I have just finished Pete Walker's Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma.
I have a bunch of things to say about my childhood, and I am writing them down as another step towards fixing my insecure attachment, which so far seems to cause almost all problems in my life.
I always thought that a) anybody who liked their parents was probably brainwashed and/or weak, and b) that none of my problems in life were related to my parents. I think I thought wrong.
In one of the previous sketches, 21-06-25: All threads come together?, I assumed that I have problems because I rejected my parents' caring/attention/something. I see now that I rejected it because it came with significant strings attached. However, there's one more reason: that caring was severely incomplete.
Walker provides a slightly breath-taking example that I have to quote in full.
Forty years ago, I was riding on a train in India travelling from Delhi to Calcutta. [...] [My] destination, Calcutta, was now inundated with 100,000 refugees from Bangladesh who had just fled their flood–swamped homes. They were all apparently sleeping on the downtown streets in the recesses beneath the protruding second floors of all the buildings that lined the streets.
[...] When I finally nudged myself down the stairs late the next morning, I was aghast at the transformed scene on the streets. Sheets had been spread out like picnic blankets and each hosted happy families. Little portable stoves produced meals and cups of tea. People bantered with incredible vitality and enthusiasm, and children...children [this was the part that emblazoned on my memory] crawled all over their parents, especially their fathers in affectionate playful gymnastics that their fathers seemed to love as much as they did.
I was flooded with a mélange of feelings unlike anything I’d ever experienced before - a strange cocktail of relief, delight and anxiety. The anxiety I wouldn’t understand until ten years later when I realized that envy had been percolating below the surface of my awareness.
I want little portable stoves with meals and cups of tea. I want this kind of a giant playground with a ton of people.
This was the first hint that I missed out on something. The second hint is an attachment theory workshop by Cedric Reeves, where we were told something like:
Close your eyes and imagine the baby you. Imagine that baby playing with his parents, and imagine that they are enjoying him and are well attuned to everything he feels at every moment.
I closed my eyes, imagined, and started crying.
The problem with remembering things lies in the fact that emotionally deficient parenting starts affecting you well before the age of 4, and usually you don't remember much before the age of 4.
I asked my mom to find the old videotapes and digitize them, so we'll see whether there'll be any hints.
Or at least I will be able to look at the baby version of me and feel "you are good". This might help too.
I think babies are fundamentally good. Or more like, humans are fundamentally good, but some are nasty and therefore it's hard to like them. Babies aren't nasty.
I have no trouble telling someone "you should hate yourself" but I can't tell a baby "you should hate yourself". So if I see myself as a baby, I might think "alright, so there was a point when I was likeable".
I don't know.
I do feel like it's wrong to do something bad and not hate yourself for it. My favorite example: there are people who lie (or steal, etc), get caught, and instead of feeling ashamed say "fuck you moron". "Two women caught stealing a canopy", for instance. This video immediately makes me enraged — but furthermore, I feel like they aren't people and like they should be put to jail until they admit that they FUCKING TRIED TO STEAL THE CANOPY. Ahem. It's the admitting part that is important.
Actually. What if I am so enraged at people who don't admit that they are wrong because I really wanted my parents to admit that they were wrong, and they never did?
I remember once spending two hours trying to explain to my mom why I felt terrible about her trying to control me. I felt like "this is the final try; if this doesn't work I don't know what else I could possibly do to be understood". By the end of it she was crying, but I got a feeling that she just was crying because of being scolded — and yeah, I didn't notice any difference in her afterwards. So I stopped trying, and I feel like that was roughly the time when I stopped talking to her as well.
Walker gives an example of a similar transference:
My client Johnny came in for his session boiling with road rage. Something infuriating had just occurred on his drive to my office. [...] "That pompous SOB! People are so obnoxious. Everyone drives like they are the only ones on the road. What a jerk. Driving like he owns the whole road. Not giving a sh*t about anybody but himself. [...]"
When his catharting petered out, I asked him to close his eyes. I then suggested that he ask himself if his feelings of outrage had a trail into the past. After a moment he said: “[...] I know you’re fishing for my father, but I keep thinking of my mother. She was such a wimp! She’d never drive like that asshole in the Beamer, and she didn’t rant and rave at me like he did, but you know I just feel so pissed at her for putting up with him for all those years, and never once standing up for me or protecting me. It’s bad enough I got him for father, but it’s even more unfair that I got her too”.
It's weird and sad how I can't evaluate my parents and actually believe what I'm saying. Is it shitty when somebody hurts you and you can't explain it to them or at least get them to acknowledge what you are feeling? Yeah. Do I feel like I was right to be angry at my mom? No, "parents be parents".
Huh.
I feel like it's absolutely reasonable that parents don't behave like people (don't listen, don't change, don't realize when they might be annoying, etc), and yet probably there are parents who are like people. I can't even bring myself to say it without "probably", though.
My grandma (dad's mother) used to call my dad every week and say "come over, I cooked some food for you". He would shout "we have enough food, how many times do I have to tell you, we don't need any more food, we don't need your cooking" and then go and take her food anyway. I felt like it was terrible to be in a situation like this, but didn't blame the grandma for acting like that — but I did blame my dad for going there time after time after time, rather than just cutting contact with her.
You probably already know "fight or flight". Walker introduces two more responses: "freeze" and "fawn".
- A fight response is triggered when a person suddenly responds aggressively to something threatening.
- A flight response is triggered when a person responds to a perceived threat by fleeing, or symbolically, by launching into hyperactivity.
- A freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt.
- A fawn response is triggered when a person responds to threat by trying to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attacker.
I was at a small family gathering recently — except that it wasn't my family and everybody spoke a language I didn't speak. Looking back at my behavior, I was alternating between all of those except for "fight":
This kind of stuff usually happens when I know 1–2 people at the gathering. If I don't know anybody, socializing is much easier. Maybe it's because I expect that those 1–2 people will chastise me for not socializing with the rest? I don't know.
"Fight" would probably be "leaving the party without trying to hide the fact that I'm not fitting in". Sounds like something I could try.
Another especially helpful somatic practice is stretching. Regular systematic stretching of the body’s major muscle groups can help you to reduce the armoring [chronic muscle tightness] that occurs when your 4F response is chronically triggered. This results from the fact that 4F activation tightens and contracts your body in anticipation of the need to fight back, flee, get small to escape notice, or rev up to launch into people-pleasing activity.
I often get told that I have a tense face. I also often feel tension in my right shoulder. Finally, my back starts aching pretty much immediately when I'm playing the piano and feeling like I'm failing.
Could all be related. I will be stretching more.
Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult.
Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust.
This is another quote that consistently makes my eyes tear up, even though I can't remember any concrete examples of contempt from my family.
A few days ago I tried repeating "you'd rather be doing nothing if you could" to myself in a mocking voice. I feel like it's something my mom could potentially say, although she probably didn't.
Regardless of whether she'd said it, I have no idea how to counter it. I feel like "fight" could be the best response — "well so would you" or "fuck off" both work — but I don't fight for some reason. Without an option to fight, there's just.. what? Ignoring? Can't ignore parents, they are the best judges of character. (?!)
No wait, I remember contempt now. My dad: "not everybody is born talented". He didn't say it wistfully, more like "I have come to accept that I am not talented; and also, the world is full of unpleasant people who think they are talented but actually aren't".
The annoying thing is that I can't even come up with an adjective here. Like, when you express contempt, you aren't making a claim — just "you are slightly unpleasant and disgusting", something like that.
I think what I learned from all of that is that if you're merely mediocre or do something merely mediocre, you will always live in the shadow of greater things. If you're mediocre, somebody can tell you "I'm happy to have you around", sure — but there's always "but of course you're not that awesome" attached to it. Because refined people (like my dad) know that better things exist. You may like pop music, but you had better be cultured enough to admit that classical music is better and more timeless. Etc.
Maybe that's why my teenage life goals were alternating between "have my own Google-sized corporation" and "have my own country"? I definitely had (still have?) a feeling that being mediocre was a contemptible thing, and I must have gotten it from somewhere.
Our family went to a water slides park once. I was.. probably nine? And one of the rides had a "minimum 10 years old" age restriction. My parents were like "you'll just tell the guard that you are 10".
"I don't want to."
"Come on!"
I acquiesced. "Okay, what if he asks me what am I studying in school, what will I tell him? Mom, what types of equations do they study in the next grade?"
"Come on, he won't ask that."
I was terrified of being caught — and had no idea what would happen if I got caught — and in the end didn't go to the ride at all. But I also felt bad about that episode for several years afterwards, and only now I have figured out why: duh, that was a genuine betrayal. Sending me towards danger and literally refusing to protect me (by coming up with plausible lies together, etc).
"I made nuggets."
"Are they fish nuggets?"
"No, chicken nuggets."
I tasted the nuggets. "Mom, those are fish nuggets."
She was doing this kind of stuff consistently, and it once again felt like a betrayal. I grew up thinking "yeah, probably all parents do that".
There are a bunch of other episodes. I don't feel like writing all of them down, because it's just more of the same stuff. "I won't turn on the computer, just PLEASE don't take the power cord away, I don't want the computer to be incomplete, please please please" and they took it away anyway. Etc, etc, etc.
So, what did I carry out of childhood?
I told mom about the power cord incident (which was like 15 years ago) and she said she remembers it and still feels bad about it and she apologized. That's cool.
See also: this whole thread.
mom: irresponsible.. oblivious to what I feel.. hmmmmmmm.. OBLIVIOUS TO WHAT I FEEL okay this feels like a 100% hit