Tag: #naricissism

Black Balloon

Black Balloon

Athena DionLeave a comment

Why don’t I have any pics of my dog on Facebook? Because I am playing out my relationship with my mother in my relationship to our dog. I know on a primal level, because I would never do it on purpose, but I was kind of ‘trained’ to be this way by my own childhood. It’s one of the many reasons I didn’t want to have another child. I was truly afraid of this carrying out with one of my son’s siblings. No human deserves to be treated that way.

It’s bad enough that my dog has to live through it. He isn’t mistreated or anything, I just don’t make it any secret that I am a cat person. I think he knows that I don’t mean it personally, in his much calmer, and wiser, dog intelligence. I think dogs instinctively know how to react helpfully to traumatized humans (this is why they are so helpful for therapy). I know that I am doing at least one step better because I have actually, on multiple occasions, cried to the dog, apologizing for the unfairness and repeatedly told him that I know he is the best dog, and that I do love him… (yes, I have literally done this).

And yet, my own mother, the woman who gave me life could not do this for me. She would rather never talk to me or my son again. She let her pride be bigger than how much we would need support when he was diagnosed with autism. She turned ⅔ of my family members against us so that it felt like we were losing them all at once at a time when we needed much more than the little support network we had.

My dog is jealous of the cats in the same way I was jealous of my half-siblings. They were so obviously favored, it was sickening. They were so much younger than me, it was more like I was their handmaid than their sister. They were close with each other, but I never became connected in the same way with them. I felt I had to hide so much of myself because my mother made it clear that she believed I was a bad influence, and that she didn’t want me affecting them in a negative way. They didn’t know why I kept getting checked into psych wards. They got the edited, censored version of it. They weren’t allowed to know when I worked at Hooters, when I started stripping. They weren’t allowed to know the real me.

I know what our dog must be feeling when he sees the cats sit on my lap and sleep in my bed because that’s what I felt when my brother went to the doctor for an ear infection while I went six months or more complaining about abdominal pain caused by an infection. He thinks in his doggie inner voice, “Hey, I’m a pet too. Why can’t I sit up there like that?”

I thought, “Hey, I’m her child too. Why can’t I be loved like that?”

 

This post inspired by Black Balloon by Goo Goo Dolls

Plush

Plush

Athena DionLeave a comment

My body can never relax because I never actually feel safe. In any given situation I will see a reason to judge myself or worry about something that may or may not ever happen. My mind will always find something terrifying about every single situation I find myself within.

There are voices of a thousand judgmental, hypocritical assholes living in my head, and I believe them as if theirs are the only true opinions that count. The tricky thing is, they are AUTOMATIC. I don’t literally hear them. In reality, I feel what they say, and react to it, without even acknowledging that a negative thought had crossed my mind.

This self-damnation happens constantly without me even realizing it. Then I wonder why I’ve felt depressed and anxious for decades, why no psychotropic medications seem to help. I am not chemically imbalanced. I am not in need of mind-numbing zombie meds. All I have needed to do is just ACKNOWLEDGE IT. I had to see my true reality clearly. I had to accept it.

This is extremely hard to do when the thing you need to accept is that your mother doesn’t love you, and that she never will. Our culture puts so much pressure on children to honor mothers. But this well-intended cultural expectancy is based on the idea that mothers are infinitely loving and giving as our hormones are built to harness within us. Yet, we all know how disgusted we are to hear about a mother killing her own children. We know there are horrendous instances where this doesn’t hold up. And a lot more of these instances involve sadistic abuse rather than outright murder, which, unfortunately, can also feel like death.

Please stop saying to people, “Yeah, but that’s your mother! She gave life to you!” Not all women who give birth are mothers. Let’s get that clear right here and now.

This post inspired by Plush by Stone Temple Pilots.

Image by andrea candraja from Pixabay

Alligator

Alligator

Athena DionLeave a comment

I had an interview today. It went really well. I think I’ll get the job!

I have fear that I shouldn’t be buzzed. I have fear that I won’t be able to handle a new job. I have fear that I’m a bad mom. I have fear that I am like characters that I read about or see on screen. I have fear that people don’t like Quarky. I have fear that I’m like Hitler or Casey Anthony. I have fear that I’m like my mother. I have fear of my power. I have fear of my pending success.

Somewhere I developed the belief that I’m a REALLY bad person, even though I have absolutely no evidence of me being this really bad person. In fact, most of the actual evidence of who I am in my life would reveal a kind, loving person who empathizes with people from all walks of life. She’s an attentive mother who wishes nothing more for her child than to be happy, healthy, and successful in his own life. She cries over other peoples’ sad situations, even some that she doesn’t even know. She wants the best for the Earth, for future generations. She truly contemplates things like the meaning of life, treating others as she would want to be treated. She cares about equality among ALL living things.She always tries to be honest with others and herself. She is sensitive and caring about the ways that she affects other people. She is quick to apologize when she believes she may have hurt someone else. Yet, inside her is a mama bear who will do whatever she must to protect her child and ensure his happiness, health, and future success.

When I couldn’t control the rages, I turned to books and therapy. When I realized it was because of the anger I held back from my mother, I unleashed it. I put space between her and anyone who insisted that I continue being around her. I hated her for the way she made me hate myself, and the way that was affecting my son. I needed to own that feeling. Even if it meant losing my sister, my brother, my stepfather, his family, and most of my mother’s side of the family. My son growing up in a home where his mother has dealt with her anger, her own past, her own family’s toxic dysfunction… that is worth all of those relationships put together

He is MY RESPONSIBILITY. What happens to him and how he will turn out, it all depends on the way I deal with him now. I know this because I know what would’ve prevented me from decades of therapy, addiction, spinning my wheels, and dating all the wrong men. A mother. That’s it. And it wouldn’t have had to be my birth mother. I could have been raised by practically any human in the world other than her, and I would have likely received more love, more praise, more acceptance, and more affection than I actually did. Most strangers in my life have shown me more kindness. The other people in my life have given me the shred of self-esteem that has kept me going through the worst of times.

Over a year with the same therapist, and she is still throwing me compliments and making sure I accept them. That’s because a year ago I didn’t believe any of them. I didn’t believe there was anything to love about me. I believed I was worthless. To my core, my entire life, I have believed that I was worthless. I did not expect anything good to happen to me. I didn’t expect to ever feel better than anxious and depressed. I felt defective. I was a mistake. That’s what I believed.

It wasn’t until I allowed myself the courage to truly begin analyzing my past, realistically, no matter how hard it may be to face the truth, that I began to see the change in myself. I had to face that my mother didn’t love me.

Small memories would surface. They weren’t repressed memories. I always remembered them, but I never realized they were bad because everything was minimized by her. To her, nothing was ever a good enough reason to lose your emotional cool.

Once I’d accepted that she didn’t love me, then I had to accept that it wasn’t the fault of the tiny child that I was. It wasn’t MY fault. It wasn’t because something was wrong with me that made me hideously unlovable. This part is way trickier.

Healing from PTSD, whether complex or not, is a big, fat irony. Normally, when you think of healing from something, you think of moving on from it, of the problem going away. But with PTSD, you may think, “I’m moving on once and for all, I’m going to live in the present, I’m going to appreciate what’s in the here and now and in my bright future.” And then one day, the old events and feelings come back to smack you in the face out of nowhere. And then, the shame of not being truly ‘over’ it, of not being grateful enough, of not being appreciative enough, of not being strong enough to let go of the past retraumatizes you. You hate yourself for allowing it to come back. You mentally punish yourself for not being free.

The only way to truly heal from this cycle is by not forcing yourself to be free of it. You must accept it. You can live in the present. You can be grateful. You can look forward to your bright future. But you must understand that that future will also have the remnants of the past in it; that you must be prepared to deal with future replays of the past, if and when they happen. To be healed with PTSD means to truly be integrated with the part of yourself that you hate, to allow that part to show its face, whenever necessary, without shame.

My therapist asked me, after I read the above paragraph to her, “Do you think you identify with the PTSD so much that you can’t let go of it?”

I thought about it and said, “If the PTSD is part of what makes me empathetic towards others’ feelings, sensitive to others needs, an attentive mother, an honest writer, full of depth, then I don’t want to get rid of it.”

At the end of the spectrum from this point of wanting to be away from it all, I feel a love that could create a million big bangs. I feel my love so powerfully that it consumes my entire body like the weight of the universe sitting on my abdomen. There are no words in any language to describe what I feel when I really think about my love for my son, my husband, our amazing pets, the various loved ones, friends, and strangers who have been there for me. I’m crying just writing about it. In a minute, I’ll probably sob for about 5-10 minutes thinking about it. There’s seriously nothing I wouldn’t do for them. I absolutely hate the time that has been wasted on me dealing with my past. It’s not fair to any of us. I wanted so badly for it to be a quick healing process, 6 months of therapy and I would be over my family’s abandonment. I mourned the loss of who I thought they all were to me, all at once.  That takes more than 6 months, unfortunately. You really can’t rush it.

But in the aftermath… there is more life left to live.

The next day…

Got a call. I start training for my new job on Monday.

This post inspired by Alligator by Of Monsters and Men.

Under the Bridge

Under the Bridge

Athena DionLeave a comment

It was five years yesterday since I have spoken to my mother, and it has FINALLY sunk in that none of it was my fault. I couldn’t control what she or my siblings did. They broke my heart. They crushed me. And they didn’t even care about that enough to talk to me about what was happening. They dropped me and my son like a damn mic, and walked away. Relationship radio silence.

Well, let me tell you how much these people who said they loved me and called themselves my family knew about me. None of them knew that I was molested, spanked with belts for someone’s amusement. That I saw my mother bust out one of the windows of the house because my dad wouldn’t let her in. That before the age of six, my sexuality had already been shaped by HBO movies like Bachelor Party and every single one of the Porky’s movies. That I was running around the neighborhood SMOKING at that same age. That when my grandmother and cousin died within two years of each other, that I was so stricken with grief that I had recurring dreams of my grandmother sitting up in her grave talking to me, and that I secretly believed my cousin was speaking to me through country songs on the radio. That I was date-raped. That two different men have tried to kill me. Do they know that in high school I slept in my Geo Metro at a truck stop because I felt SAFER there than I did around my own mother?

She was emotionally and medically abusing me, and she was GETTING AWAY WITH IT!!! Not only did I suffer from near-crippling PTSD, major depression, and extreme anxiety from ages 12 to 16 without any intervention and care, but when she FINALLY did take me to a Christian clinic that prescribed me Zoloft, she also told me suddenly she was going to stop taking me (WHILE I WAS ON THE ZOLOFT) because I threw a party while she was out of town. I had to run away after that because it was so unsafe to live there.

I was smart enough to read the information with the Zoloft. I knew that stopping suddenly could cause me to become worse and MORE SUICIDAL. It was absolutely vital that I get the hell away from anyone who would do that to me.

By the age of 7, I was already exhibiting signs of trauma for a child such as suddenly regressing to wetting my pants in public, faking a broken leg all the way to the x-rays, PIERCING MY OWN FUCKING EARS IN MY BEDROOM. I have memories of being left home alone from the age of six. I remember this because that’s when I started singing and dancing in the living room for the imaginary audience on the couch. This was a technique that I created to cure the loneliness. It was a coping mechanism that helped me with the trauma I was experiencing. I was alone so much that I had to pretend that people were with me. That’s also why I started writing. It was a way to talk to someone when no one would listen or no one seemed to care. It started with suicidal poetry when I was twelve. And yes, I did attempt suicide for the first time when I was twelve.

Back then I was the only one in my family who went to church. The church van would pick me up and bring me home. Bobbie was a guy who went to my church who was (I think) about fourteen. We were ‘going out’, so we made out and he became the first guy to feel me up on the back of that church van. He used to call me and try to get me to meet him somewhere where we could be alone. I knew why. Well, after trying a few times and failing, he moved on to another girl who was more accessible. He asked my best friend to call me and tell me he didn’t wanna go out with me anymore. I was home alone when she did.

I went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and took at least 12 aspirin from the family size bottle. Then I took a handful of Midol.

At that time, we had recently installed new carpet. When they finally took the room-hogging waterbed out my room for the installation, I wanted to continue just sleeping  in a sleeping bag on my floor so that I had more room. (I gotta hand it to my mom, she might not have shown true love and affection, but when it came to certain things, she really did give me my freedom. I was bred to be rebellious and independent.) So, I laid down in that sleeping bag right in front of my vanity with no stool. I remember distinctly having the thought, “Either I’m gonna wake up in a hospital or I’m not gonna wake up.” And I was okay with either.

Maybe a couple of hours later (I really don’t know I was so out of it), I woke up and vomited on my sleeping bag. I remember my mother washing the sleeping bag, and her saying that I probably vomited because I was so upset over my boyfriend breaking up with me.

The next day I confided in a couple of friends what had happened. One of them (thank you for caring) told the school counselor who called my mother in for a meeting. We both sat in the counselor’s office. The counselor told her that I threw up pills after attempting suicide. She told my mother that I was suffering from depression and needed help.

After the meeting, my mother took me to the mall. We never talked about the incident again. 

I was never taken to a doctor or a counselor regarding the incident. Family were never informed. I was still left home alone during business hours all summer long.

And that was far from being the last time I would do a similar thing.

The song “Under the Bridge” came out about that time, and every time I would hear it I would think of how, symbolically, the vanity in my room was like the bridge to me, and I  was under it the first day of my life that I confronted my own death. And Bobbie kind of looked like Anthony Kiedis. So, this song, in essence, is the theme song to my first suicide attempt… which I survived. Physically, at least. Enjoy.

This post inspired by “Under the Bridge” by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Listen here.

Click image to purchase song.