Facing Fear

Some of my earliest memories involve fear.  I was, as a child, and still am, as an adult, afraid of all sorts of things.  Some of my monsters are real and rational, some are the stuff of vapor.  Some have a chance of coming to life in the light of day, some only have a chance of taking form if I wake up tomorrow and discover that there's a Statue of Liberty half buried on the beach, that kid from the Twilight Zone who turns his dad into a jack in the box has moved into my town and H.P. Lovecraft was a sci-fi Nostradamus.  

Regardless of the likelihood of my fears, though, what exists on every plane through every possible or impossible scenario of terror, what resonates in every cell of my being is this single truth in relation to those fears; the fear itself is real.  That physical, visceral response when I'm scared that sets all my internal alarm bells ringing, that's tangible.  When I am scared, my pulse shoots through the roof, my breath quickens, my muscles tighten and ready for a flight or fight response.  Adrenaline courses through me and my senses become hyper-aware.  My fists clench and my jaw tightens, the fine hairs on my neck and arms stand on end.  I can hear the faintest sounds, feel the slightest touch, see the tiniest movement.  I'm ready, I'm switched on - because that fear is real.  It's telling me that there's danger.  It's telling me that I will have to take action.  It's telling me that I am afraid because there is something to be afraid of. 

I was terrorized.  

Let me state this again in more detail for the sake of clarity.

My mother and father terrorized me throughout my childhood, and my mother and father allowed each other to terrorize me.  When I realized that they were hurting me and stood up for myself, they terrorized me further still by convincing me that I was either deserving of the terror, OR (just to make sure they had a back door,) that the terror didn't really exist.  

They did this because they are sick, twisted, mean, evil, abusers.

They terrorized my sister and brother too, and I have empathy for those childhood siblings of mine.  But NSis and GCYB dealt with the terror by becoming terrorizers, too.  So they no longer have my empathy, sympathy or any other -athy. 

My childhood of torture at the hands of the master manipulator Crazymakers left me with pain, scars and fear.  Facing fear all the way through to resolution as a child, particularly as a child with no external support, is almost impossible.  So a child, this child, me, I, used the only tool at my disposal; I made it ok.  I pretended.  I  pretended, specifically, that it wasn't as bad as it truly was, and this is how I survived.  

So I grew up.  Allow me to be clear, again, about how the torture and terror of my childhood ended.  It became the torture and terror of my adolescence, and I was so ingrained with the imaginary storybook family that I'd created in order to survive that I just kept pretending.  So they just kept torturing and terrorizing me.  Childhood terrorization became adolescent terrorization became adult child terrorization.  

Bang up job on being consistent, mom and dad.

And then I changed.  It didn't happen overnight - it was a process to get to the jumping off point, but one day I made a stand.  I decided that I wasn't going to allow them to terrorize and torture me anymore, no matter the cost to me, real or imagined.

I had to run the worst case scenarios in my head and in my conversations with the real and true people in my life who loved me in order to get to this point, because I had to find a way to actualize the fear on my own before I faced the real fear of the Crazymaker affront.  I ran the cost/benefit models over and over while asking the questions that I needed answers to before I could make a stand and keep it.

Some of the first ask and answer sessions with myself went like this: 

"Is it really that bad?" I asked. 

"Well, maybe not, but it hurts..." 

"Could it be you?" I asked. 

"Well, maybe, but not all of it..." 

This segued into something like: 

"Don't you have a right to an opinion?" I asked. 

"Well, I think I should, but I never really have..."

"Shouldn't you be able to have space?" I asked.

"Well,  I think I should, but they might not like it..."

And eventually (this is where it would be helpful for you to think of one of those old cut-scenes in a movie where the shot is of the calendar pages being ripped off one by one in quick succession,) the Q and A became something like: 

"You have a right to be treated with respect, right?" I asked. 

"Yes, I do." 

"If you lose them in your life like they're promising, is that the end of the world?" I asked. 

"No, it's not." 

"Are you ready to stand?"

And the answer was yes, you know.  I was ready to stand even though I was afraid because I'd finally come to understand that my fear of the outcome (losing my 'family') was more manageable than my reality of the pain of having them in my life.  

They're crazymakers, pain dealers, emotional terrorists.  And they're so good at it that they made me believe - with their primary tool of fear - that leaving them would be even more painful than continuing to let them hurt me.  Once I understood that fear was the thumb they kept me under, I could face it.  I could own it and look it in the eye and say, "Yep, I'm scared.  Terrified in fact, but I've faced bigger, stronger demons than this fear." 

And that's when I knew I'd survive, at the very least.  I hoped - only a little bit, just a little tiny bit - that I would find a way to be ok, even.  I never thought I'd be me the way I am now; 

Happy. 

Healthy. 

Free of motherfuckin' fear.

But I'm glad I am, and I'm glad I had that little bit of courage that it took to face my fear, because what follows is one of the most important lesson that I've learned in life, and I wouldn't have learned it without the very real fear that the Narcs taught me: 

When we've been raised, instructed and taught by evil people, we've been taught to fear that which will set us free.

That's a lesson they didn't mean to teach me, you know, because it set me free.  And that was the last thing in the world that they wanted. 

So, here I am, and I still have my residual fears; heights, talking apes, spiders, the smell of Old Spice, dark, clowns with pointy teeth, deep water, man-sized wind up toys, aliens that look like giant ice cream cones with sixty-two eyes and telepathic powers.  You know, the run of the mill stuff.  I work through them as they come up.

But I no longer fear myself.  And I no longer fear doing what it takes to protect myself.  

I'll take that trade. 

Love,

Vanci

And the Truth Shall ... Well, It'll Do Something Anyway

Veganstein asked an interesting question in the comment section of my Invisibility and Dark Shadows post:

I am not sure that I want to uncover anything else in my life. I have huge blanks, but the memories that I DO have are negative enough that I made my NC decision some time ago. I don't think that I need further confirmation that my parents should not have parented. However, reading your blog, I wonder...is there a healing in finally knowing?

I needed to think about my answer to this, and discovered in the few days that I turned it over in my mind that I wouldn't ever be able to put my thoughts, theories, experience or reasons into a smallish comment box.  So, thank you Veganstein, for prompting this post about my reasons for trying to remember!

Why do I need to fill in the blanks?  I have enough evidence with my top-of-mind memories of the way the Crazymakers functioned to know that they are A) Crazymaking B) Unhealthy C) Narcissistic D) operating in and further perpetuating a broken family system E) Toxic F) Willing to blame all their troubles on me and G) Abusive to the Nth degree.  In other words, I don't need any more proof that NC is the only choice I have here, should I choose to continue remaining sane myself. 

So, why dig up any more, why shine the light on what I know are going to be bad memories of truly horrific and real events that hurt me deeply - so deeply that I had to forget them in order to survive them?  It seems masochistic, in a way.  Why do I need to pick off these metaphorical scabs, re-break ill set figurative bones, dig around in the emotional wound that I know is gangrenous?  That way be monsters, it seems, so why do I steer for them?

I have a few reasons, but my primary reason is fear.  I've written before about my high pain tolerance due to the twisted expectations of my childhood.  I wasn't allowed to hurt, or at least to show it and if I did, well- that created more hurt.  So I learned not to show it, and eventually that meant that I learned not to feel it.  It's the same way with fear for me.  I'm terrified, terrified, of certain things - the dark, open closet doors, heights, small spaces - but I learned early on not to admit my fears. 

I was ridiculed for my fear of the dark and of my open bedroom closet door by NM, EF and the sibs.  In fact, EF used to send me down to the dark basement on a regular basis to retrieve items from the chest freezer.  And when I was down in the damp, dark dungeon, one or the other of the sibs or EF would turn off the light and lock the door.  Once I crawled my way up the steps, absolutely bat-shit crazy and shaking with fright, they'd laugh on the other side of the door until I screamed loud enough or until they got bored with the 'game.' 

I know this now, but I didn't for a long time.  I just knew that I had this irrational fear of the dark that would sneak up on my while I was down in the basement of my own home putting blueberries that I'd picked into the freezer.  I wasn't prepared for it at the time, so that fear grabbed hold of me so tight that - as a married woman with two almost teen children at the time - I ran up the stairs of my own safe home screaming and convinced that the door would be locked and the light would be going out at any moment. 

It wasn't, of course, but it sure as hell felt just as scary as it did when I was a kid.  In fact, when DH and I got our first chest freezer, I subconciously did everything I could to convince him that the (non-attached, thirty feet away from the house, unheated) garage would be a better place for the freezer than the basement. 

So, why do I want to remember that this fun little game of Lock the Scared Girl in the Dark Basement Until She Cries and Screams was real?  Why do I need to remember that they did this to me repeatedly in every house we ever lived in that had a basement?  When I already know that they are Crazymaking shitheads, why do I need to know the specifics?

Because I want to be able to go into my fucking basement to get some of those blueberries without turning back into a scared six or ten or fifteen year old again.  Because I want to remember why I'm scared of things so that I can understand that I don't have to be any more.  I like what Alice Miller says in The Drama of the Gifted Child about this:
"We become free by tranforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are thus aware of our past and thus able to live with it. 
Most people do exactly the opposite.  Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history.  They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists.  They are continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time."

It's been my experience with fear-driven behaviors that I can't think them away, I can't intellectually understand the fear well enough to make it go away until I get to the root of it.  I have to know why I'm afraid before I can find a way to get rid of the fear.  So, now that I know why I'm afraid of the basement, I know how to be rid of, or at least assuage, that fear and keep it at a reasonable and manageable level.  I tell myself as I'm descending the stairs that there's nothing to be afraid of - and I know this to be true because I know that NM, EF, OS and YB aren't at the top of the stairs - but if I'm having a particularly bad day, I know why I'm scared of the basement dark, so I know that all I have to do is to take a flashlight with me.  Knowing the 'why'  just takes the mystery out of it enough to make it practical, and prevents my fear from sneaking up on me when I am vulnerable, sick or just plain unaware. 

I have had similar experiences with remembering the root causes of all the fears I listed above - locked in closets, being told that if I didn't stay in bed all night long the Closet Monster would get me, OS trying to push me out of a roller coaster, etc.  And knowing the reason, for me, has taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of fear.

So, I want to know so that I can move forward, that's all.  And yes, there's been healing in the knowledge, for me.  Even when I don't need to know about a fear or its root cause, I still try to remember everything I can to fill in those blank spots.  Because my GREATEST fear is that I will wake up one day and find out that I have turned into 'them,' that I am like them.  And those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it.

Love,
Vanci