On my blog entry entitled Grieving Loss of Dysfunctional Friendship, a reader posted the following comment:
In your blogs, and what I have heard from other survivors you often describe healing as a fight. And I have never understood this. To me, fighting is how I got through the abuse as and when it happened, to me healing is a process of stopping fighting (even retreating) which can be really hard and scary when you have fought for so long and you think the ‘enemy’ might still be close but is none the less stopping not starting the fight. I would be really interested in your thoughts on this, and wether you feel that survivng your childhood also involved some degree of a fight or not! ~ Sophie
Sophie makes a good point, so perhaps a different word than “fighting” is more appropriate. I think the word I might be looking for “adapting.” As a child, I had to adapt to being abused. I had to be the obedient child abuse victim as well as pretend to be a “normal” child in public. I had to do all of this while never giving voice to any of my emotions. This took an enormous amount of adapting, but through dissociative identity disorder (DID), I managed to adapt quite nicely. I was fully suited for living a life as an abused child.
Then, I grew up and moved away from the abuse. Safety was a completely different environment from abuse. People might expect safety being an “easier” environment, but it wasn’t because I had to adapt all over again. I spent my entire childhood adapting to trauma, and most of my adaptations were completely out of place in the new, safe environment.
I think that is where the struggle comes in. I have not had to “fight” so much as “adapt” to an environment that is very different from the environment I grew up in. While I am (obviously) grateful no longer being abused, I was ill-equipped for survival in this new environment. I did not know about basic social graces … or how to interact without someone who wasn’t trying to hurt me … or what was expected of me in this new environment. It was like being beamed to Mars and being expected to act like a Martian without having a “Martians for Dummies” books at my disposal.
My therapist is very good about pointing out that many of my struggles come from being a survivor of child abuse. I adapted very well as a survivor, but I no longer have to live that way. So, I am having to relearn everything I ever learned about interacting with the world around me. My therapist says that I have been having to “parent myself” as I learn how to adapt to life without abuse.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
I do a lot of work with unlearning. It is often the early on in change. I do not seem to be able to learn and have it replace what I learned before. I must first unlearn. If I go with just the leaning thing a new part is created.
I did not really start to heal significantly until I unlearned what I was taught about healing. This now makes sense as I was not healing from experiences that were related to what was known about trauma.
Once I recovered the memories and knew what I needed to heal from I could design a way to heal from my experiences. Adapting the methods that were successful for other traumatic experiences was not helpful and often harmful.
We wish we could turn this into a fight, it is what we are good at. Our therapist will not cooperate at all. We keep telling her that this would be easier if we had an antagonistic relationship.She will not even argue with me. Lets me argue with myself.
I do not like the term struggle. To me that is being bound and struggling to breathe and such. Same with having a hard time right now. This is always easier.
I once head the phrase “Tolerating happiness” I remembered it and understood I do not have a concept of happiness. I reentered therapy after knowing what was known about trauma was not applicable with the goal of dying a happy old man. Somewhere along the way I decided I did not want to wait until I was old.
Although it just came to me I might just go with I am working on happiness. That I can not experience happiness until I heal seems to make sense in this moment. Did not see that coming. Smile
So Faith you write the Book “Martians for Dummies” and I will write the book “Earthlings for Dummies”
{So Faith you write the Book “Martians for Dummies” and I will write the book “Earthlings for Dummies”}
LOL!!
- Faith
For me, the term “fighting” is perfect for what it takes to break free from the effects of my abusive history. When I was living in abuse, I had to stifle the fight in me, stuff it down, suppress, submit… If it became impossible, I had to turn the fight against myself – in order to survive. Now, getting healthier means reclaiming my self and fighting against Evil to live in Truth. Fighting against the lies that bombard me. Fighting against habits that hurt. Fighting against my unhealthy ways that feel safe, but are harmful.
Fighting doesn’t have to have a negative connotation. For me, it is fighting like a triathlete excited about the finish line but enjoying the scenery along the way. Fighting like a policeman pulling a criminal off a child. Fighting like a fireman hacking down walls to reach a trapped baby. Strong, determined, persistent… then celebratory.
Your blog helps me in the fight, Faith. Thank you.
Wow, lots of powerful posts and comments on this blog these days! Appreciate everything everyone has said so far (Sophie, Faith, Michael, at the time I’m writing this). Lots to think about.
Like Michael, I often wish I could turn this into a fight; as Michael pointed out about the word ‘struggle’, my childhood was a struggle not a fight. The absolutely most dangerous thing you could do in our family was to defend yourself (well, 2nd most dangerous after succeeding in anything where my mother couldn’t milk the glory for herself). Learning to be able to fight and defend myself in a way that isn’t setting myself up for more hurt would be a big step up, and I just realized that I don’t know how to do the former without the latter!
Also like Michael I’ve had to unlearn before I can learn, but just recently have added a new step: I have to (in a way) prelearn, unlearn and then learn. I have almost no memories of growing up but all these very weird ‘symptoms’ that I can’t find any way to explain (yesterday’s post has kind of freaked me out, frankly, since I’m not DID but have so many similarities with what you wrote Faith). Since I couldn’t find any reference at all in any of the mental health/trauma/etc… literature which could explain my type and level of symptoms I started to look at child abuse crime reporting in the paper and on some true crime blogs to see if I could start to see anything that might ‘click’. And I finally started to see things that made sense. Which led to my angry phase frankly, which I guess is kind of ‘fighting’, come to think of it.
What I’ve experienced is that all of the ‘healing’ and ‘trauma’ literature NEVER considers the experience of having experienced sadistic torture AT ALL, let alone for extended periods of time. That, and violence only seems to happen to ‘womanANDchildren’, not BY women AGAINST children. It describes, for instance, physical child abuse as having been beaten, emotional abuse as having been called names like ‘worthless’. My god, if that’s all I’d ever endured I would be absolutely thrilled. That stuff was almost laughingly easy to get past. And yet any tour through newspaper reports shows us quite different things, which I don’t need to elaborate on but which everyone here is all too familiar with.
All the trauma work I’ve ever had seems to come from a place where I just had an overburdened mother who couldn’t cope and ‘did the best she could’ (my god I’ll vomit if I ever hear this again, which is why I stopped going to therapy years ago). All of the DSM literature, and public mental health policy, and child protection policy, and conferences and workshops are written from a place where (I’m writing this in Canada) people like Russell Williams and Karla Homolka and Robert Pickton are mere abberations which spontaneously spring up from nowhere, leave only (conveniently) dead victims, couldn’t possibly exist on a spectrum where unknown others of their ilk operate on victims who are living and therefore need help for being victims instead of being personally deficient &/or deluded &/or ‘not right’ in their heads (e.g. schizophrenia), and where those perpetrators of their ilk can be conveniently and completely ignored: “Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.”
Hi birdfeeder
I really feel your frustration at such a lack of validation/help. And since you mention sadistic killers (killers in the physical sense of course); I read about some of these cases sometimes, and occasionally there’s mention of a victim who survived and/or managed to escape, and they’re almost a footnote. I always think well, what’s happened to them afterwards? Has anyone actually checked? Or are their feelings too much of a hassle to be bothered with?
**possible triggers – morbid thoughts**
There’s this “if you’re alive you’ve got nothing to complain about” attitude. Sometimes I feel like I exist in a place between life and death, or at least I did as a child. I can fight to hold onto the life inside me, and to help it grow, but that doesn’t make me wholly alive. Death seems very close, and not by suicide, strangely. As a child, one of the reasons I didn’t commit suicide was that I had this weird, but very strong, feeling that I was going to die soon anyway, just spontaneously. I still get that sometimes.
You know what I think? Motivations-wise, abuse is murder, but without the inconvenience of a body to dispose of.
I appreciate this could all sound very “depressive” on my part, but really I feel it’s acknowledgment of the seriousness of what’s happened, and more of a positive step in that respect.
“Motivations-wise, abuse is murder, but without the inconvenience of a body to dispose of.”
“Has anyone actually checked? Or are their feelings too much of a hassle to be bothered with?”
Just wanted to repeat what you said, because it’s so true. Matter of fact, I’d like to borrow your first statement above, if that’s OK with you. Really well said.
I get what you’re saying about the ‘between life and death’ thing, and the ‘why contemplate suicide if you’re already going to die’ thing. I started to believe that that feeling has gone away since I’ve been connecting with my anger lately. But as soon as I let myself think about it I realize that it hasn’t, just that I haven’t stumbled across it for a while.
Not sure what that means, but better to know than not. I think it’s something I need to do something about though.
**more possible triggers – morbid thoughts**
One ‘advantage’ that gives me, or at least I think so, is that I’m no longer really afraid of death, nor of fighting for my own life. Not sure what that means either, though. Partly it means I’m now able to make a conscious choice between being completely subdued if *I* choose, or battling to the death if that’s what it takes, even if everyone else in the world would just prefer it if we’d give up and go away and just shut up already. As Kristen French, one of Karla Homolka’s victims, said: “Certain things are worth dying for.” I think she would have tried to live if she had even the slightest chance, but she psychologically fought back every step of the way. I think the same thing is true for everyone who posts here – we’re here because we’re fighters for our own survival, just like all the knights and warriors and adventurers I spent my childhood reading about and being inspired by.
Speaking about the heroes I read about growing up, the way I read it Faith’s journey has been an inspirational battle and a quest for what’s true and valuable in life, a quest that I would imagine is shared by most of the people who follow her blog. Not sure if Faith sees it that way, but it helps me to think of it like that.
Of course that’s ok, I’m glad that that made sense to you; it’s always easy to start thinking that I’m making no sense or saying something offensive!
I love that you mentioned knights and warriors. When I was a child I really liked reading stories or watching films involving noble fighters with just causes, especially the medieval/fantasy type ones. It was only when I was older that I consciously realised why I identified so strongly with the good characters in those stories. I’m still captivated by those kind of tales, though the settings have broadened these days; anyone in fiction, or real life for that matter, fighting for survival or to bring someone to justice makes me feel… less alone, perhaps, just like places like this.
That’s why I don’t go to therapy too. Every therapist has tried to sympathize with my abuser and tell me there were good reasons for the abuse. A lot of therapy is very harmful to people. (Also, I’m poor so I can’t spend money trying to find someone intelligent enough and the places I tried for poor people had very low IQ people working there.)
Interesting timing: Just as I was posting above I received a notice for the following article: “Is Fighting Good For You?: The role of fighting in primal life”
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fighting-healthy/
Found a wonderful quote in the comments section I’m going to ‘borrow’: “You can’t child-proof the world – you have to world-proof your child.”
I’m not sure I ever actually ‘adapted’ to being abused. It just was. It was all I knew from the time I was born, until I was in high school. It wasn’t something that I can say started at a a certain age. It was ALWAYS there! It never even occured to me that I could fight, although I somehow always knew not to cross either of my parents! I do agree with the idea that even though I did ‘survive’ my childhood, I will never truly be ‘alive,’ or ‘living.’ I didn’t remember the extreme abuse until about four years ago, but the first time I tried to kill myself, I was seven years old! I started self-injuring at age six. I guess I just don’t feel like surviving is all that it is cracked up to be. I still wish that my parents had killed me while they were abusing me back then. And as bad as I KNOW this is going to sound, I sometimes envy the kids that don’t survive this hell!
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