I didn’t meet the first 4 layers of Maslow’s Pyramid in childhood, nor in adulthood; not until I realized I am enough. How about you?
Lately life has been more than rough. Maybe like you, I’m facing an uncertain future; I’m in danger of financial ruin because I’ve chosen to stay home and keep my kids out of circulation until they could be vaccinated during the pandemic –and now that they’re all vaccinated I set them into school –only to have them sent home to distance learn, again. The numbers of Covid19 cases are far too high in our area. I’m staying home still, searching for work online, banging my head against the ground with anxiety, unsure of what to do to bring in an income that can fit mine & my kids’ lives in a way that’s healthy and safe.
These are the facts:
* I’m wary of asking for wages that reflect my abilities, for fear of losing out on state offered food, physical, and mental health support. If I make more than $18 an hour I fall into a new category, and suddenly the state support I lean so heavily upon would be revoked and my employer would help me pay for the insurance needed to afford health care ($500 /mo.), plus food would come out-of-pocket ($1200 /mo.). It’s outrageous! It’s absolute tripe. I will be in deeper than ever before. I’m offered Cash support –yet if I accept it, that money is simply taken out of our food support and slotted into cash. It’s ridiculous!
*The Wisconsin Unemployment agency has decided to sue me for the money I qualified for, yet now they say I don’t. Plus, I’ve nearly spent it, I’ve used it to buy the kids’ needs and wants, too, and I’ve caught up on Utilities, my mortgage, and a credit card used to save the life of our kitty cat, plus the healing I’m attempting to accomplish in my head from the damages I’ve incurred during childhood and throughout my adult life, plus each minute that passes by that I’ve not sold something or been productive in any way is like money disappearing, not being made, not being here. It is definitely a Lacking mindset that I’m working against in a lacking society bent on keeping people like me in lack. I’m being sued by a credit company that purchased my debt and talked me into admitting I owed it, and I’m being sued by Spectrum because they continued to give me internet during the pandemic, regardless of how many times I asked them to cancel because we weren’t getting an income due to the pandemic.
One thing I did do was reinstate my Mortgage and keep up with utilities so we can keep the house. That’s important, even though the core of my being says to leave America as soon as possible, leave the house, leave the city —but I don’t see a reason either, there. That sounds like fear. That sounds like giving up. Supposedly the USA is the “greatest business model” on planet; it’s the “greatest system,” the “greatest governing authority,” second to few –other countries which are supposedly “more white” than here. So, why would I desert a system that has the ability to create so much success? Why would I leave? I’d be just like my mother but in reverse, leaving my children’s father and causing them heartache. I don’t want to traumatize them more. They’ve been through so much; they need a little break –and that’s what Covid19 gave us; that’s what this space of time while the kids distance learn will be.
*Trouble with the van; I drive this monstrosity day after day. It’s been getting an average of 13.5 miles per gallon, but since I had my brakes done in the summer, a caliper keeps seizing up. I have to find a side road to stop the enormous roaring, and back up, slamming on my brakes to reset it. A trip to a nearby town (11 miles away) had us pulling over 3 times there, 2 times back –and the mileage has gone down to 12 mpg… I just put new tires on the back for $500 two weeks ago, plus the damn thing needs new ball-joints in the front and back by the summer’s end. I feel like I need to pitch the damn thing. It’s cost me well over $2K last year to keep it on the road. I just don’t have that kind of money anymore. I’d like to find a car that can fit in the garage, fits most of us, and gets good mileage, however there’s that financial ruin I’m pre-soaking in. It fucking sucks, I’m simply trying to do what’s best for my kids and I and I’m uncertain where it’s taking us. And yes, I’m aware things could be far worse, I could have really fucked us up, easily, we could have run into destruction. I’ve made some really good decisions for us; I’ve taken this time NOT sitting down, but healing the hell out of my mind. Literally.
*I’m sick with anxiety. I learned last November I have ADD (no hyperactivity, just the attention deficit bill). I began treatment for it and have seen some changes in my behaviors for the better, and I’ve been trying to learn new ways to hack my brain into high-functioning. This taxes it. My brain is healing, rewriting programs, and re-booting old ones when I get too anxious (like now). With C-PTSD if I get too anxious, my mood gets dysregulated. I have restless nights, night terrors (just like when I was a kid), waking in a foul temper, getting over-stimulated, over-reacting, and even crying jags. The emotions that flood my body haven’t been recognized fully, yet. I haven’t had time to understand their meanings, I just thought they meant I was insane …like my mother taunted, like she accused so many times, “Maybe you’re crazy, just like your father.” No, I never got the chance to feel any of these feelings without mountains of trauma on top; for me to differentiate just one feeling amongst so many would have been as easy as finding a needle in space. As these feelings flood me, my mood dysregulates, I become reactive, instead of active; very much like my own mother. I suspect she also suffers this –it would be lovely for her to heal, as well.
What sucks is I literally have a brain injury; my injury’s invisible and it’s due to repetitive childhood traumas beginning with losing my father and closest friend, entering a hostile country, enduring abuse from classmates and teachers, at home facing neglect and abuses such as getting slapped in the head for not listening, being told I’m a brat consistently, to the daily torment doused on me by my step-father. I have mental illnesses which have delayed my ability to function confidently in society.
Religion on top of all of my traumas by age 8 caused un-needed fear and terror for years to come and kept me in the state of Fight-Flight-Fawn-Freeze for far longer than any body is built to endure. The results physically? IBS, upper and lower GI issues, hypervigilance, PTSD symptoms. The behavioral results: I fear being abused. I fear being misdirected, lied to, and betrayed –because my programming, the original program I received in the first 7-8 years of life was written that way, and the programming I received from age 9-21 taught me to hate my self. That self-hatred program is impossible to overcome on my own. The Self-Destruct program was initiated as soon as the rejection set in, long, long ago. My worth was whittled down by Jesus dying for all my sins, making me feel guilty even before I ever committed a sin. The lack of worthiness, the groveling for forgiveness –just to spare being thrown into a lake of fire, like my ex-husband once admitted to me. I didn’t see the fear it was all hidden behind. I couldn’t. I was too scared of the world, too scared to fail, too scared of not being Christ-like to realize the ONLY reason I’d ever come to think that I loved God was to keep from being punished by him –an immature way of thinking, if you really think on it.
In all reality, when I do something wrong, my body tells me, and if I do something good, the same thing happens –and that was before I learned all about God. I felt, as the bible says, “the penalty of my sins” when I did something my integrity wasn’t proud of. I thought that I was “bad” when I did things that made me feel badly. I’m wondering if the fear of me enjoying misbehaving kept my mother beating my ass… I wonder if the fear of me becoming stronger than him is why my stepfather decided to beat me… No one loves someone they force to be differently; they control them. No one loves someone they force to change, to suit their own wants and wishes; that’s control, again and No One who tortures a person loves them; they control them: this is how my parents delivered childhood to me; as if I were an idiot, as if I were uninteresting, as if I were a nuisance; as if I were meaningless, rejectable. And that was the message that was delivered, deep into my brain stem, buried into the very core of my soul; maybe it’s even writ into my DNA; but it told me my worth was nothing, I owed everything, I owned nothing, my needs weren’t important, I wasn’t interesting, I wasn’t important, I wasn’t needed, I wasn’t wanted around, I wasn’t desired, I wasn’t cared for, I wasn’t protected from a tormentor; I was punished when I asked for assistance, I didn’t know what safety felt like to answer the nurse in the ER if I felt “safe” in my home…
I felt I wasn’t accepted as-is. I was barely tolerated, when I spoke they endured, I felt begrudged, ignored, and very misunderstood. I was projected upon, gas lit, and mentally manipulated until I matured only in body, then I joined (by rejection and desperation) with another, who wanted a mother and would manipulate even better than my own parents, Hover’ing me, keeping us stuck in a relationship for 15 years longer than I should have stayed. No one had ever impressed to me that I could change my scenery; my grandma endured the worst, my mom and aunts put up with child-men. No one told me I had a choice –if they had, I didn’t believe it. Like how??? I have to work, I have to keep going. I have to keep at this grind. I kept hearing from my ex, my family, society in general that I must keep plugging away, erase my needs to fill someone else’s wants, chisel away at my self, lose bits of me, never discovering who I am, never healing. I was to toil 40 hours, plus keep up the house, and mother the kids while heaping more and more traumas and dilemmas on top of my existing ones… I tried. I tried for years.
And then I finally did it; I said fuck it all. I quit. I wrote to my therapist, “I cannot in this society anymore. I just can’t. If this is society, I want out because they won’t let me in. I don’t understand the roles, the rules, the lies, competition, the disparages, the differences in incomes between sexes, the tricks of the trade not shared with simple housewives -locked into low-wages and fearful balking.”
I said fuck it to the corporations that continued to buy plastic and hand it out for free, then irresponsibly not recycle; business owners of hotels and bars who brag about scraping their lead painted yachts into Lake Superior, and false-front “eco-friendly,” local businesses that are actually Republican, Hum-vee driving, capitalist schemes… Green sells. Just put a tag on it that says Made in the USA. It sells. (Gag!!!)
I’m saying fuck you to corporate foods which re-label and sell the same damn stuff, from three supposedly different companies; and boycotted business models which persuade, lie and cheat to get the sale, hiding cash flows beneath “flooring companies” and supposed Salesman Salary Folders. I said fuck you to everyone doing anything, literally anything to make a dollar to “support” their lives –because they’d never live like I do. They assume they’d die in my shoes, but they’re wrong. They might make a change if they did this.
The above complaints are typical of the mindset of a person with C-PTSD –Complex/Childhood Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This disorder is a coping skill and it is caused by continual traumatic events during the early years of a childhood where a child felt unsafe, unprotected, unsupported, and/or ignored. Our parents displayed towards us intentional or non-intentional volleys of abuse, or stretches of silent treatments and neglect –leading we children to come to the belief that “I’m a bad person, no one wants me, I don’t belong.”
This is my programming. This has been proven, time and time again –proof my injury is real. Also, C-PTSD is proven to be healable. I can get past this. I can grow, I can become more alive, feel joy in my life, more often –less flight-flight-freeze; no more non-stop Survival Mode.
My body will some day soon be able to relax, fully, without anxiety attacks. I can lessen my hypervigilance and drop my shoulders from my ears. My memories can slowly soften, no longer triggering me into a memory flashback, no longer triggering physical flashbacks, no longer instilling rage, no longer tripping me up. I can grow, heal and become more of myself and feel safe enough to socialize, safe enough to feel, safe enough to discover who I am after years of trying to be/act like others wanted me to.
Something I’ve learned in my therapies and self-help seeking has been that all this self-destruct programming I received is no longer serving me. Like an old record, skipping. Great knowing the brain is malleable! I can retrain my mind to think in new ways, accept new thoughts, install new programs! I get to write it filled with self love, approval, encouragement, and success.
C-PTSD mind is keeping me stuck. It’s keeping me frozen as if the old life is still coming at me the same; but it’s not. I’m not in contact with toxic family and friends any more. I’m facing children, though, and they’re masters of manipulation. That’s difficult, but I’m in a safe space to get better, to grow, admit failures, and teach my children through modeling the behaviors I’d like to see in them –this is incredibly challenging. I’m paving my own path, here; I had caught up to my role models and needed more than they knew. I had parents who couldn’t hold back, impatience was the way they dealt with willful, demanding children. As their kid I was enmeshed, trauma-bonded to my mother, feeling I owed her, being responsible for how she felt, believing that I was, as she’d accused me, a “spoiled brat.” Yet, she made me that way using negative reinforcement. She punished severely causing me to become better at lying, hiding betrayal, and pretending, convincing actor… How do you punish someone for becoming the way they did –when you either positively or negatively programmed them that way??
How do you raise someone and then fling your hands in the air and say, “Not my problem,” when they don’t measure up to your standards? How do you even measure your own child? Why???
Because of ownership, rather than loving parenting; victimhood waiting on a savior over becoming a victor; serving a repugnant god over serving a child all you never had; suffrage and drama over listening and love; a hurting person’s wants over their own child’s needs; a need to cause the same suffering on a smaller, weaker person (your own child), to not be alone in the pain.
It is so odd to me that the bible warned of a deluding influence that would be over “even his own,” and it’s here and so obvious; this biblical idea of what love is is skewed and broken; it’s capitalist sales, and grossly patriarchal when there needs to be a union of feminine and masculine, not one over the other, lording. Yeah, I don’t believe in the “holy” fairy tale any longer; I understand what Jesus did; I know why the Law was placed there —for the babes, the ones who need the milk; it’s there for hope, but not forever; it wasn’t meant to be a life-long servitude, the bible story began as a simple guide and turned into a monster; Telephone Game gone seriously awry.
And, don’t be a narcissist; there’s really no reason to bark at others for not believing in the same fantasy world and god as you –when it’s your own god who said that if a man does what is right in his own estimation, he’s going to heaven –why tell him about Jesus and hell? Now you just damned him and burdened him with a gift he never asked for. Leave him, he does good from his heart –he knows & does goodness without your god. Colonialism needs to cease; this narcissistic drive to force others to think, feel, and believe the same as you is toxic.
If you’re finding this is true of yourself, I suggest seeking out professional mental health support. There is no judgement, there is no stigma –you speak and share your fears, your therapist helps you find ways to cope; you speak your mistakes, your therapist helps you find ways to become successful. A therapist is an unconditional friend –one you pay to put up with you, lol. But really, therapists are not out to get you, they’re out to get you the help you need to heal the pain you keep sharing with everyone else instead of feeling it, yourself. In fact, therapists are great role models –and we should speak to others as kindly as they do to us while we’re in a terrible state.
It’s been one lovely day outside, and I actually made it outdoors for over 10 minutes. I even began to feel chill, which I’m told is helpful in burning brown fat. We shall see. It got so cold I swore my toes and top lip and nose were frozen solid. It was several degrees below 0* Celsius.
My health has been so low lately due to my sleep issues, and I’ve been lax on working out and that makes me glum. While I do my therapy homework each day, the kids are face deep in screens, far too often, and I fear they’re going to need more therapy if I don’t keep taking them places and occupying them. I hear we can rent snowshoes nearby… Still working on my scheduling, focus, and drive.
I believe I’m learning how to adapt. I’ve had a lot of practice. The uncertainty of it, tho…
So much love, Send those good vibes.
Love,
Dalai Momma