bad I feel this whole time. I've been in a state of anger and opposition. Under that is a feeling of profound exhaustion and helplessness. That's really it: helplessness. I feel like I don't have the power to stop anything. Maybe that's why i come off too strongly when I am trying to get people to stop doing something that's bothering me.
I guess that's what my childhood has been about in large part: how do I stop my mom from ignoring me? How do I stop my dad from hurting me? How do I stop the sexual violation? How do I make it stop, stop, stop already?
The sad thing is that means there's more horror to be faced, more disgusting things to be acknowledged, more pain to endure. More crying sessions where I feel like I'm about to pass out from the pain.
And I'm one of the lucky ones.
What about all the kids out there who don't have access to mental health care? The millions upon millions upon millions of them worldwide?
As I speak, there are millions of children being humiliated, tortured and violated verbally, emotionally, sexually, physically.
I'm really tired. I gotta go.
Feb. 13th, 2009 @ 04:36 pm
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| » How Do I Do This? |
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I was reading some of my old posts just now and I felt very ashamed and embarrassed. I wish i could feel some compassion for myself. I am so worried about someone reading them and thinking that I'm a wacko. I feel sad at that. There are only two people who read my journal. I have been desperate my whole life to convince some imaginary person that I am sane and normal and not in a state of intense emotional agitation.
I am very ashamed at how emotionally agitated I am a lot of the time. I am ashamed at how much I fear abandonment. I am very needy. clingy and I think I can get over-the-top emotional with a lot of people. I am so ashamed of these things. It's something that I conceal from so many people and I try to conceal it from myself.
I am so used to seeing myself through other people's eyes. It's very hard for me to see the dignity in my life even if someone does shake their head at me and sigh and feel like I'm just too much for them. And I think that that is a much much bigger problem than how much I fear abandonment and feel devastated by small things. In fact I think feeling contempt or respect for myself based on what others think about me is the single biggest problem that I have and it is a big driving force behind my fear of abandonment and intense emotional turmoil.
I don't have enough of a sense of self. I know that i am good at some things and bad at others. I know some of my traits. But I'm still not comfortable with who I am. I still feel like it is wrong to feel comfortable with myself. In fact, the idea of feeling comfortable with myself feels great until I decide to try it on for size. And then I feel abandoned, lost and alone. It's like some part of myself is still trapped in infancy and does now know how to come out and is screaming for Mother.
My mother will never show up. I don't know how I am going to live the rest of my life without her. I don't know if the rest of my life has any meaning without her.
It's funny: a few days ago, I sobbed a lot because I missed having a mother so badly. And then a few days later, I had dreams where I was acknowledging her sexual abuse of me for the first time.
Then I just couldn't stand the idea of missing her in particular. She never was my mother and she never will be.
But how do I survive without a Mother?
The irony is that if I had no Mother to begin with, I may not have missed her so much and felt so terrified to live without her. My life feels meaningless and empty without a Mother to tell me who I am and what I should do.
I feel so scared and so anxious. I don't know what to do. It's like absolutely none of my childhood needs were met. So how do I go about being an adult when i still yearn for someone to feed me? I miss a Mother all the time. I went shopping tow days ago for groceries and it felt so wrong and so strange to have to do this all by myself without my Mother. I miss her so much and I just wish she would come back to me.
I'm crying as I type this. Life just seems so empty and barren and flat and desolate and grey and meaningless without my Mother.
Where is she? When will she come back to me?
How do I live without her? How?
But I am going to have to do that.
Some part of me wants to learn to live without her. I don't want to die. I really don't. I want to live. I have to live. I have to move towards the light. I don't know how. I don't want to do it without my mother. But I have to. If I don't live without my mother then I will die. And I don't want to die. My whole life, I have just wanted to live. With or without her.
Even when I was suicidal, I decided to stay alive because I thought my mother would miss me. And so I stayed. But now I can't do that. I have to live for myself.
It's just too much fun to do things. To do stuff. Just to play racquetball. To cook. To paint. To draw. Even typing. Cleaning my room. It feel so good. It's so much fun. It gets my juices flowing.
I'm sobbing as I type this.
I have never ever really lived.
I wan to live now. I want to engage with the world. I can't put it aside any more. I want to do whatever it takes to live. To participate in the world.
And my mother never ever ever let me do that. She always put road blocks in my way. even typing with my left hand feels so good. I miss my Mother so much. Maybe I'll meet a spiritual mother somewhere. But no one person will meet all my needs. that makes me so sad. It's so hard to have to learn these things.
More than anything I want something to keep me from making mistakes. I need to find some way to accept my mistakes and see them as a way to learn things and as the natural consequence of my shitty upbringing. The tricky part is to also take responsibility for them.
How do I do this? How do I take responsibility but not contempt? I guess I have to learn to feel respect for myself. Real self-respect. Not the kind that people talk about when they talk about how some woman is virginal or slutty.
I need to learn to respect myself. To respect my womanhood, my femininity, my beauty, my intelligence, my flaws, my mistakes. It's going to be so lonely. But it's the only way.
I have to learn to be alone. I really just want to learn to do stuff. I want to move in space. To engage with my life and my world. This is the only way that I'll have friends who I can rely on and who can rely on me,. Otherwise I'll be a child still looking for my mother.
I am not going to be like many other people. That's okay. If I have myself and I like and respect myself, I think I'll be okay. If I can withstand someone's respect and not feel like a horrible piece of shit, I think I'll be okay.
I don't know how to do all this.
Feb. 12th, 2009 @ 03:48 pm
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| » Enough |
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I am so tired of seeing myself as some sort of conniving man-stealing schemer. Why do I see myself this way? I was sobbing and crying earlier today and I realized that for all the horrific abuse and neglect that I have been through, I haven't hurt anybody. I have stressed out poor D and made his life difficult. But I have never been able to muster up the malicious intent to go after someone and fuck up their life.
So why do I see myself as an evil bitch? Rather, it's like being misunderstood and being seen as a bitch.
I'm not.
I want to stop worrying that other people see me all the time as a bitch and they will see me as a conniving arrogant schemer. That's how my mom saw me. I don't know how my mom could see her own small, sweet, innocent child as a cold, harsh, evil schemer. Was she talking to her mother all those times? Was her own mother cold, harsh and remote? Possibly.
I have many flaws. But I am not a cold, harsh person. I do have great moments pf rage and frustration. But I am not distant and I don't put people down for no reason.
I wonder if many abuse survivors are still extremely innocent, sweet, child-like people who are deeply ashamed of the fact that in many ways they haven't grown up. I see many abuse survivors struggling to be cynical, tough, angry, cold, jaded adults. I have mistaken being jaded and grumpy and sardonic for being an adult.
I just want to have a cute little pink car and a sweet little hat and cute shoes and a little bag that holds all the important stuff: protein bars, wallet, phone, notepad, makeup, lotion and keys and a nice job I like and a cute room of my own that I can decorate however I like and a cute cat named Buttons and a really sweet guy with whom I have a nice relationship. I'd like to have some money for ill health, times of unemployment and travel. I'd like to have n adequate retirement fund and some nice good friends around whom I don't have to worry too much about my terrible stomach problems.
That about covers it.
It sounds so juvenile but I don't know what more I could ask for.
Who wouldn't feel great if you had a nice interesting job, good friends, a sweet caring partner, a warm fuzzy friendly pet or two, nice friends and a cute little pink car to drive to work and back?
I would love to have a little funky pink car and some funky shoes. Wow, I wonder if I should feel embarrassed that after all this crap I have been through, I am almost thirty and I am unemployed and I have little job experience and I just want small, cute things. I can't bring myself to be so jaded any more. There's a lot of fun stuff in life.
I think abuse survivors need help finding voncations. Part of the search for identity also involves a search for a vocation.
Dec. 8th, 2007 @ 12:26 am
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| » My Fears |
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My biggest fear is that I will become invisible and no one will see me any more and no one will care that they can't see me any more and no one will remember me and I will be all alone.
I feel so bad that no one saw me when I was a kid. I was invisible. I never could get my mother to make eye contact with me as a child. She never wanted to spend time with me. I was desperate to look at her face, but I was never allowed to. My father never saw me either.
Everything has been so painful and so difficult and I am so tired. I am so freakin tired. I am tired of being cold all the time and I am tired that I have do it myself because no one else is going to cover me up. I am so tired.
I am really angry that I never got any help from my parents and I was forced into being another person, someone that I didn't even like, and I am angry that I didn't like that person because I could have at least used my own love and support, and now...
Now I have to learn to do everything on my own. I can't rely on my poor dear husband any more. He has his own battles to fight.
It's not fair.
It wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't feel like other people were having these wonderful warm cozy relationships with each other.
Is it because I live in the South?
Here, in North Carolina, there is a fakeness to a lot of human interaction. Is that what is fooling me?
I want to feel like I am one in a sea of people with problems. I don't feel that way at all. I feel like a shameful loser. I feel like how I did when I was a kid and my mom had an enormous delusional meltdown when I was 9. I felt so ashamed. I still treat the world the same way. Like they have all the power in the world to judge me and I have no power at all and I should just be watched and laughed at and mocked.
I have a lot of worries about how I am perceived.
I can't do it all. I don't want to do it all. I am too tired to do it all.
I feel so terribly alone and empty inside of myself all the time. I don't know what to do to make it go away.
Dec. 4th, 2007 @ 12:10 am
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| » Another Thing I Learned |
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There are no crazy people or sane people. Everybody is crazy. Seriously. Get to know anybody really well and you'll be surprised at how crazy they are.
There are people who know how to manage their craziness and keep it from disturbing themselves and others and there are people who really don't. The more someone knows how to manage their meshugas, the more they feel peace and the more they feel comoftrbale with opening their hearts to their own inner child and other people.
I also learned today that I don't have to respond soooo much to what others are say and do. I get way too angry and rattled when others do something that bothers me and way too grateful when people are nice to me. Some potential employer that I had previously interviewed with sent me an email acknowledging that he knew I had been patiently waiting for a reply from him and asked how I was doing. My first response was to get all thrilled and happy and send him a longish email. Then I remembered that someone else, a recruiter went out of his way to be nice to me and help me out with my resume and I responded to his kindness with this overflowing looong email filled with all kinds of things. I think it put him off. His next reply was very terse and kind of distant.
I think I respond way too much to the kindness of men and way too little to the kindness of women. Also, I don't have to be so grateful when people are nice to me. Most people do some nice things to strangers every once in a while. It happens. It's nice. I might as well enjoy it rather than get so agitated by it. I guess I get agitated because I feel so surprised that of all the people in the world, I am getting some kindness thrown at me. But other people don't see the filthy disgusting outcast that I see. They see a nice fairly attractive lady who seems sort of nice. Heh heh so many qualifiers :)
I don't have to worry so much about what people say and do. Who knows what the heck is going on in the heads of most people. I certainly don't want to know. I have been watching a lot of 'The Office' lately and I am so grateful that I finally have a template of the mundane annoying dull interactions that most of us are subject to. My parents based a lot of their histrionics on what they saw in the movies. I'm grateful to finally find a depiction of real human interactions, albeit with the humor turned way up. All the other shows I've been watching and the other movies I've been watching have all somehow been bad for me in the sense that I have a really bad grasp of how mundane most human interactions really are, and watching something really intense and histrionic where every interactions is extremely significant exacerbates my condition. I feel compelled to make every single interaction special and meaningful and memorable. That is so impossible. But my idiotic dad and mom made me feel so neglected and lonely and forgettable and also made me feel like I had to work really hard because of mediocre they thought I was. Also my crazy dad had no sense of how human interactions work anyway.
God, I feel so angry as I type this. It was so pointless. So senseless. So stupid. Hey guy who possibly raped the lady who gave birth to me, when the fuck are you going to realize that nobody really cares that you try to speak perfectly accented English and you trim your beard impeccably and you read up on newspapers and newsmagazines so you can impress others with your knowledge and you push your wife to iron your shirts so you always look crisp and professional....no one cares!!!
You're still a turd. A very well-groomed turd who knows a lot about world capitals and news trivia. But you are still a piece of shit.
And lady who gave birth to me, you suck. You're ugly. Seriously. You smell. Your crotch reeks every time you sit down or stand up or lie down. You're one of the grossest people on the planet. There are homeless people who smell better than you. And you won't take a shower just to spite your husband. Which makes you sick, really sick. And you're nuts and a bitch, to boot. You have a huge sense of entitlement and you're a psycho monster. I really hate you. I wish you were not the lady who gave birth to me. I wish you were never born. Because if I wasn't the person you gave birth to, you would have fucked over some other poor defenseless child. You horror of a human being. Oh also bitch, you've gotten a lot of mileage from your whole 'there are cameras and video recorders and microphones spying on my every move' bullshit. That has given you a lot of emotional blackmail currency and you have used it well. Your delusions somehow always acted up when it was my birthday or when I had just won a prize or when I had an exam the next day or when I was terribly worried about something or just about any situation where the attention or focus was to be on me. Fuck you, bitch. You're really an asshole when you deny your only daughter some basic human attention and feel like you have to compete with her all the time for male approval from your turd of a husband.
You, madam, are a turd. Ironically, you smell like one too.
Finally, I have learned that for abuse survivors to recover, the biggest thing they need is a sense of their own identity that is independent of the abuse. In order for an abuse survivor to stop identifying with the abuser's distorted view of them, the abuse survivor needs to find a place inside of their self, that is their own. Simple things like genres of music that resonate deeply or kinds of art that seem especially evocative or poignant or even styles of clothing that seem particularly apt. All these things...all these means of self expression, these ways of being for the inner self are so useful. The more I find out about what I really like and dislike, the less I feel pressure to like or dislike something else.
Nov. 28th, 2007 @ 09:56 pm
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| » Today I Learned... |
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That being kind and nice, and being meek and taking crap from other people are two wholly unrelated things.
That it is important to be kind and to also keep the hell away from jerks.
That there is a huge middle ground between being incredibly rich and famous and toiling away in obscurity.
Nov. 18th, 2007 @ 10:05 pm
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| » My First Love |
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My beloved ______
You mesmerized me the very first moment I met you when I was in the fifth grade. I have needed you since then. As I grew older, I needed you inside me. I have craved you, your mouth on mine, your eyes on my naked body, my hands on your naked back, my fingers caressing your chest.
None of that came to pass. Nothing happened. Ever.
Do you remember that time when we were teenagers in your room and you turned off all the lights and you took off your clothes and stripped down to your shorts and you wanted me to take off my clothes and you lay down on the bed next to me?
Do you remember the night you wanted to dance with me in your room with all the lights off?
Do you remember that night we were watching TV and the lights were off and your parents were asleep? I still don't remember if I showed you how I felt about you ..if I really did lean against your shoulder.
You don't understand what you meant to me. You were one of the few good things in my life at that time.
I wanted to marry you, ______. I wanted you to be my husband, my man.
_____, you were all I had. The hope, the promise that you might love me got me was the one beautiful thing in my life, the one thing that made me feel young, fertile, beautiful, pretty.
You see, my father and my mother were sexually abusing me and beating me and calling me names the whole time.
I felt old, and ugly and dried up and repulsive the whole time. I was always afraid that you would realize how ugly I was, and you saw me as a disgusting old hag...even though I am two years younger than you.
I never saw myself as a young girl, _____. My father was raping every day and my mother was fondling me and beating me every day and I never felt young and pretty. I felt old and unwanted. But you, being attracted to you made me feel young and nubile.
I have yearned for you my entire life. Now I am married. I am almost thirty. But I have yearned for you my whole life. What happened to that? What will happen to those feelings I have for you? What will happen to my love for you? Where will my yearning go? As you fade away from my life, I want to tell you how important you once were, how I fantasized about you every night before I went to bed, fantasized about you making love to me, you and me, fused in love, forever.
And none of that happened,_____. None of that happened. None of it will ever happen. My father raped me. He would rape me at night, after I gave myself to you. And my mother would join in. And I have nothing left now. Nothing.
I wanted you to be in love with me. And that didn't happen either.
At the end of all these years, at the end of this crazy one-sided love affair that has been going on since I was nine years old, all I have is some memories and a wild yearning that has no place in my life.
Will you ever understand these things? Will you understand this urgent throbbing painful thing I feel for you?
Or will you run away? Like you always did.
And one thing about my husband now, _____, he never ran away. And he loves me. A lot. More than you ever did. More than you ever will. More than you ever can, or could.
I fell in love with a boy. I married a man.
You are my first love. Maybe, I just want you to know that. Maybe I am tired of this secrecy. Maybe I am tired that you have no idea how I felt about you, how I yearned for you for almost two decades.
I don't even really love YOU. I just miss being a child, and being a teenager and a young woman. I never got to be any of those things. And you did. And you're the biggest symbol of everything that was taken from me when my parents raped me. I had to grow up really fast to deal with that shit. You didn't. You got to be young. And beautiful. And you got to keep your innocence. I didn't.
I wish my husband was my first love. And not you. My husband is special. You aren't. And everything I ought to feel for him I feel for you.
I hate that. But it is what it is.
You are my first love. And that sad lonely terrified raped child inside of me still loves...you.
I don't even know you, really. I don't really know you well even though I have known you since I was nine. I just love the idea of you.
And if you ever reciprocated, I would fall right out of love with you.
Maybe I love you because you are so elusive.
Like my childhood. I can't have you. And I want you so bad because of that.
I didn't have a childhood. And so I can't leave it behind and move on. And so, I can't leave you behind either. I can't see you for who you really are. I see some idealized hero when you are just some average guy plodding along.
You know, I just wish I got to be a kid. I wish to God that my mother and father let me alone, let me be a kid. So I could leave it behind, outgrow it all. And I didn't feel so ugly and old and disgusting all the time. And so unworthy of you.
And so unaccepting of my own husband. And so contemptuous of his love for me.
You have grown up to be an immature man, a childish uncommunicative man. But you're still nice. One day, I hope to outgrow you. One day, I hope that I will not feel this urgent powerful thing for you. That you'll be an old friend that I like a lot and treasure as a piece of my childhood. And I will learn to love my husband, I will learn to love what I have.
And I hope I will learn that I was a lovely, beautiful child. I had a good heart. I was young. I was fresh. I will never dry up and fade away. I liked babies and animals and cake. I liked and appreciated affection. I still do.
Maybe I will stop feeling so much attraction to you when I accept that I was a lovely child and a gorgeous young girl. That you did me no favors and you weren't unattainable. That you were totally worthy of me and I was more than worthy of you and I don't have to approach you or life or anything that I want, like some sad lonely homeless ugly beggar outside a Christmas window.
Nov. 15th, 2007 @ 01:38 am
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| » Identity problems |
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I am terrified that I will be found out:
As impractical
As a lazy crazy dreamer
As someone loud and nutty
As unfeminine
As low class
As histrionic
As a hysteric
As all talk and no action
I have an imagination, i dream in color, i see colors when I hear music, I love shapes, colors and sounds
I can't do anything though. I am paralyzed with inaction because I feel like I am a prostitute.
I have never done prostitution work, ever. Never stripped for money. Never done anything involving exchanging my sexuality for money, but boy, do I feel like a prostitute all the time.
I was recently contacted by a staffing agency and they offered to help me find a job. And my first thought was "Oh god, they'll find out that I'm actually a prostitute and start demanding sexual favors."
Whatever I do, in the back of my mind, it runs, this constant videotape that I am a prostitute.
I remember feeling like a callgirl when i was thirteen years old. My father was obsessed with prostitutes. He would talk openly about them when he and I were together. after my mother's breakdown, my father couldn't shut up about prostitutes. He was always talking about them. About catchphrases and euphemism pimps used. He would always speculate about which random women standing around at bus-stops or walking down the streets were prostitutes. He did all this with me.
I realize now that I feel like I am an old dried up used prostitute. I feel like I have drifted into prostitution and I have made some sort of terrible mistake and I have a filthy dark disgusting sordid past that i should be ashamed of. I feel like I have drifted steadily into a sordid world of drugs, gambling, alcohol and prostitution.
When I listen to the Animals' song : House of the Rising Sun, I feel like it describes my life especially these lines:
Oh mother, tell your children
Not to do what i have done
Spend your life in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun
What the fuck??
What have I done??
I have done just the opposite: I have worked hard in therapy, I have tried to go to school, I am a married woman.
But it's more than that: I always got the feeling when i was a kid that if I didn't get great grades, if my life came easily to me, it was because I was taking the easy way out and on my way to becoming a prostitute. I don't know how to explain this...my mother's father was an alcoholic who squandered his family's money on prostitutes and booze, or that's what my mom told me.
My maternal grandfather eventually married his mistress and had a child with her.
I always felt like my mother somehow invariably treated me like I was a whore when I went out on the long Saturday morning walks with my father that often happened during weekends. I think my mother actually saw me as some kind of prostitute.
I also got the feeling, i don't know why, that my mother too saw herself as a prostitute. I often felt like a bastard. My mother actually called me a bastard one time.
I don't know why this is but I instinctively understand the shame that children of prostitutes feel: the alienation, the feeling that everyone else is somehow more legitimate, more recognized, more real, more in the here and now in the eyes of society than you.
When people come into my home, I feel defensive and scared and nervous. It feels familiar somewhere: the idea of people entering what should be my home, but really isn't, because they come in whenever they like, and my mother going off to another room with them and me left alone wondering what's going on and being terrified that I am next.
What the hell happened when I was a child?
I remember one time when i was in fifth grade, my mother was combing her long black hair and she wouldn't do it on the balcony where I wanted to play and she told me that a certain kind of woman did those things and I immediately knew what she was talking about.
As a kid, I was often curious about what a prostitute was, and what happened during a rape.
I don't know why, but I feel like I am a courtesan from a long line of courtesans. But I know that my grandmother was not a prostitute. She divorced her first husband and then married my grandfather and apparently had a shitty marriage with him. My mother told me he killed her for the first few years of my life. Then she told me she died from a cerebral hemorrhage. I recently spoke to an aunt who confirmed that.
I read an abridged version of Les Miserable when I was 11. I instantly identified with Fantine, the prostitute. She falls into prostitution to support herself because she falls in love with a man who then abandons her after she gets pregnant with his baby.
This is why I feel guilty to live my life and do what I want: I constantly feel like a prostitute and It makes me feel angry and oppressed and rebellious and outraged all the time. I feel like others are constantly seeing me in a very unfair light all the time. One reason why I fear color so much is because prostitutes wear bright gaudy colors to attract potential customers.
Why do I always have this quick blurry image in my mind's eye of my mother tied to a chair naked and getting her genitals fondled?
I think my mother felt like a prostitute around the time of her wedding day. I also feel like somehow my father's younger sister was the reformed prostitute of his family: by marrying a rich man who was supposedly good to her, she was no longer a prostitute.
My mother would keep telling me about how she got her period on her wedding day and that because in Hindu tradition it made her unclean, it made the wedding rites awkward.
I am not sure what happened, but apparently my father's mother and sister were not sympathetic and were really mean to her. My mother would always talk triumphantly about how my father's sister ended up getting her period on her wedding day.
As a prostitute, one should not eat much, be too loud, too assertive, too exuberant, too funny, too anything, lest they find out. And excommunicate you because of it.
My mother and my father's mother both favored austere clothing. My father liked austerity too. My father, however was color blind. Color frightened him. I never clearly figured out whether he was color blind or what. I think he had difficulty distinguishing between red and green sometimes. He was very ashamed of it. He also froze with fear when he had to identify other colors. But he always could with a little gentle prodding from me.
But yes, anything bright and exuberant was a no-no. When I wear bright clothes and put on perfume and jewelry, I feel like a prostitute. This is why I wear loose-fitting clothes all the time even if they make me look like a sack. If I look good, they might find out that I am a prostitute. No art on the walls of my home, no sculpture, nothing that might attract johns and make them feel like they're in a nice comfy bordello.
I am living my life like I am a prostitute and I did some sordid filthy things that polite society disapproves of and I am scared shitless that someone will find out and at the same time I'm angry and resentful of the power other people have over me and from time to time I want to fight back against them and be defiant.
I get mad at my therapist because she seems so virginal and pure and I feel like a dirty prostitue around her. Because of this identity that has been forced upon me, I stay away from women because I am terrified they'll find me out. I fear attractive women because these are women who have managed to attract male attention and respect:something I cannot do and these women have figured it out. They have figured out how to be beautiful and get attention and power and all the advantages that come from being attractive to men without being prostitutes.
And being dark-skinned adds an extra dimension to it: I think my father genuinely believed that being dark-skinned meant having to be nothing more than a prostitute. He watched a movie in the late eighties about a black callgirl and I think that got him started on this whole thing.
My father's sister's daughter is of course light-skinned and thus prettier. It was as though my father looked at me when I was ten or eleven after my mom's breakdown and he felt completely humiliated from it and he saw me and he thought 'well, she's dark and has thick lips and looks like a black person and so since I think black women can only be prostitutes and nothing else, what the heck, I'll just rape the black prostitute in my house and have fun with her body".
My parents' house was like a little plantation: my dad was the depraved cruel white slavemaster, my mother the crazy uptight slave mistress and me slightly darker than both of them (but in post-colonial India, where even the slightest differences in shade are critiqued and analyzed, that darker tinge in my skin makes all the difference) being the slave.
My mother once gave me a story to read from Guy de Maupassant called Boule de Suif, about a French prostitute who is trying to cross the French border with some rich aristocrats during the Franco-Prussian war. When a Prussian general stops them at an inn and does not let them go and finally agrees to free them only if the prostitute sleeps with him, the aristocrats pressure the woman into having sex with him even though she doesn't want to. They see it as her just doing what she does everyday anyway, never mind that she does not want to sleep with a Prussian. Finally they break down the poor woman's will and she sleeps with the general and he lets them go. The aristocrats then promptly ignore the woman and let her starve while they break out their food and eat. The story ends with her sobbing out loud in shame and despair while the aristocrats around her ignore her and talk amongst themselves.
Somehow the implication was" learn to take care of yourself or you'll end up like Boule de suif the French prostitute. It was like she was telling me that I wasn't entitled to the protected status afforded to me as the child of a middle-class woman. As someone that others saw as a prostitute, they would try and take advantage of me and it was my job to figure out their tricks.
My mother also made me read a British book called 'Jill' about a young working-class boy who goes to a posh college in London where he doesn't fit in with the other rich kids and they mock him and make him feel out of place and poor. Desperate to fit in, he invents a cool smart sister called Jill and talks about her to everybody. Then he gets exposed as a fraud at the end of the book. My mother constantly praised this book to me and told me that I needed to read it, I suppose, to warn me against the dangers of forgetting my humble origins and getting too big for my boots and thinking i could be anything better than a working class schlub or a prostitute. It was important to remember who I was or where I came from. She wanted me to become a doctor or get a degree in business, something severe and serious that would wipe the prostitute stain off my record. My mom also told me the story of 'Psycho' when I was a kid. I guess she saw my dad as the Anthony Perkins character.
Even my mom's delusions were about prostitution: people watching her on the toilet, showering, changing her clothes, and paying money to see her and gambling on what she would do next.
Nov. 5th, 2007 @ 03:26 pm
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| » Looking for a job, desperately |
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I don't want to be bored.
I don't want to be around rude people.
I want to be around polite and nice people.
The path is not clear yet.
I don't want something really low-level.: I want to have lunch when I want to.
What is important to me: what do I need?
What am I really looking for?
I have turned this into a contest between my fear of having unrealistic entitlements (my mom's voice asking me angrily "who do you think you are?" and nastily refusing all my requests for help because she thought of them as handouts to the lazy) and my sad tired bored child who's desperate for help and is terrified about going out into the world and feels thoroughly incompetent and mostly very bored and doesn't want to do anything.
I have to do something that is neither: I want to get a job and be independent and that is not too mind-numbingly dull and that I can stand to do for eight hours a day.
What expectations are realistic? What should I be aiming for? What is true? What jobs can I expect to get? What jobs should I just go for?
Should I bother to look for work that I really want to do? I am so afraid to speak up for what i want in case someone laughs at me and my unrealistic expectations and my arrogance.
Nov. 5th, 2007 @ 01:39 pm
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| » So scared |
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I think what really drives my life most of the time is this: I wish my mother was here with me and I wish she would tell me what to do.
I feel terrified now. It's weird. usually i leave my therapy sessions with some feeling of resolution. Today I didn't. I felt like I had just begun by the time it was over. I cried for a long long time yesterday because I really missed my mom. Or a mom. A person. Someone. Someone who would watch over me and take care of me.
The worst part is that I feel so ashamed that i don't have that person in my life. I feel so ashamed when I see pictures of my classmates and relatives on orkut.com (a social networking site that's huge in India). They're all doing so well.
These are the same people who always had someone to love them. They always had supportive moms or dads or older brothers. Somebody older and wiser and helpful who looked out for them.
I feel so ashamed that I don't have that. It makes me feel trashy and grungy and like a panhandler, a drunk, and around men, I often feel like a whore turning tricks for money but who is somehow concealing this shameful fact, but can only do it for so long before she gets found out.
I am so scared and so ashamed. I think I cannot do anything about my fear as long as I'm so ashamed
I am terrified.
I have been looking for a job for nine months now and I am not even close to getting employed. Our savings are drying up. What do I do?
My mother never once gave me an ounce of help. Ever. With anything. I moved all the time. From one town to another. From one city to another. Over and over again. Every town was in a different state where they spoke a different language. So I had to learn to speak a whole new language. Every time.
Correct that: my mom has helped me exactly twice: the first time I cannot even remember: apparently I was very small like two or three and my dad was teaching me to read and write English and I kept messing up the 'c; and he got furious and threw the pencil across the room and yelled at me and stormed off. My mother always said that she said with me and taught me how to read and write English. the implication was that but for her I would be a retarded bumpkin.
The other time was the one day my mom decided to teach me one single Hindi lesson from my second grade Hindi textbook. She sat with me and explained the meanings of a bunch of different words and wrote the English meanings over the Hindi words for me.
That was all.
I have a definition of a good person and I believe that anything outside of that is pathetic and shameful. I also believe that most successful functional intelligent classy people are this way. I believe that trashy people are the opposite of the list below:
A good person is : kind, strong, even-tempered, in a permanent state of emotional equilibrium, never upset by anything, always serene, always calm, always entertaining, always smart, always profound, always says The Right Thing, always pretty, always thin, cracks really funny jokes that always work, never lets down his/her guard, is never ever vulnerable, always reacts just the right amount to everything, very emotionally independent yet knows how to open up and be vulnerable just at the right time with the right person to the right extent.
The bottomline is that I don't want to go anywhere or do anything because I am afraid that people will find out what a horrible hysterical histrionic high-strung clingy needy noisy loud crazy mess I am. I am so ashamed of the way I am that I feel embarrassed at all the alliteration in the previous sentence.
And that is why I have no friends, nobody besides my therapist and my husband that I am close with. Because I am afraid that if I call up someone they'll think I am clingy. That if I openup with someone about my weird trippy bizarre yet oddly beautiful life, they'll get shocked and appalled and run away. I don't go after jobs that I really want because I am afraid that they'll call me in for an interview and they'll get that sickened-appalled-disgusted-disappointed look that says 'you're not as awesome as you first seemed We don't like you any more".
I give killer first impressions. Everyone who meets me for the first time thinks I am wonderful : I am pretty, witty, charming, intelligent with flashes of brilliance, hilarious, wise, insightful, attentive. it's like I have been trained to seduce people into liking me and then there is just nothing.
I don't go by myself anywhere. It is a huge effort for me to do anything that involves contacting anybody. It is a huge effort for me to do anything close to resembling what I really do want to do.
Today at a bookstore, a man cut in line in front of me. I wanted to say something. But I was scared to look like an angry hysterical mess. So I kept my mouth shut and awkwardly waited.
It was weird and embarrassing cos the guy cut in from the exit side of the line just when I was walking down to the cashier. ANd so I had to awkwardly wait in the middle of the path while the guy finished up, and the cashier didn't say anything to him. I was scared to come off as an asshole or as an angry highstrung bitch who gets easily upset. But I also had to come off as a supremely assertive unafraid regl queen who never let anybody take advantage of her.
So I beat myself up about it.
It's exhausting being me.
I am so worried someone is reading this and laughing their ass off at how pathetic I am.
Oct. 30th, 2007 @ 06:27 pm
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| » Identity, Anger, Healing, Honesty |
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There were “fumblings” with girls; he wanted to meet one who “looked like a boy, Kate Moss, impish with small bosoms”. But really he fancied the actor Jared Leto and eventually “found” himself in Miami. He came home, told his “family, cab drivers, everyone”. Now he treats it as an implicit, though not defining, part of his identity — like being Jewish. “The freedom is not to be defined by it. I think it’s immature when people cling to it as an identity.”
- UK gay Jewish comedian Simon Amstell
This is how I feel about defining myself as an abuse survivor. This is why I avoid many women who are abuse survivors. Why do female abuse survivors, of the lower-middle classes and above, define themselves as victims all the time?
It irks me, terribly, to see this orgy of self-pity among female abuse survivors.
And there is , in my mind at least, a HUGE difference between pitying oneself and grieving for one self. Between seeing oneself as a martyr and feeling compassion for oneself. Between refusing to feel any anger at all toward one's tormentors and allowing oneself to feel rage and fury at one's captors. Between refusing to look past one's immediate history as an abuse survivor and actually allowing oneself to fully experience the sheer horror of what really happened.
D's mother, D's friend G, my ex-friends K, M...all women...all too busy being professional victims. Men who have been abused and refuse to move past being victims act out. Women who have been abused and refuse to move past being victims act in.
Men being perpetrators towards society at large, particularly women and children. Women become perpetrators towards themselves and THEIR OWN children.
75% of child physical abuse cases are perpetrated by women. Women abuse their own children. Men abuse their own children and other people's children as well.
When I watch Oprah and I listen to the weepings and wailings of middle class educated white collar women from the world's most prosperous nation, I feel the same twinge of, quite frankly, rage that I do when I hear K and M go on about their attempts to be "mature" and to "forgive".
Why be "mature"? Why forgive? Why weep? Why wail?
Why be a martyr?
Why not, instead be bereaved?
Why not be an orphan?
Why not be shell-shocked?
Why not be a tornado of rage?
Why not acknowledge what is really going on?
Why not feel the horror?
Why not feel all of it at once and have it be okay?
The rage, the pain, the horror, the sorrow, the bereavement, the emptiness?
Why not let oneself feel the enormity of what has happened?
I met this woman once P at an abuse survivors group. Her father had raped her. No, I do not want to use the clinical term 'sexually abused'. Forced sexual intercourse is rape. End of story.
So her father had raped her. Her own father had raped her. What could be more horrific than that? I know, the fact that it happened to me too. And this girl had the audacity to say that she had forgiven her mother. She said she had moved on. She felt sorry for him and now she was in contact with her mother to 'discuss', to discuss why her mother had looked away for all those years when her own father raped her.
Yes, yes, this is how it happens, this is a typical case. Blah blah blah.
But her own fucking father raped her. And her own mother knew. And her mother did nothing. And this bitch was in contact with her mother to discuss matters and to figure out why her mother didn't do anything when her father forcibly shoved his penis into her vagina.
Oh wow.
P was so proud. She felt mature. She felt like a good little woman. She felt like she was a good girl. A nice girl. The nice kind of little girl we're all brought up to be. Vengeance and rage are for the guys, you see. It's okay for the men. It's okay for the Charles Bronsons of the world to chase and hunt down the rapists who raped his wife and daughter. That makes him a good man, a noble one even. It's okay for the action stars of this world to hunt down and massacre terrorists, criminals, sickos, serial killers.
IT IS NEVER OKAY FOR A WOMAN TO GET MAD.
And among the anti-anger Nazis, the foremost anti-anger Nazi, the most controlling, manipulative and repressive group is the female middle-class survivor of sexual abuse.
Nobody is more controlling and disapproving of the anger of other abuse survivors than the female middle-class survivor of sexual abuse.
Because female middle-class sexual abuse survivors are fundamentally not interested in re-defining their identity. Female middle-class sexual abuse survivors have a different priority altogether:
That of proving to themselves and the world that they are not crazy.
And in middle-class circles, the biggest trope we have for insanity is still rooted in British Victorian Gothic literature: that of the angry woman locked away in the attic. The crazy lady who is crazy because she is angry.
Middle-class female sexual abuse survivors are consistently the ones who are the crazy one in their family. Why? Because their mothers tell them in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that they are.
You can throw a rock in a roomful of female sexual abuse survivors and hit a woman whose mother made her feel like she was nuts whenever she got even a little angry, when she was a child. The common thread among middle-class female sexual abuse survivors everywhere is that their mothers make them feel like their very normal emotions are BAD. That any negative emotion they have is a sign of some deeper more sinister pathology.
When the normal is pathologized, the normal is stigmatized. When the normal is stigmatized, then there is immense pressure to do that which is the opposite of normal. And always, that which is the opposite of normal is that which is unhealthy.
The woman P who prided herself on her recovery from sexual abuse and her quick painless forgiveness of her father and mother was not all that recovered. She overate. She was fat. She was a shopaholic. She had a nervous agitated manner.
She also had a frequent habit of exposing herself. Badly. She wore flimsy skirts that she never ever adjusted correctly and she would end up opening her legs wide and exposing herself. She also wore shirts that were cut very low. Too low. And she would show great masses of cleavage. Way too much. Whenever she bent down. It was embarrassing to be near her.
She was juggling a full-time job, internship and college all at once. Whenever she was nervous and upset, she went out shoe-shopping and got herself manicures, pedicures, clothes, burgers, fries and milkshakes.
But, she was considered to be fully recovered. She considered herself to be mostly recovered.
Because we have lower standards for women than we have for men. While men are not encouraged to feel vulnerability and sorrow and pain, men are encouraged to never be unnecessarily perky and cheerful. When a man is bereaved and grief-stricken, it's okay for him to have a sombre demeanor. Not so for a woman. As long as a woman forgives her tormentors and abusers, she is considered to be fully recovered.
Among women, forgiveness is code for granting immunity from responsibility.
Among women, there is no question of a different way of life which is common among recovered male abuse survivors: to never forgive, to never forget, but to move on.
To find out one's own true identity. One's real true way of living. And to live that. And to push that to the fullest. The emphasis is NOT on making things okay with the abuser.
Rather, the emphasis is on making things okay with oneself, no matter what that entails.
The first one is easy. All you need to do is develop an eating and shopping addiction and lie to yourself.
The second is hard. Really hard. You make yourself your first priority. And you keep pushing a relentless honesty on yourself. What do you really want? How do you get it? What is possible? What is impossible? What do you really feel? How do you express that?
You can never ever make nice with your abuser with the second approach. How can you make nice with someone who has raped you? You can't. So you don't. So instead you focus on making nice with yourself.
I notice that Jewish Holocaust survivors are never pressured to forgive the Nazis.
That John Walsh is never pressured to forgive the man who murdered his seix year old son.
That Black men are never pressured to forgive slave owners.
That male sexual abuse survivors are never pressured as much as female sexual abuse survivors to forgive their rapist.
Men hide their feelings of vulnerability behind their anger.
Women hide their feelings of anger behind their feelings of vulnerability.
Women are not particularly more nurturing and caring than men. I think that is another conceit that societies and religions have developed in order to keep the lid on women's anger. I think if women were as physically strong as men, everything else being the same, we would see higher rates of crime and violence from women.
I have observed consistently now, that I can't stand to be in close contact with a lot of female sexual abuse survivors.
It becomes all about mutual enabling of bad habits. It becomes all about dishonesty and Being a Good Person (TM).
And about being spiritual. And caring. And kind. And compassionate. And rescuing dogs. And rescuing kittens. And being vegan. And meditating. And lighting candles.
It gets to all about the ultimately meaningless rituals of faux-spirituality. Faux because real spirituality is about honesty. And acceptance. And it is about fighting the right battles for the right reasons. It is not about feeling a warm glow of righteous martyrdom because today you ate only vegan food and you felt some righteous indignation at the plight of the homeless and you lit some incense sticks when you came home from working a poorly paying job because well-paying jobs are for the oppressing classes and you tried to soothe yourself with the lavender scent of the incense sticks and chanted some fake-Hindu mantras you learned in yoga class.
This is what the state of female sexual abuse recovery has become.
By extension also, this is what liberalism in this country has become.
Life as a perpetual victim and noble martyr is about being Christ on the cross.
It is not about walking among the living. It is not about accepting what cannot be changed. It is not about changing what can be changed.
It is not about keeping your feet on the ground. It is not about feeling the normal emotions of rage, grief and pain that come from getting a monster's penis forced into your vagina. It is about pretending that the monster doesn't exist, the humiliation isn't really there, the pain doesn't matter and that you're a better person because you went thru the experience.
No one becomes a better person from someone else forcing their penis into them.
That's bullshit.
And no one has to.
The great myth of all major religions is that suffering makes you better than you were before.
Bullshit.
If that were true, all rapists would not be sexual abuse survivors themselves, Hitler would not have been an abuse survivor, etc. etc.
There is nothing good that comes from rape. Sorry. That's the fact.
My father raped me. Nothing good came out of it. I have to bear the consequences of his monstrosity. and that's okay. That's just the way it is. There is no point fighting it. I do not have to forgive him. I do not have to forget that it happened. i do not have to feel morally superior to anyone else because of it. I do have to feel all my pain, my anger, my loneliness, my despair. All that. And that's it.
One day I will confront him. Hopefully I'll get to scream at him, maybe punch him, I hope I get to knee him in the groin and punch his testicles.
I can't change what happened. But I think it'll make my life a lot better to hurt him. At least a little bit.
I'd like to have a good messy uncomfortable public confrontation. That'd feel good. It won't be pretty. I'm sure some would consider it trashy. I know my father hates negative publicity. So I'd just like him to feel raped and humiliated and exposed. Just like I did.
I don't want to be a good little abuse survivor any more. i don't want to be A Good Person (TM).
I don't want to aspire to any spiritual heights like most middle-class female abuse survivors do. I don't want to be a great and noble saint.
I don't want to belong to the great sorrowful sisterhood of middle-class female sexual abuse survivors. I think I'd like to belong to my group instead. The group of pissed-off rape victims trying to figure out what they really want to do with their lives and working slowly towards a confrontation with their rapist so that they can hear their own voice speak their own truth and so when they die they know that they gave it their best shot and they can move on peacefully.
Oct. 17th, 2007 @ 09:41 am
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| » Impressing men |
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What would my life look like if I didn't care about male approval?
What would I do?
What would I say?
What would I look like?
What if I opened my heart to all the love and approval I already get from my husband?
What if I didn't care at all about any man thinking I am gly?
What if I was never afraid of any man thinking I am stupid?
What if I never accepted any shame from any man?
What if I rejected any man trying to shame me?
Then what?
Who would I be?
What would I do?
What kind of work would I want to do?
Would I want to struggle with math just to impress a bunch of men and be the cool hot chick who's also really brilliant at math?
Would I want to run mushy romance novels that would make me a bunch of money?
If I had a father who was kind, loving and decent and he would give me all the approval in the world no matter what I did, would I care about what I did?
Would I just do what came easily and naturally to me, no matter how 'mediocre'?
I am not looking for success and happiness..I am looking for some vague idea of excellence.
I am still struggling to please my father.
I am holding so much back.
I just realized my father wanted me to write intense sex scenes when I was a pre-teen. I used to write poems and short stories and he kept telling me to write sex scenes for him to read. He said sex scenes would make my works that much more intense and they were actually really bland and wimpy. So I guess that's where the idea to write romance novels comes from.
Every urge I have comes from my parents' influence.
Where am I in all this?
Oct. 16th, 2007 @ 03:04 pm
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| » Getting Better is About Seeing the Truth |
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Interestingly, for the first say eight-nine years of my life, my dad wasn't around much. He was a total workaholic. He worked late, he left home early, he worked weekends. He wasn't around much.
The times he was around, there was this hot tension in the air partly because my mother couldn't stand him.
Getting better is about learning to handle the truth.
I think I am terrified to see just how vulnerable and pathetic my father was around my mother. He was like ...a vulnerable puppy, a dog around her. And the times that he exploded at her in violence were simultaneously scary and pathetic at once. Scary because he seemed to be saying that he could rape her right then and there because he was a man. And she was a weak little woman and he could bash her brains then and there and there was she could do about it. And pathetic because it took so long for him to explode at her in violence and to beat her. Because she would slap him, pinch him, twist his kin off, throw stuff at him, scream horrible words at him right in his face. For hours.
Here is where this entry will get a little more graphic than usual. But this is the truth as I see it. For now.
I think my parents, both of them, got off on sexual violence.
I think my father liked it when my mother was violent with him. And I think my mother secretly wanted my father to hit her. Because if she didn't want to get back by a man, she wouldn't have consciously, deliberately provoked him. So much.
I think I didn't want to ever understand that my father liked it, that he got off sexually from my mother hitting him so much. Because I would be there. right next to him. See, they had me sleeping in the same bed. I remember being seven years old one night when my mother got mad at my dad and started pinching him. Now when I say 'pinch', I mean claw. I mean she would hook her fingers like talons and grab a fistful of skin in my father's inner tricep or bicep and dig her nails in hard and twist.
She always drew blood and little ribbons of skin would dangle off the wound. She got this triumphant look on her face. And my dad would make this sound that could best be described as a yelp. It was so horribly pathetic. It made me want to hit him.
But see, I didn't have to be there to witness this. This horrible mating ritual. Because that was what it was. It was some primitive raw courtship ritual that they had. With anger, violence, rage, pain, yelps, screams.
I think my parents were into S&M. And I think they were pedophiles as well. I have this feeling: I don't know where I got it from, that somehow my parents felt they were keeping it real. That this crazy grotesque thing of theirs was them being true to themselves. them being raw and honest and real.
They took me to museums and art galleries a s akid and my father would always make it a point to show me the nudes. Always. Without fail. Oh, it was for art alright. Sure. He was always talking about the nudes. Long after we left the exhibition. He would be talking to me about art and artistic nudity and how it was no big deal, if only people would just broaden their minds, if only people weren't so uptight about nudity blah blah blah.
My previous therapist said my father was a sex addict.
The man was obsessed with sex. All. The.Time.
I thought all dads were like him.
What was going on with him and my mother was that he eroticized every last goddamn thing she did. Even the abuse she heaped on him and the abuse he heaped on her.
I think my father and mother were terribly sexually abused as children and they compartmentalized so strongly. I think they sexually abused me a lot more than I realize. I don't want to realize it because it is so frankly horrendous. And disgusting. And twisted. It's just so gross. It's like seeing a dead decomposing ugly thing in a garden. It is just so sick. And I am afraid just like when someone gets trash on themselves that I am dirty because something dirty touched me.
I realized one day at work, all of a sudden, that my dad got a real sadistic rush when he was beating me. When I was a child. And my mother would watch him. And she would have this little blank smile on her face. Like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. It was partly resentment at me: I guess because she was jealous that I was the recipient of the sexual attention. And partly smug satisfaction that i was getting punished for luring her husband away from her. And partly pure sadism: she enjoyed seeing me in pain.
This was what my mother was about: the enjoyment of other's pain. She feasted on my pain like a ravenous vampire.
I think my father was intensely aroused by my mother's humiliation and violence. I think he was also intensely ashamed and afraid of it. I think he took out his sense of emasculation on me. I think he was sexually aroused by torturing and humiliating me. It was his revenge. But he was taking it out on the wrong person.
I feel very exhausted now. I feel so angry. And I feel so tired.
Every thing, very single goddamn thing. every minute way in which my father experienced consciousness was to fill it with a sort of disgusting grasping, mean, sexual yearning. A yearning that was based on torture and humiliation.
This is why i do not trust men. This is why i read eroticism into every thing men say and do. I am terrified that any minute action of mine will be perceived as a come-on.
I do not trust men to not be like my father. T not be sex-obsessed, sex-fiends who do nothing but fantasize about sex all the goddamn time.
Oct. 11th, 2007 @ 03:58 pm
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| » The Relentless Pressure to Give More |
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I was making out with D on our couch today and I was suddenly overcome with nausea. My stomach felt tight and queasy. I felt like how I did when I was a small child going to school in my school bus in the first grade. I vomited every day on the way to school in the bus.
Today I realized a little bit more about what that was about: it was about pressure.
And then I realized just how much of an attention whore my father is. And my mother. Two attention whores who would do anything for attention. My father would constantly demand my time and attention. Even when he was busy with his big files and papers at home. You had to pay attention to him be carefully tiptoeing around him at home. By never interrupting him. By never ever making any noise. By leaving him the heck alone by god. By remembering to ask him quietly from time to time if he needed anything.
Living with my parents was all about elaborately staged dramas where no one was ever honest about what they really wanted. It was a war zone and like most wars, these wars too were fought for nothing, but the selfishness, greed and dishonesty of two people.
And the pressure. Oh god, the soul-killing pressure to be all things to all people. To be everything: father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife, best friend, drinking buddy, courtesan, prostitute, whore, wise-ass, naughty school boy, cute little girl, mischievous toddler, blushing bride, demure girlfriend, adorable boyfriend, sweet pet animal, supportive sibling, concerned cousin, motionless doll, fashion model, posh relative, mindless servant, eternal slave, eternal eternal slave .....FUCK FUCK.
Wow, the mind-boggling selfishness of it all.
This is not family, this is not childhood. This is wrongful imprisonment. This is penal servitude. This is slavery.
My therapist once told me that children owe their parents nothing. That when parents bring children into this world, they need to know that they are doing it solely for themselves, and that they have no right to expect anything from their children IN RETURN.
I think that after my parents got married, it didn't take them long, especially for my mother to develop an abiding loathing of the other person.
And I spent my life making up for this big hole in their lives.
I am sick, literally to my stomach, of this pressure. All the goddamn time. The incessant pressure to pay attention to this needy whiny plaintive complaining pathetic organism called my parents.
Fuck this shit.
I want to know how to give my husband the attention he deserves, no more no less.
I want to know how to feel good getting attention from him.
I want to know how much attention-giving is appropriate. How much is too much, how much is too little.
I want to find out how much I am comfortable giving. How much I should be giving, and give only what i can.
I want to do right by D, and I want to do right by me, as well.
I am just going to go by my gut. My own sense of what makes me comfortable and what doesn't feel good, my own sense of what feels excessive and what feels measly.
Oct. 10th, 2007 @ 02:59 pm
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