Looking for Inspiration

I am not a big fan of change. I want everything I do, everywhere I go, the people I know and my relationships with them, to remain in a fixed and unchanging state so I always know what to expect.

However, I am also committed to progress and healing – and if there’s one thing that both those processes require, it’s change.

The conflict between my desire for a predictable world and my commitment to healing is one that has required constant attention over the years, because it seems like, at every step, there is a chance for this conflict to trip me up or slow me down – a chance that my own resistance to change might be the thing that prevents my own healing.

And ironically, I think this becomes more true the more we progress.

When we first begin the healing journey, most of us enter therapy in various stages of finally admitting that something needs to change. As little as we might want to admit it, and as hard as it is to make the changes that really need to be made – we are at least nominally acknowledging the fact that change is necessary.

And these changes have elements that can feel good, even while they also bring their fair share of confusion and difficulty. They can make us feel like we are finally taking action on a problem that we have put off for too long, like we’re finally doing something. We are finding ourselves, we are gaining a sense of community with others like us, we are making connections – even the difficult times are opportunities to discover that we are not alone or “weird” or isolated in negative uniqueness.

The discovery of community can be emotionally addictive, especially since most of us have gone our whole lives up to this point without ever feeling like we’re on the inside, like we’re part of the group instead of trapped on its fringes.

So many of us have spent decades feeling unacceptably weird, unforgiveably different, undeserving, worthless, hated – and to finally find a community where people understand our struggles and accept us anyway, is like balm to our aching souls.

We can finally have a space for honesty, places to tell the truth of what we see and what we feel and how things really are, instead of having to hide everything behind smiling faces and facades of functionality.

However, I think there are a lot of people who get so caught up in finally feeling like part of the group, that they forget that this community was supposed to be only a waystation on their journey.

If our sense of self, our identity, our friends, the things we’ve done that make us feel good about ourselves, the things we do that are important to us, become inextricably entwined with our diagnosis, with being sick – then it is entirely possible to lose our incentive to work toward getting well, because “healing” becomes synonomous with loss.

The desire to hold on to this good thing they’ve found can sidetrack people from their healing, and cause them instead to take up permanent residence as a perpetual patient, eternally “working to get better” but never actually getting anywhere.

So many of us want to reach out to other survivors and offer them encouragement and support and hope – but the truth that many of us miss here is that, before we can really serve as a living example to anyone else, we have to actually accomplish something ourselves.

Support along the way is a great thing to share – but if we let the giving and receiving of that support become an end in and of itself, instead of a step that lifts us closer to where we really want to go, then we are missing the point – and cheating ourselves – and by example, cheating everyone who is newer to the journey than we are and is looking to us to see where they might hope to be when they’ve been at the process as long as we have.

So after you’ve been part of the survivor community for five years, ten years, twenty years – if you’re still doing the same thing you were doing five or ten or twenty years ago, it might be time to re-evaluate and ask yourself what you’re still doing there – because proof that you can be in therapy for twenty years without getting much of anywhere is really not all that inspiring.

Our own successful healing and peaceful lives are the most inspiring thing we can offer to other survivors.

What are you modeling to newcomers at this point in your healing journey?
Are you showing them that they can get where they hope to go?
Are you living the kind of life that could inspire or encourage anyone else’s healing?
And if not – then why not?

No More Silence!

Too many writing projects and not enough time! I guess it’s time to drag out another old chestnut from the storage trunk of thoughts and see if I can make a blog post out of it…

Have you ever noticed the tendency of people to feel bad for “telling on” someone else?

As survivors, of course, we have a heightened awareness of this feeling, since so many of us learned not to tell under threat of dire consequences, but it’s not a feeling that is limited to survivors. In fact, it seems like a pretty universal feeling.

People are worried that there might be some kind of backlash…
Or they worry that someone will be angry with them…
Or they want to protect someone by not breaking bad news to them…
Or they think it’s none of their business…
Or they just don’t want to get involved…

If you think about it that way, the threats that were used to make us all too afraid to “tell” were really only emphasizing a message that everyone is learning. But what a terrible message…

Why should the person who exposes wrongdoing ever feel like they did something wrong?
Why are we all bending over backwards to protect the person who actually did the wrong thing?

This is the kind of mindset that allowed many of us to be abused for years without relief, even if we believe there were adults who knew (or at least had an idea) that it was happening.

This is also the kind of mindset that allows crime to flourish at all levels – from the streets to the board room. Someone always knows what’s going on, what was done, who did it – but regardless of whether the justification is that “they’d kill me if I ratted” or “I’d lose my job if I blew the whistle”, the end result is the same. The criminals are protected by the conspiring silence of everyone around them.

It’s the kind of mindset that allows teenagers to bully each other until they commit suicide or go on murderous rampages, and everyone knows it’s happening, but nobody says anything until it’s too late.

It’s the kind of mindset that causes us to teach our children that “nobody likes a tattle-tale” and end the lesson there, so that we can raise another generation of people who are afraid to “tell” on anyone, for any reason.

It’s also the kind of mindset that allows someone to present themselves as a hero for daring to “tell” something, even if what they’re telling is lies. We’re all so impressed with the strength it takes to tell, that we don’t bother to question the content of what we’re being told, and we certainly don’t bother checking it out to see if it’s true. Society at large is so conditioned against “telling” that we can actually be manipulated through a false show of courage.

It’s so ingrained, so habitual, so taken for granted by absoutely everyone, that it doesn’t even stand out as odd or unusual to hear someone agonizing over whether to tell something… we never even ask why they’re hesitating. It seems obvious.

But as survivors… we also know what that hesitation can cost. We know how much damage can be done, while the world is protecting perpetrators with a shield of conspiring silence. We know what it is to suffer through what the silence hides, and how desperately we wished that someone, anyone, would have the courage to help us, by daring to break the silence.

And is the situation always that serious? No, of course not. But if nobody dares to “tell” in the small situations, then is it any wonder that nobody dares to do it when the situation is that serious?

So it all matters. Small or large, every conspiring silence causes damage somewhere, to someone – if nothing else, by simply reinforcing the idea that silence is preferrable to speaking the truth.

I can’t change the world. I can’t change everyone’s perceptions or change how everyone does things.
But I can change what I do. My complicit silence, and the complicit silence of everyone around me, stole decades out of my life. The complicit silence of society allows crimes large and small to be committed with impunity every day.
I am speaking, not only in defiance my own history of secrecy and silence exacted by threats and torture, but also in defiance of the social malaise, the mindless willingness to protect the criminal at the expense of the victim.

My complicit silence has come to an end.

I will not let someone else’s wrongdoing be hidden and protected by my fear or my indifference – I will not hide the truth with my silence.
And the more of us who join together in speaking the truth – about anything, large or small – the more we change the currently prevailing perception that the criminals and the perps and the liars have the power, and that the truth should not be spoken, about anything, anywhere, because nobody dares to speak it.
I dare.
How about you?

It would take a miracle…

It would take a miracle…

How often have you said or thought that about your healing?

I used to think it, on average, about ten times a day. My history, my misery, my PTSD reactions, my mood, were getting in the way of my day (again…), and it would take a miracle to change it. And some days, I thought even a miracle might not be enough.

Ironically, I turned out to be right. Healing does take a miracle. In fact, it takes a lot of miracles.

We need to find a therapist who knows up from down when it comes to DID, or one who is willing to learn with us – really learn, since the skills required for effective treatment of DID cross numerous areas of specialization and demand a number of different approaches – and that takes a miracle. Too many trauma therapists think they’re competent to treat DID when they aren’t, and in those cases, we’re lucky if we come out of it no worse off than we started. The bad or merely incompetent therapists outnumber the good ones, and the good ones tend to figure out relatively quickly that treating DID is a thankless and unprofitable path and move to a different focus, so it’s a miracle when we find a therapist who knows what they’re doing, or who is willing to actively learn what they need to know, and who is really willing to work with us.

Our therapist needs to have a strong enough sense of their own self and their own competence to withstand the many challenges a DID client can present – from anger and hostility to manipulation to sexual coercion to intense neediness to outright attack – even when our switches are whipsawing from one extreme to the other – without getting pulled to pieces in the middle of it all.

At the same time, they need to be human enough to admit when they’ve reached the limit of what they can safely or reasonably help us do, and have the good sense to seek their own support or consultation or supervision for the areas where their ignorance might present a serious danger. (This definitely includes mind control issues. )

It is hard to find strength and humility in the same person, and it’s really stretching the odds to hope that the therapist we’ve found will be one of those rarities – so it might seem like it would require enough of a miracle just to have all those things come together for us… but finding the right therapist is really the least of the miracles we need for healing. We also need to create our own internal miracle – and that’s a much harder miracle to come by.

We, who have been hurt beyond hurt, who have no reason to trust anyone or have faith in anything or believe that anything will ever be different than it ever has been… we whose hope has been burnt out by years of extreme yet pointless suffering at the hands of other human beings for whom we are merely objects to train as needed… we need to find some vestige of hope to grow on, and enough faith to push us forward, and enough trust to let someone else into our worlds.

We need to do things differently instead of sticking with the familiar comfort of “what gets us through”… we need to be able to stick with the work of healing when it gets difficult instead of just falling back into apathy and giving up… we need to begin the actual work of healing at all, instead of wasting all our therapy time on everyday issues and whatever few system members are least threatening to work with. We need to face the hardest aspects of our history… the things that were done to us, the things we did to others, the ways that our sickness has damaged the people we least want to hurt, the ways that our history has stunted the lives we might otherwise have had, what we’ve missed out on and what we’ve lost forever… and then we have to find a reason to go on and build the best life we can have, despite all that.

When it comes right down to it, we can have the best therapist in the world and still throw that miracle away because we can’t find the miracle within ourselves to truly heal from the devastating and all-encompassing abuse we have suffered.

So, some people settle for building a life without the miracle. They do just enough work to reach a tolerable point of existence, and then they settle there and live as well as they can around their disorder. Therapy is used to maintain functionality, without significantly challenging the current state of affairs, and these people just do the best they can with where they are.

This is a perfectly viable option. It’s not healing, but it is surviving within a reasonable facsimile of a life. And it lifts the burden of having to face any of our past horrors, and makes that a purely voluntary exercise, periodically engaged in for a variety of reasons, with little to no actual benefit in terms of healing – because healing has already been dismissed as impossible. This is the easier option, insofar as we don’t have to face history any more than it takes to function around it in our current day.

The cost is, that it’s static. We can maintain where we are indefinitely, but we will never really get better. We will never really be free of any of the symptoms or difficulties or issues presented by a mostly untreated dissociative system. We will continue to suffer with depression, anxiety and panic, eating disorders, self-injury, suicidal feelings and thoughts and urges and plans, we may still lose some time, we will still have flashbacks and periodic problems with unprocessed memories causing problems in functioning… none of the things we experienced at the beginning of therapy will ever be fully resolved by therapy, because we are not fully engaged in therapy. We’re really just trying to maintain the status quo.

In a cost-benefit analysis, there are many people who are going to find this arrangement tolerable enough to live with, especially compared to the alternative – and many people do make this choice. There are actually a number of reasons I think this can end up being true, but certainly one of the reasons is, that the cost of trying to genuinely heal is too high, whereas the cost of staying in more or less the same place seems negligible.

After all, what are we really giving up, to stay in the same place, but some things we’ve never had anyway? That hardly even feels like a loss.

So, part of the miracle required for genuine healing, is to believe it’s ever worth the work it takes, even when it really isn’t necessary.

We can live forever in a maintenance daze, battling the same old issues but never really going anywhere, just getting along from each day to the next, until our days run out.

Sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes, it isn’t enough – but it takes a miracle to believe that there is anything more, that we can achieve more, that we deserve more, that we can have more, and then to actually do it.

Another part of the miracle is taking the chance for healing when it comes to us. We might not feel ready. We might not be ready. But miracles can’t be counted on to come around again just because we weren’t ready to go along for the ride the first time around. If we let them go by, they could very well be gone forever. So – part of the miracle is knowing that a miraculous opportunity is being presented to us, to see it for what it is and to realize what it could mean for us, if we could make the leap out to catch it – and part of the miracle is jumping, committing ourselves, throwing ourselves into what we can make of that opportunity, whether we’re ready or not.

Healing takes a huge miracle.

This, from a confirmed atheist who finds their own use of the word “miracle” in any context to be highly questionable, not to mention hokey.

Hokey, but true – I can find no other word to accurately encompass what was required, as a lifetime member of a group who brainwashed and programmed my mind from the earliest years to the present day to believe and think and be their possession and their slave, to find the faith and hope that healing required. It took a miracle.

But it was a miracle I made myself – and that’s the beauty of it, and the trap.

We make it happen for ourselves, or we don’t. If we’re sitting around “waiting for the miracle to happen” – we’ll be waiting forever. Making a miracle, benefitting from a miracle, is an active process, not a passive one.

We have to use our own efforts to find what we need in the world – and every day that we settle for less, or waste our time with ineffective (or outright damaging) therapists, or squander the therapy resources we have on trifles, is a day lost.

And we need our own courage, to face what really needs to be faced, and to allow ourselves the hope for something better.

When the damage is so extensive, it truly does take a miracle to find hope and faith, in ourselves or in life.

But miracles do happen, if we make them happen.

“I have found in life that if you want a miracle you first need to do whatever it is you can do – if that’s to plant, then plant; if it is to read, then read; if it is to change, then change; if it is to study, then study; if it is to work, then work; whatever you have to do. And then you will be well on your way of doing the labor that works miracles.” ~ Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author

Choose Wisely

“But choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.” ~ Grail Knight, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Choice is a concept I am only recently coming to understand.

As a child, in the world and in the environment where I grew up, there was really no such thing as choice.

I might be asked if I would rather hurt someone else or be hurt myself, or I might be asked to “choose” my torture for the day – and each year I was obliged to say that I chose to be a part of my abusive group, and to pledge my unconditional loyalty to them – but none of these things were true choices.

I thought they were at the time. I remember arguing vociferously with my therapist about my freedom to choose and how I wasn’t letting any upstart bitch tell me what to do when I’d already made my choice and was happy with it.

Well, thank goodness she has more patience with people acting like idiots than I do, because looking back on it, I was putting on a fair show of idiocy myself at that time.

I thought the scope of “choices” that had been presented to me by programmers and abusers were real choices. And I believed, at the time, that the words I spoke saying I chose to be with them meant I really did. It took a lot of time and effort on both our parts for my therapist to help me see this a different way.

Since then, I’ve been particularly interested in the concept of choice as it is used and misused – what goes into the choices people make, and how those choices turn out, and how various individuals then respond to the consequences of their choices. Maybe it’s the novelty, but I just find the whole process fascinating.

And in that context, I’ve found the above quote to be profoundly true, on many more levels than the obvious life-or-death context of the movie it came from.

Our choices grant life or take life from us on all levels.

When we get into an argument with a friend – we can choose to forgive, or we can choose to harbor a grudge. If ending the friendship is truly the better and wiser choice – we can choose to do it in a way that we can look back on with respect, or we can be bitter and hateful and destructive toward the other person, a choice that is much more likely to destroy us from the inside out than it ever is likely to destroy the target of our bitterness.

We can choose to face problems as they are – the true problem – or we can choose to completely deny a problem, or twist it into something different (someone else’s fault, something we make personal or take personally when we shouldn’t, something that’s less of a problem than the truth would be, something that’s a more acceptable problem that the truth would be) – and let the true problem suck the life out of us while we choose to pretend it’s not.

We can choose to fight for what we want, or we can choose to roll over and be helpless, the eternal victim, because it’s all just too difficult for us.

We can choose to be honest with ourselves – or not.
We can choose to believe ourselves – or not.
We can choose to believe in ourselves – or not.

There are challenges for each of us in each of these things. I doubt that any of us really have the self-assurance to simply lay claim to them without a fight.

Dissociation is the essence of hiding the truth from ourselves.
Dissociation can make it difficult to believe ourselves, or even to know what to believe, and programmers will purposely create additional self-doubt and confusion to make belief even harder.
And believing in ourselves requires things like hope, and confidence, and self-esteem, which can be in painfully short supply for an abuse survivor.
They are not easy choices… but they are still choices.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see that certain things are choices at all. After all, none of us chose to be dissociative, or to have been abused badly enough to require a dissociative defense – so it can be difficult to see anything else about the dissociation or the abuse as a choice, because our choice would have been that none of it ever happened.

That’s true enough – historically, every single one of us had our right to choose taken away from us by force, and we have all left with the consequences of someone else’s choice to abuse us.

But – staying locked in bitterness or helplessness or willful ignorance is our choice.
Not approaching things because they’re eternally “too hard”, not speaking to the other members of our system because we don’t want to hear their stories or we don’t want to believe they even exist – those things are choices.
Avoiding our problems by blaming them on other people, and then taking out our frustration and anger about our problems on those people like it really is their fault – that is a choice.

Maintaining our dignity in the face of the unfair adversity life has thrown at us is a choice.
Abandoning our selves to stagnation or negativity or anger, raging against the injustice of our lot until our resentment consumes our lives – that is also a choice.

Lying to ourselves is a choice, and believing those lies is a choice, and never taking a stand for what we know is right is a choice, and silence at any time when silence protects something that doesn’t deserve protection – that  is a choice.

Nearly every part of how we deal with things in the current day is a choice.
Even if we refuse to admit that we have a choice, it’s there.
Even if we don’t want the responsibility of making a choice, it’s there.
Even if we don’t like the consequences of the choice we made, and we try in retrospect to disown it… well, that too is a choice, and it’s compounding the errror in addition.

If we sit idly, waiting for time and fate and our therapist and our friends to make our choices for us, then we will stagnate in our own suffering and unhappiness, and we will drift ever away from where we want to be.

If our active choices do not represent where we really want to be in our lives – emotionally, spiritually, internally – then we are actively driving ourselves in the wrong direction.

And if we think we’re making the right choices, but somehow we seem to be driving ourselves away from where we want to go anyway – then we’re not being as honest with ourselves about the choices we’re making as we need to be.

If we want freedom, healing, safety, peace, calm, a better life, a more predictable life, a more “normal” life… more stable relationships, safer relationships, healthier relationships… quiet selves, quiet heads, quiet souls…
… it is nothing but our choices that will get us there, if we get there at all. Nothing else can carry us so far – and by the same token, nothing else can thwart us so thoroughly, or keep us so firmly in the same place.

So choose wisely.

No regrets?

“I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, but I don’t regret anything.”

I heard someone say that on the tv last night. I was multitasking at the time, so I don’t know the show, but the quote really made me think.

At first, I thought it was just some ridiculous thing that only a tv character would say. How can we not regret something if we’re not proud of it? Aren’t those just different ways of saying the same thing?

Well, maybe in my life, they are. I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, and it doesn’t much matter that I was forced to do them, or that I was being abused myself in the process, or that I had no freedom to choose to do otherwise. I still regret every single one of them.

And was it my shame, or shame of their own produced by years of criticism and unrealistic expectations and the constant feeling of pervasive failure, that created regret in the “front world” people? Wherever it came from, they have it. They are never proud of anything they do. The closest feeling to pride that they, or any of us, are able to experience is relief that we didn’t fail.

Everything less than perfection is failure. And every failure is a badge of shame, which we regret.

But then again, just because the quote has never been true for me, that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be true at all.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about it that maybe the regret over the things I’m not proud of comes from lack of acceptance. I don’t want to accept that I did what I did under any circumstances. I don’t want to accept the consequences, or admit the consequences, or even think about the consequences – and I don’t mean the consequences that fell on me (which I believe I deserve), I mean the consequences that rippled out from my actions to affect one, or ten, or fifty other people in a negative way. Sometimes being forced doesn’t feel like an excuse, and acceptance feels impossible.

But – if a person could find acceptance – if they could accept a choice as being the best they could do at the time, even though in retrospect it might not have been the best choice ever – or if they could accept a reality for what it was, even though it was terrible and they did terrible things in that context – if they didn’t chastise themselves for eternity because they didn’t see the consequences ahead of time or because they existed in a reality that sucked – if they accepted all the consequences of the choices they made (good and bad) or the reality that was imposed on them instead of spending eternity dodging the consequences, or feeling victimized by them, or trying to make them someone else’s fault or someone else’s problem, or doing anything to avoid owning them – if a person could own and accept all the different aspects – then maybe they could make peace with themselves for whatever it was, even though they aren’t proud of it – and then maybe they would be able to look back on it and honestly say that, although they are not proud of it, they don’t regret it.

Maybe if a person can accept why they are not proud of something, then there is nothing left to regret.

Or at least, maybe that works some of the time. Somehow it doesn’t seem realistic to imagine that any human being (outside of tv land) could get through life with no regrets at all. But it might be true that acknowledging and accepting all sides of a choice, whether it makes us look good or not, whether we like it or not, whether we’re ultimately proud of ourselves for doing it or not – acceptance might mean laying some regrets to rest, which would mean that we end up with a lighter weight of regrets to carry with us through life, and a lighter load of baggage trailing behind us.

And when I think about all the things that would ultimately be different if our baggage were less, if our regrets were fewer, if our shame was less smothering – if we could genuinely accept, and therefore let go of, the things that are long past changing no matter how much we regret them – that could very well change everything. The basic mental structures that govern our every thought and choice and reaction would have to change in response to that kind of acceptance.

It sounds simultaneously too simple and too overwhelming.

But I think there is a kind of emotional alchemy that is sometimes brought about by genuine acceptance of the actual truth.

Acceptance is the necessary first step to a lot of other equally profound changes, the key without which doors remain locked and progress remains blocked. Maybe acceptance is also the first step to fewer regrets and a life of greater peace with myself and my history.

Just a random Friday thought.

Blind Acceptance Is A Mistake

Has anyone ever analyzed a programmer’s message?

Or, to take it a little out of that realm, have you ever really stepped back and listened to a manipulator at work, when they are working on someone other than you?

It’s hard to see it when it’s being aimed at you, when it’s in your head and working on you already, when it’s your emotions and your vulnerabilities getting played – but seeing the same person using the same tricks on someone else can really give you a whole new perspective on what they’re doing.

I think the thing we fail to see when it’s aimed at us is that, objectively speaking, the messages don’t make sense. The programmers and manipulators talk like experts on subjects about which they are intensely ignorant. They make assumptions and accusations that have no bearing on reality. They make huge and thoroughly incredible leaps in logic and fact. They tell us who we are like they know. They tell us what other people will do or how other people feel like they have the first clue about those things, like they know more about it than the people to whom those feelings or actions belong. They interpret the events of our lives like they understand them better than we do.

They target our fears and insecurities, our doubts and vulnerabilities, our hurt and anger – they play on our emotions in order to cloud our judgment and our reactions so that we swallow their ideas whole, without really thinking them through.
And it works.
But it shouldn’t.

Every single one of us has developed skills in critical thinking, and we need to use them, all the time.
We need to think for ourselves.

The world at large is perpetually bombarding us with excessive and frequently conflicting information from which it is truly impossible to escape, even if we don’t necessarily seek it out – and if we do seek out information, we can learn far more than we bargained for. Listening to various sources can provide us with important information about ourselves and the world around us. But just because someone says it or writes it or makes it public, and even if they wholeheartedly believe it themselves, we absolutely cannot substitute someone else’s certainty for our own. We must apply our own critical thinking skills before we decide to accept anything into our belief system.

If our histories have taught us anything at all, they should have taught us the dangers of blindly accepting someone else’s views or ideas or words. We should never let anyone tell us who we are, or what to think, or what to believe. We should never let anyone else revise our truths – and if they wish to interpret our experiences for us, then we need to listen with a critical ear, because our histories should also have taught us that the way in which information is presented can be a clue to the intentions behind it.

If information is presented in a way that targets our fear, shame, guilt, doubt, insecurity, hurt, or anger, then that is a red flag.

Someone who has our best interests at heart will not provoke these feelings intentionally, and will not play on the feelings if they are provoked. On the other hand, someone who intends to manipulate us will make it a point to target our emotions, hitting sore spot after sore spot with their “sympathy” and “understanding” until our common sense is drowned out by our feelings – and once this happens, they can twist us however they want.

When we were children, we had neither the freedom nor the knowledge nor the abstract skills to see these mental manipulations for what they were, but is there a single one of us who does not know firsthand the damage they caused? And knowing that, why would we ever allow it to happen again, in the current day? Why are we not more protective of our selves and the things we allow into our worlds? Why are we not more discerning about what we accept and what we reject?

Emotional rhetoric is intended to get past our guard, provoke our emotions, and circumvent logical thought, so that we accept what is presented purely on its emotional appeal. But emotions notoriously make really bad decisions, and if someone – anyone, in any situation – is encouraging us to make decisions based on emotion, then they do not have our best interests at heart. They are trying to manipulate us – and if we accept what they say and act or react on that basis, if we let our emotions rule our thoughts, then they have succeeded.

But if it does succeed, it is only because we have been parties to our own manipulation.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned V

The instincts that helped me to read abusive situations can also be relied on in non-abusive situations.

After the years of dealing with and surviving the abuse, my instincts and perceptions surrounding abusive situations were well-developed and pretty reliable. I could tell who was approaching me with intent to harm, get a sense of how bad it was going to be, and I learned to read people and respond to them in ways that might protect me, at least to a degree. And I’m not alone in that – I think this ability is one that most survivors develop.

But when I moved over to this new world, for a time it seemed that absolutely everything I had learned up to that point was irrelevant, inapplicable, and useless. I felt like I would have to start all over with everything, that even my familiarly reliable perception had to be broken down and rebuilt from scratch.

This left me feeling like I couldn’t trust myself or anything I thought I knew or anything I believed about situations or people – because in this world, what I knew, or intuited, or perceived, was all wrong. I had relied on perception and intuition for years as the one skill I possessed in my own defense, and now I had lost even that. I felt helpless and vulnerable and out of place, almost enough to stay in the life I was familiar with, just to keep that familiar ground under my feet.

And in a sense, the feeling was true. My perceptions were informed by a whole different set of circumstances than anything I was likely to find in the standard day-to-day world, and the conclusions I drew tended to rely far too heavily on suspicion and distrust – so of course my perceptions and intuitions about most situations were skewed toward the negative.

But in another sense – my abilities didn’t really have to be rebuilt at all. They just had to be fine-tuned a little to allow for a new set of parameters that hadn’t ever existed for me before. I had to learn to allow for the possibility that, if my senses felt baffled and I couldn’t see the potential problem looming or the impending craziness in the person in front of me, it might be because there was no problem, no craziness – no danger. Not every situation in this world will turn dangerous. So if I don’t see it, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m missing it – that might really mean it isn’t there.

But if I do sense danger – or if I don’t see it right away, but the feeling develops over time – I also don’t have to discount what my perception and intuition tells me just because I’m relying on senses honed by a whole different context. Even in this world, my gut will not always be wrong. There are dangers in this world – not as omnipresent as they were in mine, but certainly there. So if I sense danger, I can listen to my gut, at least to the extent of checking it out, doing some reality testing, and being careful of myself in that situation until I get a better read on it.

The important thing, really, was learning to tell the difference between a real danger and a chimerical danger.

Wanting to share my life with others who will appreciate me and my accomplishments is not a tendency of weakness or evil.

Actually – I’m not sure where I got the idea that wanting to share of myself with another was weak, or bad, or even just… abnormal.

When I was being trained as a child – and when I was being used as an adult – the concept of positive reinforcement was always used to great effect. If I did X, then I would get Y, which was perceived as a good thing. When I was young, that might mean three sips of water, or it might mean removal of some painful stimulus. When I grew older, the reward became less concrete – usually being allowed a sense of approval, superiority, specialness, and/or belonging. And when I began on the path to leaving that world behind, those feelings were some of the hardest things to leave. Where else was I ever going to get that? Where else would I ever belong? Who else would ever approve of me, make me feel special, make me feel like they cared? (A cold, distant, purely conditional caring it was – but it was still all I knew, and it still seemed a lot better than nothing.)

Wrestling with those feelings should have been enough to clue me in to the fact that no man is truly an island. Even people with very low social needs still have some social needs – everyone wants at least one person in the world who can appreciate them for who they are, celebrate with them when things go well, offer commiseration and support when things are going wrong, someone who will discuss things with them honestly but still from a place of caring… everyone wants at least one person in their lives who makes them feel special and worthwhile just for being themselves.

And expanding outward – everyone likes positive reinforcement. They like to be told they did a good job, or that their efforts are notice and appreciated. In fact, people like to hear those things so much that they can get pretty darn pissy if they think they should be hearing them and they aren’t.

So where I got the idea that, in this world, wanting or needing or desiring positive reinforcement was weak and bad, I don’t know.

Most likely, it sprang from the belief that I didn’t deserve any positive regard in this world. In my world, my job brought me a lot of status. I hated the job itself, but let’s be honest – I loved being that special.

The problem was, that the very thing which had made me so special in that world would make me an absolute pariah in this world. My whole feeling of specialness was inextricably entangled with that world, and it had not a single part of it that could translate beyond the shadows. In the light of day, I was ugly and cringing and evil. By this world’s standards, I knew I didn’t deserve to feel special for anything I had ever done, and nothing I would ever do would make up for that.

And besides that, I figured someone would have to be insanely stupid to accept the things I had done and still think I was a worthwhile person. It was just never going to happen, or at least not from anyone I respected enough to give value to their opinion of me.

And so I determined that, that being the case, I’d better just not expect anything. I’d better just assume that, in this world, I would have to learn to do without any of the positive reinforcement that every human being craves, and learn to go on without it.

Well, as it turns out – that’s really not necessary. As it turns out, there are some people in this world who can see past what I’ve done and still appreciate me for the person that I am and the person I am becoming – and they are not, in fact, insanely stupid. But I had gotten myself so convinced that such a thing did not exist that it took quite a while for me to see that I was wrong.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned IV

Every relationship is a two-way street.

This statement is such a cliché that you’d think it would be self-evident – but all the same, it took me some time to understand it.

Where I came from, the imbalance of power ruled everything. There was no such thing as equality – there was always one person with all the power and one person with none. And no relationship in that world ever required effort or work. None of them were a choice. They simply were. They were functional and purpose-oriented. People were tools – you used or you were used, and the relationship was the medium of use, nothing more.

But in this world, things don’t work in quite the same way.

Out here, relationships are choices, they require a lot of effort to make them work, and the effort must go both ways.

Both people have to be willing to compromise for the sake of the relationship, to consider the other equally with themselves or sometimes even ahead of themselves, to find the balance point between relying on each other and relying on themselves, to blend dependence and independence successfully, to work out conflicts between themselves in a reasonably healthy manner, to respect each other, to be considerate of each other, to sometimes be the bigger person and be able to rely on the other to sometimes be the bigger person, to trust each other, and on and on… the list is truly endless, and none of it is easy.

If neither person is willing to put the effort into the relationship – or even worse, if only one side is expected to do all the work while the other side does nothing but receive what they are given and expect more, then the relationship is doomed.

This is a lesson I learned primarily through observation – it took me so long to figure it out that I haven’t really gotten around to giving it much of a test yet, except within the relative security of therapy.

The rules of successful relationships apply to therapy too.

Regardless of everything else that makes therapy unique and different from any other relationship we might ever have, it is still based on a relationship. As such, it is subject to the same dynamics that positively or negatively effect the other relationships in our lives.

And yet, because of the unique role that the therapy relationship holds in our lives and the unique way in which that relationship is structured, the complications are more obvious, and seem more obstructive, than they usually do.

I am among the one hundred percent of the therapy consumer population who has invested the role of “therapist” with a full load of expectations and projections and assumptions. And I am among that same one hundred percent in my tendency to lose sight of the person beneath the role that I created for them.

Learning to separate the role I created from the actual person was a very important part of keeping the therapeutic relationship a strong and viable part of my healing.

It was so easy for me, as it is for anyone, to get caught up in my own needs and my own expectations and what I believed a therapist should do for me, not to mention my own projections and trauma-related issues and misconceptions and negative assumptions – and to lose sight of the fact that none of these were actually relevant to that particular relationship. They were all products either of my own fantasy or my own history. They were not things that had grown from the actual relationship that I was trying to build with this actual person.

In fact, I had so many things clouding my vision of who the other person truly was, that the person I ended up relating to, reacting to, responding to, was almost entirely a figment of my imagination.

I was forever comparing the real actions and interactions to the “golden ideal” in my head, and responding to the difference between the two instead of evaluating the real action on its own merits. Or I was making automatic connections, so lightning quick that I didn’t even realize it was happening – this turn of phrase, that fleeting facial expression, a particular emotional response, dragging up history to taint the current day – and yet, I never saw that this was about my issues. It always seemed to be about what someone else (and most specifically the therapist) said or did in the current day.

It was exceedingly hard to see through my own automatic preconceptions and assumptions and faulty connections. It was a major challenge to sort through events and emotions to see where I had gone off track, where I fell into incorrect assumptions or carried a historical reaction forward into the present. It was another thing I could never have done alone, because it took a long while for me to learn how to do it at all, even with guidance.

But it was a crucial problem to resolve, because although it tends to be most obvious in therapeutic relationship, I was making the same kind of automatic assumptions and carrying the same kind of preconceptions in every other relationship as well.

Seeing a therapist – or any other person – only and entirely in the role we create for them can lead to some very strange and unreasonable abuses, and it can lead us to neglect or ignore or assume on the underlying relationship in some extremely unhealthy ways. Learning to see past the created role was essential – but not easy.

I had to learn to treat the therapist with respect, even when I was angry or hurt. I had to learn that, if I want to keep a person’s support, I probably shouldn’t lean on them so much that their willingness snaps under my weight. I had to learn how to resolve conflict without running from it or triangulating other people into it or making it all the other person’s fault and then waiting for them to repair it. I had to learn to ask for and accept help, but also to maintain my independence despite having help available, and when to do which.

I had to look at all the things happening between me and the therapist, in the space where the relationship was being built, and at how various actions or interactions affected that. I also had to look at the negative things I was contributing to the relationship – and I had to face some uncomfortably shameful and embarrassing and hurtful truths in the process.

It sucked to learn those things about myself, and it was humiliating to have someone else point them out to me. I tended to want to blame the therapist for that, to kill the messenger and hope the message died too, but it turned out that that wouldn’t work. Apparently plenty of other people had already noticed these things about me too. The only person who wasn’t seeing it was me. And ultimately it was more embarrassing to think that everyone else was seeing this when I wasn’t, than it was to face it and deal with it so that it was no longer there to be seen.

Relationships can be changed for good as well as bad.

The mutability of relationships was a point that was obvious to me from the start, but it took a long while for me to see that this could ever be a positive thing, or to realize that I wasn’t a helpless pawn of fate waiting to see which way things would go.

At first, my assumption was that change in a relationship was uniformly negative – relationships would inevitably go from “I like you” to “I hate you”, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t have a lot of experience with relationships, but this was my natural assumption.

But it left me feeling like my relationships were an unsteady tower of cards, and I was perpetually waiting for them to collapse. And it made me long for the relative security of the relationships with my abusers. I never felt like those relationships were going to collapse at any minute. Those relationships were bars of steel that surrounded me and kept me close, whether I wanted to be or not.

Relationships in this world, on the other hand, felt flimsy. Unreliable. Too unpredictable to be trusted. They were influenced and affected by so many different factors, I could never control all of them. And least of all could I control the other person or their feelings – therefore, I couldn’t depend on their feelings remaining constant. Even if all my actions within the relationship were technically correct, that was no guarantee. Maybe tomorrow they would decide my shirt was ugly, and they couldn’t tolerate such deplorable fashion sense, and the relationship would be over regardless of what I said or did.

It felt that arbitrary, that final, and that uncontrollable to me.

It took some time for me to realize that it wasn’t that uncontrollable or arbitrary – the success of any relationship really is dependent on what each person is (or isn’t) contributing to the bond between them. Disaster is not brought by the random finger of fate, but by the people involved, who are not building or maintaining that bond.

I realized that, in a way, the foundation of a relationship is created anew every day. Every day, there is the possibility that something might shake an apparently solid foundation to the ground, recasting everything that went before it in a new and different light. But every day, we also have the opportunity to shore up an unstable foundation and to help a relationship grow stronger, or to do things that will add to the strength already there.

Just another thing that I thought was entirely outside my control, where it turns out that my own choices make all the difference.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned III

I’m a little behind this week, so the line of thought I was following here is not complete, but here is what I have so far.

It is impossible for anyone to prove that they are trustworthy.

I got hung up on this point for a long time. In the course of my therapy, I was given a choice I had never been given before… actually, I was given a choice, period. For the first time in my entire life, I had the power to make real choices, to decide my own future fate all by myself…

… or so I was told by this therapist person. But who the hell was she, anyway? What did she know about it? And how did I know I could believe her? I knew I could trust my abusers – at least to the extent that familiarity had made them predictable. But how did I know I could trust this person who was presenting me with a possibility that I had long since abandoned as impossible? Why was she trying to help me? How could I know she wasn’t trying to raise my hopes just so she could shatter them again and laugh at my naiveté, one more cruel trick in a lifetime full of them? How could I know that she meant what she said?

Where was the certainty?

I paused there for a long time. I kept thinking I would somehow know, that this person would pass some ultimate last test after which I would know they were trustworthy forever more – but it never happened. And eventually, I realized that it never would.

Trustworthiness can never be conclusively proven. There is no ultimate test, and even the absence to date of any specific reason to distrust someone is not proof that there will never be a reason. We can never be absolutely about anything. Sometimes, we can’t even be certain of ourselves.

It took me a while, but I finally realized that there was never going to be a guarantee on the trust I extended in therapy, any more than any other relationship came with a guarantee.

Trust in a relationship, in any relationship, is always extended on credit. It is never given without risk. Nobody can really guarantee us that our trust will be well placed or that we will never take a loss, and anyone who says they can is lying.

The risk might be obvious in a therapy relationship, but it is also present when we send our kids to school or leave them with a babysitter, order food at a restaurant, have a contractor remodel the house, rent property as the tenant or as the landlord, accept a job, hire an employee – on every side of every relationship, there is some measure of trust involved, and there is never a guarantee on any of it.

The stakes in therapy feel higher, but the basic choice is still the same. Do I want what I want enough to take a risk to get it, or do I just want to leave things the way they are?

Nothing comes with a guarantee.
Trust is always a leap of faith.

Trust is not an all-or-nothing concept.

Making the decision to trust one person in one situation does not mean I have to trust all people, or trust the same person in every situation. Thankfully, I have a brain, and it functions fairly well. This means I can apply some judgment in each case. I can decide who to trust, and when I trust them. If they do something that breaks my trust (such as lying to me or manipulating me), I get to decide whether this means I will never again trust them about anything, or whether I simply won’t ever trust them in that situation again – or whether it was an aberration, with the possibility of trust being earned back.

Deciding which is which in any given situation is difficult and time-consuming. Sometimes there are so many possibilities in this world outside the shadows that it can be overwhelming. Sometimes the relationship in question isn’t worth the work, and it’s easier to just write it off than to sort through where I really stand on it. But some relationships are worth all the work they require.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned II

The several lessons I’ve chosen to include today are really one issue in its progressive permutations, and it is one that has been particularly difficult for me — finding the balance between reliance and independence. Even finding the healthy balance point (let alone putting it into practice) was a real challenge. This issue isn’t specific to overcoming programming — it probably affects every survivor. But even so, it was an issue that strongly affected my willingness to let go of the life I knew, and as such, I’ve included it.

I am still ultimately on my own.

This system, like many other dissociative systems, grew up learning that, overall, the only person we could really rely on was our own self. Adults might be caring one day and abusive the next, or change the rules in unpredictable ways, or they might be predictable only in how abusive they were – even adults who claimed they wanted to be helpful usually didn’t listen or understand enough to do anything but make things worse with their efforts to help. We, like so many others, learned early that nobody was really going to help. Our survival, even for the basic needs of food or shelter (which could certainly be denied if we didn’t perform as expected), was entirely our own responsibility.

As so often happens, the flip side of that early excess of self-responsibility was an excess of wanting to be taken care of – since none of the people who should have taken care of us did so, and since we were never taken care of when we should have been, we were constantly on the lookout for any likely substitute who would take on that role for us. But it also created an excess of distrust, and a too-easy willingness to find fault in any caring attention that we did receive.

And, again as so often happens, the entire mess ended up in the lap of the therapist. Wanting to be taken care of to the deepest extent of what was not provided in our childhood, wanting to give up the burden of self-care and make our care someone else’s responsibility – we expected the therapist to provide all of it, and we were unreasonably quick to find fault with what the therapist was reasonably able to provide. Thankfully, we didn’t go as far down that road as some people do, but it was still a lengthy digression. This seems to be a sidetrack that many survivors wander down in the course of their healing – and some get lost down that track for months, or years, or forever.

The trouble with that sidetrack is that it’s a black hole into nothingness. Nobody can ever really replace what we should have had but didn’t. Nobody can retrospectively be there for us during the abuse, or rescue us from what happened years ago, or parent our grownup selves the way our parents should have done it when we were young. We didn’t have any of that when we should have, and painful though this truth is to face, this really does mean we missed the chance. We can have other kinds of relationships, and if we allow it, those relationships can help to fill the void left by our defective early caretakers – but this only works if we accept the current relationships as they are, rather than trying to make them be something else that they can never be. Nobody can replace in the present day what we didn’t get thirty years ago.

Nevertheless, we wasted some time thinking that someone could do that, and moreover that they should do it, and we blamed others for their failure to fill our emptiness or to satisfy our neediness – because if they said they wanted to help and that they cared, and yet we still felt the way we did, then it must mean they weren’t trying hard enough.

My first response to this was to interpret it as proof that I was right in the first place – nobody really cared, nobody could be trusted, and I had nobody but myself to rely on.

Over time, however, it became clear that this extreme was too extreme, because…

I can’t always provide everything I need for myself.

I can provide a lot for myself – I can support myself, provide food and shelter and entertainment and pleasure, we have each other in this system for companionship and support – we are self-sufficient for the vast majority of our needs. But not for all of them.

I did return for a time to my original position of self-reliant distrust, and I could have stayed there forever if I had chosen to do so. It was something that had worked for 36 years at that point, and there was no reason it couldn’t continue to work just as effectively for another 36 years. But the question became, was it really the most effective position I could take on the issue?

I could probably have lived the rest of my life without ever being forced to re-evaluate that, and had I not been forced to do it, I can’t say whether it would ever have happened. I would like to think it still might have, but who knows. In any event, I was forced to re-evaluate, and subsequently I began to work on finding a healthier balance point.

It began in a situation where the choice between staying where I was or moving on to something new became a very concrete and unavoidable choice – and for a variety of reasons, the choice of staying where I was was completely unacceptable. I had to move on to something new. The problem was, I couldn’t do it alone.

So either I chose to accept help from others (and thereby relied on them to a certain extent), or I chose to rely only on what I could do for myself, even though I knew I couldn’t do this thing by myself – and refusing to accept help in this situation risked not only my own safety (which was tolerable), but the safety of other people as well (which was not tolerable).

The concrete clarity did not make the choice as easy as I wished it would have. But I did choose to accept the help. This obliged me to place a certain level of trust in those who would help me, and to rely on them for certain things.

Despite all the risks my choice involved, that felt like the biggest risk of them all.

There is a healthy balance between dependence and independence – it doesn’t have to be all or nothing either way.

It’s been about three years now since that initial choice, and I’ve worked since then (and still continue to work) on finding the healthy balance between independence and reliance. This balance, as I’ve defined it for myself so far, is as follows.

My healing is my responsibility. Most of it involves things that can’t be done by anyone else but me. It requires my effort, my determination, my consistency, my willingness, my sweat and blood and tears. If I sit around waiting for someone else to “fix me” then it will never happen.

My healing is not anyone else’s responsibility. Nobody else is obliged to help me or fix me, not even if I’m paying them – and paying them is not an excuse to dump the responsibility on them and then blame them for not taking care of it. Therapy is not about shirking my responsibilities or handing my responsibilities to someone else and letting it all be their problem. If those are the expectations I have of therapy, then it’s my own fault if I’m being constantly disappointed.

Therapy will also not replace what my parents never gave me, and I’m not entitled to expect that it will. I might have to cope with not being the most special person in my therapist’s life. I can’t reasonably expect to be treated like her friend, let alone to be treated like one of her kids. That’s not what a healthy therapy relationship is about, and if that’s what I expect, or if I’m going to blame my therapist for not treating me in these ways – that is most definitely my problem.

What therapy can do is be the extra hand I need to help me over or through the places I can’t get through alone. It can’t replace my own effort, but it is a necessary addition to it. I need to get past the desire to be in an unhealthy role in relation to my therapist,  but I also need to be able to take the hand that’s offered when I need it, because being unwilling to accept any help at all is just as much of an unhealthy extreme. Sometimes I need help to achieve the things I want most.

Being as independent as possible makes any necessary reliance on others less of a threat, and it makes disappointment by others less of a crisis.

Relying on other to do what they say they will or be who they say they are is not easy. People feel like a perpetual disappointment to me. It seems they never manage to live up to my expectations, even when my expectations are so abysmally low that I can’t understand how anyone could sink low enough to disappoint them.

I’m geared to expect disappointment, because disappointment is what I always seem to get – and this is true whether I expected a lot, or whether I expected nothing but some basic common sense or a little human dignity. Some people can’t even manage that.

And every disappointment hurts – some of them hurt on a personal level, some only on the level where I’m looking for something to tell me that this world is an improvement on the world I chose to leave, that the people on this side of things are not as stupid or selfish or self-absorbed or manipulative or dishonest or cruel – every disappointment hurts in some way.

So even in the cases where I decide that I could accept help, maybe even that I need to accept help – deciding whether or not it’s worthwhile to actually do it is still a difficult issue. My expectations of a person tend to increase when I feel I have a personal stake invested in them – and yet, I still can’t control them or make them live up to my expectations or their promises. Sometimes the potential disappointment makes the effort of accepting help seem like it’s just not worth it.

What I’m learning, though, is that the degree to which I maintain my own efforts and my own contributions to the project at hand makes an appreciable difference in all respects.

If I contribute everything within my own ability to the effort at hand, then it feels like less of a threat to allow someone else to also contribute. I never feel like I am depending solely or entirely on them, or like my own efforts require theirs. I can feel the solidity of my own independence even while working with another. That feeling is very reassuring to me.

And as long as I am contributing everything I can to the effort, not being overly reliant on the other or depending entirely on their presence, then I have also found that it isn’t the end of the world if they don’t come through. It doesn’t give me a very good opinion of them if they don’t, but I’m sure they can live without my good opinion. What is more important to me is that their failure does not mean the failure of whatever we were doing together. My success wasn’t riding on them, and my effort can and will survive and continue, whether or not anyone else does what they say they will. And that’s pretty reassuring too.