I am learning there were two versions of truth.
His truth.
And then the truth.
Forgive me because none of this is black or white. Nothing is as it seems and this is so fucking confusing. Ever since I received this news I have had an overwhelming sense of guilt. Shame. In little kid terms... badness.
Small voices repeat... bad people get killed... he was bad... he was our dad... so we are bad... over and over and over. These are anxious words wrapped with fear. Fear that we are next. An irrational fear yet a real anxiety.
How could I be good yet come from them? I get that they were bad. Exceptionally bad. So how did I get here when badness raised me?
Bad little kids don't have parents... If you tell then you will get taken away... And then you won't have parents... Because you were bad.
And now we have no parents.
Quite honestly, I am lost. I pace the floors all night. My chest is full with pounding butterflies. I stare at the food on each plate. A cold sweat overcomes me with each police car I see. My mind wanders through each day waiting for that phone call. The call that makes this all official and I wonder how it will go. I wonder how I will react. And what I fear the most is that I will have no reaction whatsoever.
And in that lack of reaction, my badness will commence.
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Hello darkness my old friend,
4 months ago
14 comments:
I have a friend. A very close friend, who is also DID. She shared recently that one of the worst fears all of her people share is that they are, as she termed it, "demon seed". She has spent a long time working through...as have her insiders...how this is untrue...two evil parts to not equal an evil child. I don't believe that we (me and mine) are bound to the laws of instinct and genetic mutation. I believe in free-will. I believe in choice, and there is freedom in that. I refuse to believe that i am innately what and how my parents were. Now, that belief does not yet permeate every part of me, but it is a start. Kinda like a rock being thrown into a pond, or how food coloring takes over a glass of water. I guess, I guess i would hope that this truth would run it's course through all of you as well. I don't have much to offer, except what has worked for me. I know you expect nothing...this is an outlet for you with the great benefit of a lot of opinions and some wisdom mixed in. Yet...I get the conflict. I am not in your situation, but i get it. may your heart fill with truth that you are free to decide, not condemned to be like them as blue ink seeps into a cup and slowly leaves its mark on 100% of the liquid in it.
love and hopes your way...
ang
"Bad" is not part of our DNA. It definitely is not. Not at all.
You are not bad. What your parents did and continued to do for a long time was bad. But were they bad people, or just people with a very warped sense of self? It's too difficult to tell.
We don't know why they did what they did. In all likelihood, neither do they. It's a sad truth. But another sad truth is that you never really *had* parents. Not the way parents are usually described anyway. You had people who brought you into this world and used/abused you horribly.
But you are not bad. What happened to you *is* bad though. And unfair.
I don't know if you will agree or not, but I think it's a blessing for you that your parents are no longer around.
It completely breaks my heart that no matter what they put you through, you never gave up trying to get them to show some affection. Those people didn't deserve to have you, and they completely botched the whole deal.
But not you, dear girl. Not you.
I wish there was a way to reach into my computer and help you know how obviously you are not badness. You were born to your parents, but born of The Light. And that you kept that Light burning despite the howling wind that was your parents is a testament to your incredible strength. I know it. I only wish your howling wind parents hadn't stolen your ability to know the truth as clearly as I do. Sending you some light and good thoughts.
Jennifer,
One sentence struck me particularly ' How could I be good yet come from them?' Honestly I think this is an absolutely unknowable thing. There exist good parents whose children turned out to be killers or rapists or pathological liars. And in your case, and many others, there are terrible parents whose children were, despite their influence, good and decent people.
Something in you was stronger than your parents' evil. You must have, from a very young age, recognized that this was not how you wanted to be.
I can't add anything else that would help. I read Ang and Svasti and it is clear they are people who do really understand.
You are very often in my thoughts. I hope you find some degree of peace in the coming days and weeks.
I can only repeat what others have said. "You are not bad". You ask questions, bad people do not ask these questions and if they do they answer them painlessly, effortlessly, finding reasons why their badness is not badness. You suffer the pain left behind by the evil done to you; you do not inflict pain on others. You are the victim of bad not the doer.
Nobody can now come and take you away, there is nobody to be afraid of, all the things they said were wrong, they were not only bad but also wrong.
I hope definite news comes soon, it is always better to know than to
be left in the air. Whatever it is, it is just that, a piece of information about a person who has no power over you. You are the one who gives him power over you now; you will have to work and work, with the help of your therapists, to free yourself.
I am so dreadfully sorry, like so many of us here, I want to come and help and reassure you. We all think of you often, but not one of us can really do anything; it is you alone who has the power to heal you.
Anything I say is out of lack of experience or knowledge of what you suffer. But I intuit that because of the intensity of your life experience, your parents are deeply embedded in your flesh, blood and psyche - maybe more so than most of us. To resist that is futile. Yet to face it, to feel it, is to suffer. The shock waves of what is happening to your father reverberate in your being because of how embedded he is in you. I know that is probably a big DUH. But I think back on the demise of my own parents, and there just wasn't that much of an impact when I lost them. They were not embedded in me that way.
I find it pretty incredible, actually, that you are able to pull yourself out of DID and expose these emotions. I pray that one day you will not feel this so sharply, and all I can say is I hope you will keep going. But I know that means you will suffer more, and I just hate that.
I just now stumbled onto your blog from Donna's. Your raw honesty and unbelievably beautiful writing make me cry... in a good way. Bad? Hardly. I do not know what to say other than you can be nothing other than remarkably strong to be here, writing as you are in the midst of the part of your journey where you are delving into the aftermath of having ACTUAL monsters living in places other than under the bed. I do know about that. Twenty-four years ago I began having flashbacks, when my son was thirteen and found me hiding from my brother in the closet. Only my brother was about 500 miles away at the time. From then, for the next five or six years, the journey was... you know. NOT fun. I would not have missed that for the world, however, and I see so many years later, that for whatever reason, I was not like others in my family. Whether it was "bad" that I was not, or so damaged that I could not survive without chemical help, or without inordinate amounts of food--for whatever reason or NO reason at all, just circumstances of birth, I did not go the routes of the rest.
What I found was, first when my parents died, and now just recently--there is inordinate pain at being an orphan, though my parents were horrendous at their worst. But it was freeing. And now? There is no one left to criticize, call me a liar, find ways to shut me up. OR TAKE CARE OF! I was the youngest of four children, but also the one who took care of things and people. And I took care of the oldest as we aged...
Never mind. That's too much about ME. My only real point is that I think you must be an extraordinarily HUMAN sort of person in all the wonderful senses of that. And I will be reading more of your past blog entries as well as, I hope EVERY entry from now on.
In the feeling of it all now, in all its intensity now, I hope you will find some more hope in reading from yet another person that doing what you are doing now can have wondrous benefits when the pain begins to dull. I don't know whether it ever leaves entirely, but the power of it goes away! THAT is the thing. YOU will find that you have the power, not that horrendous pain and something in you--beyond what you perhaps ever hoped for yourself--will rise up and fly out of the mess. Free. I believe that the courage to face it all down, to speak it in our own voices... it makes us all phoenix women. YOU are one. THANK YOU for sharing your heart, your pain, your fear, your courage, your beauty.
BAD? No way in hell. And while you are in hell for now, there is no way in that hell you are BAD. Nope.
Ang, I often forget about freewill. I am not used to having many choices but you are right, I think that free will is bigger than genetics.
"I don't know if you will agree or not, but I think it's a blessing for you that your parents are no longer around.
It completely breaks my heart that no matter what they put you through, you never gave up trying to get them to show some affection. Those people didn't deserve to have you, and they completely botched the whole deal."
Svasti,
I do agree. In the longrun this is going to be better. It breaks my heart too that they never accepted my love or gave it in return. Thank you for recongnizing this...
Debbie, thank you for your comments and encouragement. I hope that one day I will be able to find my way a bit better than I can now.
Deborah,
"Something in you was stronger than your parents' evil. You must have, from a very young age, recognized that this was not how you wanted to be."
This is all I can think it could be. I don't remember when I decided that I wanted something different from them and I really wish I could. I think that would help me gain some sort of footing.
Friko, well I have my answer and I think it helps me. I know that often times people here think that they can't do anything but believe me, just to know that I am heard, that makes a huge difference for me. Thank you so much for listening.
Ruth, you are right, they are embedded in me, probably moreso than the average adult child. Shock waves is an accurate description because this is rough, really rough.
Jeannette, thank you for all that you have written here. It helps more than you know to hear from someone on the "other side" of all this mess. I am sorry that you had to go through it because you are right, it is no fun. But it is also incredibly encouraging to hear you say that it was worth it. Thank you for reading and I look forward to more of your insight.
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