healing childhood trauma Pt3

The Irreversibility of the Loss

Sitting alone in our family therapist’s office, I finally asked the burning question that had plagued me for so long. “Do you think my parents will ever change?” I held my breath. This was it. I had summoned enough courage to say the words out loud. It had been a long, slow slog through suffering taking more than a decade to come to a conclusion. The decade of distress, I called it. That season began with the phone call I received from my father. “Your mother isn’t doing well.” That was the understatement of the year. She was having a nervous breakdown. 

My husband in the Air Force and us living in Europe, I had to get emergency clearance to fly across the Atlantic with a four month old baby—by myself. I arrived home to find my mother almost catatonic. That trip was the beginning of the end.

Me being the designated scape goat and family fixer, I arrived to find circumstances far beyond my abilities to change. I might as well have been a chimpanzee. My mother continued to lose touch with reality, and my father grew more and more angry as his world spun out of control. Eventually, my husband got out of the military, and we came home to an even worse mess. Going home was the worst decision we ever made. But how could I have known? This was long before I had any understanding. I was still living in the delusion of a constructed reality my parents had built since my childhood. My father was a control freak narcissist. My mother a broken and mentally ill person with borderline tendencies. I was the toxic dumping ground for all their emotional problems. We were all deranged. No one ever talked about the problems. In fact, there were no problems. It was totally crazy. And it grew crazier by the moment. 

My mother had shock treatments. There were suicide threats and suicide attempts. Everybody was depressed. It finally ended in divorce and my brother and I were left holding the bag. Mom continued to devolve while Dad started a new life. It went downhill from there. When my mother was particularly riddled with anxiety, I tried to comfort her by spending the night. It did not work. The look that crossed her face was so strange. The mother I had once known had disappeared. A combination of rage and threat, her brows would draw together at a strange angle, an evil look resting deep within her eyes. I was afraid of her. She had been violent in the past. I slept on the couch near the back door making sure it was unlocked in case I needed to make a quick exit. 

My mother totaled her car—three times. On one of those occasions, I met her at the emergency room. Hands shaking, she could hardly speak. I had to help her dress. This was a nightmare from which I could not wake up. My voice had long ago been buried under mountains of threat and control. Robot-like, I went through the motions. How was I going to be a parent to a parent who had always done me harm? My mother withered into a wisp of her former self. I didn’t recognize her.

My father smiled and talked about all the women he was dating. He was trying to put his life back together while mine was falling apart. I looked at that family therapist that day pleading for one shred of hope to get me out of this ordeal. There was none to give.

“Rebekah. They are never going to change. And things are never going to go back to the way they used to be. It will never be the way you wish it was.”

The loss was final. 

Accepting the loss, accepting the meaning of the loss and lastly, accepting the finality of the loss are part of the tasks of healing childhood trauma. Each step we come to must be worked through and then worked through again as we peel back the layers of trauma like the layers of an onion. 

Accepting the irreversibility of the loss wasn’t just about my parent’s divorce or the progression of my mother’s mental illness. It was about accepting the truth about the past. We were never the perfect family. We had never been the perfect Christians. We were never better than other people. My father never had special insight and talent. The structure they had built because of their own trauma came tumbling down like a house of cards. 

Memories that I had ignored or never made sense began to fit like pieces of a puzzle. Oh, that’s why I’ve been struggling with crushing anxiety my whole life. It’s trauma! It comes from a family that is hopelessly dysfunctional and has always denied reality. That’s why I have always struggled with overwhelming self-hatred! My parents communicated that and more to me my entire life. These are all classic results of a family run by a narcissistic system. If you are a survivor of trauma, you will recognize them immediately. 

Though all these events were devastating, strangely, the finality of the loss led me to see the truth. Something I never would have faced otherwise, and the truth about my family led me to an even deeper place. The truth about myself. 

I did not have the power to fix other people. I did not have the strength to carry other people’s emotions. I was not the problem in the family, and I had not caused any of the dysfunction. Those my parents brought with them when they married. But had I never accepted the finality of the loss, I would have stayed in the grip of lies and placed all my confidence and security in things that were like shifting sand. It would have eventually destroyed me. It almost did, anyway. 

For me, the only way out was to look at reality and instead of running away, turn, face it and even embrace it. Did I want to do that? That was the last thing on planet earth I ever wanted to do. I wanted to go back to the familiar. I longed and pined away for the family I once had. Even if it was a lie and my place in it destructive, it felt secure. It seemed safe. Everything I had based my life upon was crumbling around my ears and I would have done anything to stop it. I didn’t want to believe my father was a narcissist and had chosen the path of himself over anyone else. I didn’t want to believe the things my mother did to me throughout early childhood were sexual abuse. Why would anyone want to believe such things? It was easier to believe they were the best mother and father in the world—in the short run. But in the long run—to live in such a place is to die. 

The process of healing this kind of trauma forced me to reorder everything. As I did this, all the things I tried to avoid got worse. Anxiety, fear, threat, self-hatred and a host of other symptoms went through the roof. If you are in a similar place, do not despair. You are actually on the road to healing, no matter how bad it feels at the moment. It was as if my brain took over apart from my will and said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to take everything offline until you stop and face this mess.” My emotions were completely haywire.

I’ve seen pictures of Hiroshima Japan after the dropping of the atomic bomb. An orphaned child seated among the wreckage. That is as close as I can come to describing how it felt to come out of childhood trauma. Utter devastation. It is why accepting the truth and the finality of the loss is so very difficult. 

You can do it. There are many resources available some are listed on my website. Work at getting a system in place that will support you through the most difficult times. One or two people you can call when flashbacks are unbearable. A small group like al-anon or one through zoom with organizations like The Arizona Trauma Institute, or SNAP or the CPTSDfoundation.org.

I am in a better place, now. But I am thinking of those of you who are not. Defy trauma, the joy will eventually come.