What It Feels Like and What It Really Is

Any survivor of abuse, and I am convinced that all ACoNs are survivors of abuse to some degree or another, can relate to the process of having to separate reality from fiction.  It's a difficult thing to do, and that might be the understatement of the year.

We take for granted that the world around us is tangible, real and mostly unchanging.  A rock, when touched, feels like a rock.  It's coarse or gritty, perhaps smooth or polished, but it is unflinchingly solid and it feels, always, like a rock.
To learn how to discern between what we have known as the truth and what the truth really is, well, it's a tricksy process.  Like touching a mold of jello and discovering that this, yes, this gelatinous mound of quivering slickness, this is what a rock really feels like.

How do we really know?  We take for granted that rocks, as we know them, feel like rocks.  Chicken tastes like chicken.  Water is wet and wet is what water is.  Red is red, not yellow or mauve.  Right?

How do we learn to see truth?  Changing our idea of what we've known as fact goes against human nature. We are not, inherently, creatures of faith.  We need tangible, hard, cold, factual proof.  Evidence, that's what we crave.  And once we discover, uncover or simply remember the truth, once we have our proof, what do we do when the certainty of fact as we now have it butts firmly up against and clashes glaringly with the former certainty of fact that we used to know.  How do we know the difference?  What is it, really?  Jello or a rock?

My mother, in the reality of presence that she presents to the world at large, is a kind, lovable, caring person.  She talks the talk and walks the walk that supports these presuppositions, as long as you are willing to take the surface value of her projection as fact.  She's a frail and weak old lady who's had a lot of health issues and really just wants to be around young people.  Just don't scratch the surface.  Push against the idea of herself that she wants you to believe as the 'good' matriarch, as the mother of the year and world's finest grandmother and you'll discover the rot inside the polished shell.  In the tradition of the essence of all emotional vampires, she vants to suck your blooood.  But, the veneer is good as she's a master manipulator.  It's difficult to see through, especially when we, as good people, want to believe the lie.  Most people wouldn't ever think to crack the shell in the first place.

She denied me basic safety and protection as a child, from the world outside the doors of my childhood houses as well as the world inside those doors - my siblings, my father, herself.  When I excelled in life, she questioned me to the point of forcing me to second-guess my achievements.  When I shone, she diminished my glow unless and until I pointed it in the direction that best suited her purposes; most often I was allowed to be 'good' only in such a capacity as it made her and her clan look 'good.'  When I rebelled and refused to play the Happy Clan game anymore, she reacted with neglect, at best, and outright deceptive manipulation, at worst.  She ground on me to have relationships with others that she knew would either exemplify and glorify her, as my mother, or that would keep me in my place of subservience within the plan.  I was not allowed to do anything that was for my sole and internal benefit and growth, unless it happened by chance to coincide with her desires for her own amplification of self.

All of these tactics, these strategies, were easy for her to execute when I was a child.  A child, after all, wants nothing more than to be loved, particularly by their primary caregiver.  In fact, a child must be loved in order to thrive.  And when we, as children, need love and are given specific dogmas and rules from the only source of love near to us in order to attain that love, we will follow those rules in order to gain the necessary love we so desperately need, even if they hurt us.  We don't know that it's nothing more than a carrot on a stick, perhaps with a permanent marker scribble of L-O-V-E across it.  We learn that there will be no 'love' without succumbing to the stick, and that 'love' feels like nothing more than that stick and carrot routine.  This is the essence of conditioning.

I'm reminded of the old saying that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist.

We have, often, an inkling, that something about this abusive false reality we are given just is not right.  It's a feeling in the pit of our stomachs or perhaps a subconsciously cued story idea that we write about when we begin to learn to express ourselves on the page.  Maybe we draw pictures with a dark and barely glimpsed undercurrent of terror.  Perhaps we stuff our known but unadmitted pain so deeply within our souls that we think it's gone forever; denial is a powerful tool.  Then it comes out sideways when we choose abusive partners or we seek to kill ourselves slowly with drugs or alcohol.  Maybe we go on for decades believing the lies are reality, and then we wake up one day and something has conspired in our lives to pull back the veil.  It's ugly, reality, once we have to see it for what it really is.

It felt, for a long time, like I had a caring and loving mother who wanted the best for me and who would always be there for me.  Of course, I disappointed her often, usually without understanding how or why, as her greatest disappointments in me were typically at times when I was happiest with myself.  I assumed that  I was the failure, I was the disappointment and the problem.  How could I not be?  Rocks don't feel like Jello, they feel like rocks.  I had always been the problem, why would I believe anything differently?

But always, there was that niggling little itch in my brain that cued me, that made me feel like I was missing something, that there was a piece of the puzzle missing and something just wasn't right.

And then one day, I saw.  For real.  Reality, not a version of reality, but what was true and actual and factual.  That's the day that I lost my false relationship with my mother.  And that's the day that - eventually - ended my relationship with my mother, too.  I could only stay in the room with the monster as long as I could deny that's what she was.

I saw my mother for the truth of the monster that she really was, and is.  What she'd taught me was love, wasn't, it was abuse.  Red became yellow for awhile and rocks turned into Jello.

But here's the beauty of reality: what an untruth feels like can be changed.  Real is real and the reality and truth of my life has become this, just this, no matter what it feels like, I am supremely and confidently aware every single day that I am a good person.

I am good.
No matter what she wanted me to think or feel, then or now.

I am good, and that's the truth, that's what's real.
The longer I do not have the unseen devil in my life, the better I am.
For that absence of evil in my life, I am truly grateful, and that is also real and good.

Love,
Vanci