It was exactly a year ago in July 2023 that my therapist essentially told me that I had been doing therapy wrong. “We’ve been working together for 7 years now. Do you trust me enough now to let me dig a little?” Apparently, she had been biding her time to finally get to the real work. We had processed through the trauma of exiting Bali, deconstructing faith, and all sorts of challenges of the moment, but she had seen glimpses of pain that I wasn’t even aware I was feeling. I agreed, and she sent me off with a list of questions that I dutifully began pondering, adding a few of my own.

One of the questions on my list was “What was it in your life that made the first crack in your childhood ideology?”

It was not a difficult question. I knew the answer instantly. The answer was Marcus, my first boyfriend (and the only person I dated before I met and married Dan). He and I had had a love at first sight experience when my family was back in the USA on a home assignment during my sophomore year at high school. For 6 months, we tried to navigate my parents’ increasing hostility and absurdly controlling rules until a return to Honduras and its lack of phones/internet made us break up. I had been absolutely devasted and on some level still ached over it 25 years later –  though it took me a few more months to learn why.

Marcus had been a hinge point in my life because he gave me permission to think outside of the designated lines, and our relationship set a standard for how I wanted to be treated in relationships. He was the first person to ask me hard questions about the faith that I had been born to and to allow me to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance of so many of my own observations. He was the first feminist I had ever encountered, and the way he interacted with me empowered my agency and understanding of consent. He was gentle with me but also unafraid to point out that the way I was being treated in my family was not okay and that kindness was something that I should be able to expect rather than earn. Though our relationship ended when I moved away, his influence on my life was permanent.

I took these thoughts back to therapy and had to take a look at some pretty deep, unresolved grief about Marcus. I remembered crying every day for months after we returned to Honduras, but because my parents hated him so much, I didn’t talk about it. And they didn’t ask. In fact, I never even heard his name again or received any acknowledgment that I had slipped into my first experience of depression. Eventually, I learned that I had been dealing with something called “complicated grief” which is a chronic type of grieving that a small number of people experience, most often after the traumatic death of a loved one. It’s far more likely to suffer this type of grief when you have no real support through the loss. Much later, my therapist observed that Marcus had been the only safe attachment figure in my childhood, which explained the depth of my grief and also why even after he was out of my life, the memory of him was an anchor to sanity in what felt like an emotional hurricane for the rest of my adolescence. I am not sure I would have made it to adulthood without being completely broken had it not been for the love he showed me and the lessons he taught me.

Looking at the lack of support and parental care during what was easily the most painful thing I had gone through as a kid pushed me to start looking at other experiences. I dug out a box of old journals from the attic and spent a week reading through every single one of them. I wanted to know if my memories were accurate, and I wanted to know if there was more that I hadn’t remembered.

I found that my memories were accurate and that there was not a whole lot that I read that I had forgotten. That wasn’t the problem. The issue was that my understanding of the nature of those events was warped. As I began talking about my childhood and teenage experiences with Dan and a few close friends, they responded with shock and sympathy.

Even my therapist couldn’t hide her surprise. “In all this time you have never come close to telling me those things.”

“I didn’t realize they were a big deal. Everyone has crap, and mine doesn’t seem that bad comparatively.”

“They are a big deal. What you are describing is serious childhood abuse and emotional neglect.”

“Oh. Then why don’t I feel anything about it?”

“Maybe that’s exactly what we should be trying to figure it out.”

 

By early October, I had increased my therapy appointments to weekly, and we were reviewing all sorts of childhood memories. I hit a wall one day and cried for hours. Within a week I had dropped 10 pounds, hadn’t slept for more than two or three nightmare filled hours a night, and was unable to focus on anything. I took a leave of absence from work for two weeks, and fortunately my colleagues graciously made up for my slack while I tried to get back to some sort of functioning over the next several months.

My therapist asked me to start seeing a trauma therapist who specialized in EMDR to work through different memories. I was told I likely have C-PTSD, which I initially didn’t believe until I took a inventory on family toxicity and was startled by the word “severe” in the results page. I wasn’t very excited to accept the idea of having C-PTSD because I know that C-PTSD doesn’t go away. However, as much as my experiences explained C-PTSD, the symptoms of C-PTSD that I was experiencing and have experienced for as long as I can remember validated the depth of pain I had experienced as a kid.

It got worse before it got better, but I was surrounded by an incredible network of friends who held me when I was falling apart, answering SOS calls when I found myself crying on the bathroom floor, often unsure why. I felt all these things deeply, but they weren’t connected to a particular thought or memory. It was more like an avalanche of frozen tears had thawed and needed release.

Eventually, I put together some hard truths.

My parents had used extreme isolation as a punishment. I actually always preferred to get spanked (which I was multiple times a week with belts, flyswatters, and hands) because the alternative was being grounded. I’ve heard people talk about being grounded my whole life, and I always assumed that their experiences were like mine. Apparently not. In my case, I was put in my room sometimes for hours, but often for days, and a few times for weeks. Since I was homeschooled, it meant that I didn’t even have the break of going to school. I came out to eat, but otherwise was stuck in my room. If my parents were particularly mad, they would remove all my books as well, leaving me to literally stare at the ceiling. I developed a fantastic fantasy world, creating a library of stories in my head. I also developed an intense fear of boredom and of making people I love angry at me. I had an expectation of being emotionally abandoned so deep that in my early adulthood it took people about ten years of consistent friendship before I would truly open up to them.

I learned that I was over-functioning in relationships, not trusting anyone but myself to take care of my needs, but also believing that my value in relationships was meeting others’ needs. I still struggle to ask for anyone to do anything for me without a deep sense of shame and guilt for even having needs and desires. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the messaging behind this thought process came from.  As a small kid, I learned very early to be independent. I had 3 more siblings born before I was 11, and my mom homeschooled while my dad worked multiple jobs. If I wasn’t doing school work, doing a LOT of chores, or taking care of babies, I made myself scarce. Not needing anything was clearly the most helpful way to be, and requests for attention or needing comfort were often met with frustration at the inconvenience or worse, a re-write that made my parent’s feelings about my feelings the only important thing. I understood that I needed to take care of myself and was completely capable of doing so. I was the definition of a parentified child. My parents seemed content to let me manage myself, and when I was young, they seemed to enjoy that I was the feisty ring leader of my friends.

However, when I hit puberty I was suddenly told that I needed a chaperone. I learned that I wasn’t to be trusted alone and that I needed to be protected by a man. Stating my opinion was now labeled “disrespectful,” and though I had always been one to take charge, I  learned that my religion forbade women from leading. I could see that the only thing that had changed was my body, so I learned that being a woman meant lost autonomy and the rule of men, regardless of their abilities and my own. And somehow it was God’s way no matter how illogical.

The desire to be treated the way that I had been treated AS A SMALL KID was the basis for most of the fighting that happened between myself and my parents during high school. I hated the new restrictions that now infantilized me when I had once been allowed nearly complete autonomy. I had been taught to be independent and opinionated and confident, but now I was punished for being exactly those things. Sometimes violently.

For a couple of years around the time that I dated Marcus and for a while afterwards, I fought to have my own voice and my own thoughts. I wanted to be respected, even if what I believed was not in line with my parents’ ideas. I stood up for myself, but usually it resulted in some sort of punishment. That ended abruptly in a night of extreme violence when I realized that standing up for myself was unsafe and there was literally nowhere to go and no one to help me since I was overseas. I knew how I deserved to be treated, and I also knew that in a different situation I would have left home permanently, but neither of those things were possible. So I got quiet. I knew that the only way out was pretending that I was “trustworthy,” a code for “a good Christian woman.” It was the only way to stay safe. I stuffed down all of the cognitive dissonance that I felt and pretended that it all made sense and that I was finally maturing away from my sassy teenage self that constantly butted heads with my parents. Eventually, I forgot that I was pretending.

In some ways, it has felt like I have had to mentally go back to that night of violence when everything in me shut down and take up residence there. Oddly, I still feel very few emotions about that night. It happened, but it still doesn’t feel like I was there, even though I have pages of the experience and the immediately following feelings about it written down. I guess at some point my brain simply decided that those emotions weren’t going to help me survive, so they were broken off and tucked somewhere that I still haven’t found. This type of dissociation became my body’s go-to method of dealing with anything difficult. For my whole adult life, I’ve been regularly affirmed in my productivity and my capability to work robotically. It is something that certainly has helped me in my career and helped me survive many difficult situations, so I saw it as an asset until I realized that it was something I was doing automatically to avoid dangerous feelings like fear, grief, and even tenderness.

These days, I am still unpacking memories, but I’ve realized that it’s entirely possible that I will never find the feelings that are supposed to go with the abusive moments of childhood and the many ways in which I was abandoned to care for myself emotionally and psychologically. Instead of trying to find these lost emotions, I am working on understanding the impact of them in my life today. I am learning to recognize when I have a need and ask the people that I trust to help me with those needs, even trying to believe that they actually want to know and help. It’s still a terrifying thing to do. I am learning to be a human rather than a robot and allow myself to rest regularly. I am pursuing personal pleasure and joy rather than believing that I have to prove my worth by the value and utility I bring to others. I am allowing myself to walk away from relationships that aren’t serving me and to lean into brand new relationships with tentative vulnerability.  At the very least, I am learning to recognize what I feel.

One of the most difficult things for me is the fact that those with C-PTSD have no “before” to compare themselves to. Because it’s a disorder caused by chronic trauma in childhood rather than a single event like PTSD, we don’t really know who we would have become without our trauma. It’s even more tricky for those, like myself, who have a history largely defined by emotional neglect because it’s incredibly hard to recognize the impact of what didn’t happen. I don’t know what parts of my personality are ME and what are parts that developed to keep me safe. The only thing that I know to do is to allow for the possibility that some of the things that have felt at core of who I am are actually just habitual coping mechanisms, and then allow them to morph or to go away completely. It’s been odd to realize that I am far softer, far less confident, far more tender and emotional than I knew. I’m getting to know myself again, but it feels more like meeting myself for the first time.

It’s been a year of intense inner work, and it has not been particularly fun. I know there is more to do. (Recently, my therapist prescribed me a book on self-compassion that I know is going to sting a little.) But I can’t imagine still being frozen where I was emotionally for so long, and I can’t imagine settling for shallow relationships that have dominated my life because I have always been too scared to believe that anything else was safe or possible. Speaking of safe relationships… Marcus is back in my life again. With Dan’s encouragement, I looked him up last fall. He is exactly who I expected him to be 25 years later, and having his friendship again has been healing and joyful. In fact, as my only “witness” to some things, he lifted a few boxes down for me to sort out that I know I would have never been able to get to otherwise. My childhood was lonely and fearful, and my young adulthood was marked by isolation and numbness. But on the other side of the last year, I feel well loved by a lot of wonderful people, and I am experiencing a bigger and bigger range of emotions. It’s been quite a year.