After the unholy trinity left, Mum and I were alone, isolated and the hunted. Completely cut off and ostracised by any family we had, (she was the divorced black sheep of the family and we literally had no support for anywhere- no hyperbole), under duress I learned that I had to keep my sword drawn and be on guard 24/7, chronic anxiety alarming me with visions of attack by aggressors and readiness to defend. By now the worm had turned and I’d changed overnight into the angst-ridden, rageful, confrontatious creature although at this point, school was my only outlet for my pain and aggression – the abused became the abuser, the bullied became the bully – which I will recount but not in this post. At home, with Mum now unravelling and spiralling into deep, profound depression of the sudden abandonment and neither of us able to deal with the victimisation by the local thugs, I’d lose myself in superhero-type mental movies where the victim becomes the victor, the quintessential anti-hero, usually where I’m a huge, indomitable power, donning an automatic weapon, and better still, being invisible as my superpower, so I can harass, dominate and effortlessly subdue my aggressors. “If only….” I’d muse, and lose myself in these violent mental movies to abate the fear. I shake my head in sheer dismay just even recounting and recalling these memories and growing up from a child into a teenager were the worst, most abnormal and dysfunctional days of my life. It’s shocking to think that as a teenage girl I’d be getting lost in killing fantasies of my aggressors rather than losing myself in fantasies of a famous muse, obsessing over teen girly things like the latest fashion or dreaming of the future that I wanted for myself. Innocent I was not. Naive navigating the world: definitely.
It was from those times as a teen that I learned to cloak myself in defence: constantly.
I recall on a number of occasions being so frightened late at night, usually around midnight, when local racist thugs would knock violently on our front doors and windows, to intimidate mum and I, knowing we were easy prey. They used to knock on the front door with so much force (which led straight into the house, no porch), I thought they were going to kick the door in; and then they’d aggressively knock on the single-glazed glass on the front wooden windows which led straigh into the lounge. I would tremble with fear under the covers, just wishing I wasn’t there, unable to run away, frozen in fear that they might smash the windows or kick the door in, get in and attack us. Luckily for us, the windows never got smashed in and the front door never kicked in, but I had a vivid nightmare which I can still recall today of a bearded, down and out, hill-billy vagrant type of man who probably hadn’t washed in weeks, scowling and angry ready to throw a breeze block through our front window. It was just at that moment my eyes would suddenly opeb being jolted out of my my sleep, before witnessing the horror of the the front bay window being smashed in. Normally dreams float away like butterflies, elusive to catch once conscious but I remember this image of that nightmare: it’s etched deeply. To this day I have PTSD when someone knocks my door too loudly – I literally jump out of my skin and my heart beats as if it’s bursting out of my chest, and it takes me straight back to that time of the teenage girl trembling under the covers, as if someone’s coming to get me.
I cry for her. But it’s not me crying, it’s her. I console and comfort that part of me when I think about her and telling her that it’s ok to be upset, that it was really hard for her back then, that no girl should have had to endure what she went through. I’m learning to hold space for her and give her the support she never, ever got when she needed it. It’s only then that she’ll be able to safely come out of exile and melt peacefully into my inner world.
By the time I was in my late teens to early 20’s my trauma pain body was formed and fully fledged with claws and teeth. “Why me?” reverberated in my psyche and mind for years. Yes it was a victim mindset but I was entitled to think like that. I was a product of my pain. I had unwittingly morphed into a rageful, bitter and slightly unhinged 20-something…although I certainly wouldn’t have described myself as such back then. There was an inner Hades within me, and like Persephone, I was carried away into its underworld: I had drowned in a thick, turbulent and stormy ocean within me, within which I’d formed gills and learned to breathe in. I thought that life owed me something back but in all honestly I was waiting for a saviour, to be rescued from my underworld, oblivious that I needed to rescue myself. I’d become possessed by my pain, the dark side my filter. And here’s how it manifested in the years that ensued.
Akin to the movie, my “Babadook” made me maladjusted and unhinged. It skewed and distorted my thinking. My emotions were a soup of heavy grief, rage, bitterness and anger, which underpinned my thoughts leading to poor choices and erratic behaviour. Having not experienced a ‘normal’ and happy childhood, I was bitter about it, really bitter, which remained a constant undercurrent for years. Of course, I was oblivious at this point that I was traumatised and that my pain body had become me. I was only too aware of the feelings and emotions I harboured. I had uncontrollable rage and anger issues: I would fly off the handle at the smallest, most inconsequential of things; it was as though I needed to expel the thick tar of rage out of me but no amount of blowing-up would soothe it or assuage the rage. The skewed thinking and unhinged part of me manifested as a wildly jealous and spiteful streak which drove me to do the most insane and hideously irrational things, nothing life-threatening or criminal, just thoughtless, bitchy and childish things like interfering in other people’s lives who I thought had it better than me, to try and fuck it all up for them in some convoluted way, and in turn that would make me feel better. Very naive I know but no one told me that wasn’t the way. The truth is I hated myself and I hated my life – I wished I was someone else somewhere else. I hated being me. My deeply wounded part coveted other people’s lives: what they had, where they lived, who they were married to, hated other people’s success and the ease with which some people seemed to glide though life, so effortlessly. It felt as though everyone else had a much easier life, had it much better than me and that life was surely against me, being dealt a shitty hand of cards. Yes I was in complete victim mode with a ‘why-me-how-come’ inner echo chamber that formed the basis of my existence. Can you blame me? “Why me…why did I have to be born into this fucked up family?”; “why couldn’t I have had an easier life?”; “why can’t I find success…everyone else seems to have it so much easier than me, well they didn’t have the shit upbringing like I did?”; “why haven’t I got a boyfriend…when am I going to get married…how come other girls seem to find someone really nice and they’re not even that pretty!”; “no ones going to want me in the shit hole where I live – it’s shameful”; “why couldn’t I have grown up in a nice house and a nice area with nice neighbours…my life would have turned out so differently”; “why have I had a shitty upbringing, in a shithole of an area?”; “why couldn’t I have had a normal family and do normal things like summer holidays, or going abroad and have big family gatherings on special occasions?” ; “why did I have to grow up on the breadline, with a fucked up start to my life – I just haven’t had a fair chance at all?”. “I’ve had a much worse start than anyone else I know! I could have a had a much better start than this! Why me? It’s just not fair! It’s not fucking fair!!”
That’s the 20-something year old me talking by the way. That’s what the inner echo chamber sounded like most of the time. Of course I didn’t realise that I was constantly repelling any goodness with this mindset, but I never had any therapy as a young woman, something that probably could have saved me back then to help reframe and reshape my life.
Looking back, it was as though I’d developed some sort of a personality disorder, although I’ve never been diagnosed as having such. Perhaps I had developed a bipolar disorder, although I do believe I was deeply depressed. I became a foul-mouthed, confrontatious, impulsive and aggressive creature; I was a bitch to my mum in my late teens and early 20’s, telling her how useless she is, screaming at her constantly that she was neglectful and ineffectual as a parent; I was deeply resentful that she kept us where we were living as a teen, feeling deprived of a normal childhood, having to take on adult roles at 14, constantly trying to hold space for and motivate my, by then, extremely depressed mother who was in her mid-late 30’s, settling for mediocre jobs and unemplyed in between. I just wanted another role model, someone to guide me and take me under their wing. I’m ashamed to say that the pain body resented my mum and wanted her gone. I wanted a better life, a better family and to be somewhere else away from everyone, including my mother. But the pain body steered me away from sensible choices. It made me lost, scattered and fragmented, dominated by a toxic, compulsive and impulsive ‘doing’ energy which enticed me like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, taking me way off-track down the wrong roads to dead ends and dry valleys. It made me forget completely who I am and abandon everything about myself that was honest, innate and true, all the goodness sucked out of me with my beautiful creativity left hung out to dry. I was lost and aimless and became a hollow imposter living my life. I was always in a hurry to get somewhere, wildly impatient as well as hasty, always wanting the shortcut, an energy that still follows me today, although I now know how to temper it (and learning the art of patience in mid-life). I wonder what opportunities passed me by back then on this hasty and aimless trajectory that never allowed me to stand still long enough to hear the distant and muffled cries of my soul which at this point, was gagged and shackled, caged and locked up on the maybe-later-shelf. Glimmers of the real me flashed like torch in the dark now and again but the voice of my pain body kept me on the wrong road telling me there’s something else, somewhere else, but always selling myself short. I threw away lucrative job offers or worse still, I wouldn’t even turn up to job interviews. I never made enough money, fecklessly floating from rootless job to rootless job, on the dole in between and ending up in pyramid schemes where I lost more money than I made, trying to find the quick route to success, building up a mound of loan and credit card debt and keeping me exactly where I was because I hated it so much. It’s ironic, what you hate, you get more of. What you resist, persists. I was fuelled by an unhinged “I’ll show you“ attitude to the transgressors in my life, not fully understanding that the energy was totally misplaced. It’s fills me with heaviness to think that underneath the mountain of pain was was an intelligent, insanely creative and talented young woman, who could have nutured that talent and easily have forged a life as such. She was a bright spark with initiative, but completely fragmented through no fault of her own, having no sense at all of her worth and abilities, waiting for some normality and most of all, waiting for a saviour. That’s what I wanted most of all: a saviour to nudge and beckon me onto the right path. But the saviour never came. Or perhaps it passed me by in my haste. Or maybe the beloved saviour was within me to find. This is painful for me to write but rather than blaming her, or filling myself with regret of the life I could have lived or should have lived, I have compassion for that young woman who just got totally fragmented by her pain, totally lost in her wilderness and possessed by a pervasive, all controlling and all consuming, almighty pain body vortex that sucked her into it, and didn’t let her go for a very long time. Beneath the unhinged and angry facade lay a spiritually and emotionally broken young woman: depressed, lonely, deeply sensitive, broken-hearted and insecure, fearful and distrusting of the world, heavy with grief and burdened with the toxic shame of betrayal and worthlessness, searching for someone to love and accept her so she could love and accept herself.
Life gave me a break – things settled down somewhat when I was 28 years old for about 8 years until turbulence and betrayal followed me again and I eventually imploded leading to my 2017 breakdown – that’s another blog for another day. But it’s no coincidence that I imploded. It was bound to happen sooner or later, trying to come up for air in a very chaotic inner world which eventually would swallowed me, the dark goddess Ereshkigal bringing me into her underworld and hanging me on meat hook, a painful initiation of the soul.
Fight mode was and has been my modus operandi for a very, very long time. The fight and chaos within was projected outwardly into my reality. A self-fulfilling cycle, a loop that has no end and no beginning, but like ouroborous, fighting is akin to biting your own tail. It will always hurt. You can see where it comes from though, what that energy body is trying to do to correct itself with presenting fight scenarios. There’s no winners or losers though, just loss. Fighting leaks energy; it leaks your light, drains your joy and crushes creativity. My life thus far has routinely present me with re-enactments of betrayal or injustice and will continue to do so until I choose not to fight back or choose a different approach. It’s exhausting: how many fights will it take; how many wrongs can I right and at what expense? Perhaps choosing not to fight back isn’t losing? Perhaps choosing peace rather than the fight will assuage the pain and will take me off on a different, more joyful trajectory? It takes more inner strength to walk away than take on the battle. In losing the battle you win the war. How can I erase the indelibly etched streak in my veins that wants justice, to put people in their place, to right the wrongs that I couldn’t right as a child? As I write this I realise that perhaps my only solution is to consciously reign myself in. The rage still lives in me to this day, not as voraciously or fierce but from time to time I can blow up over minor things or have an urge to want to fight back about a wrong-doing or ‘put someone in their place’. I remind myself that to not fight back is not synonymous with weakness, which is how I used to see it.
The way forward is self-compassion and self-acceptance: to fully see and be with the wounded parts; it’s what I’ve been taught in IFS therapy. I no longer have judgement or ill-feeling toward the young woman I used to be. Neither do do I berate her. Nor do I burden myself with heavy regret. I now comfort the regret with a soft blanket of understanding. I soothe the “I should have’s” with a hot water bottle of compassion. And I warm the “what if’s” with a cuddle of kindness and acknowledge the pain that the child endured with an embrace of heart-filled love, pain which rendered her so emotionally and spiritually broken that it’s taken a lifetime to try and fix.
Isn’t this what we must do with our pain body and exiled parts? I think this is what self-love really is: to be tender and gentle with our wounded parts, feed them with loving kindness, acknowledge them in all their glory, and as as ‘ugly’ as these parts might be, to witness them, validate them, acknowledge them so that rather than metamorphasizing to become us, the pain body simply dissolves into our soul to alchemise and evolve.
If baring my soul to you (and the world) has moved or touched a part of you in any way, then your support would be very welcome. To help me on this healing journey, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee (although mines a tea) via the link below:
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