My own worst enemy
Despite my less than perfect childhood and a horribly abusive ex girlfriend, the reality of my life may be that I am my own worst enemy. Is that irony? I may be my worst abuser. The others are long gone and in the past, but I seem to be relentless and unforgiving when it comes to beating myself up. How can you not resent yourself more for that? Perhaps the hardest part of it all is forgiving and loving yourself.
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Wild Turkeys
I might as well write about my father as long as I’m on a roll of reliving my childhood and triggering myself with unhappy memories. I wish I could write about something positive and uplifting, but I might might have to wade through a lifetime of negativity before I can reach those parts of me. I think once I work my way backwards through an awkward life I might do a better job at being able to move forward.
I remember my father as an alcoholic who passed out on the couch in front of the TV and did little more than make people misrable. I don’t even understand myself why the man filled me with such angst and hatred. He didn’t yell or beat us, but being in his presence made us all feel unworthy and devalued. He was narcissistic and controlling, and he used his authority as a father to manipulate us and not love us. The toxicity he created made me fear leaving my room to even go to the restroom or visit the fridge. My mother used to sit outside in her car and drive in circles just waiting for him to fall asleep so she could come home. He was angry and bitter, and we were constantly being punished for every perceived slight. We weren’t deserving of love and support or privacy; we needed to be taught a lesson.
To add to the disorders running through my family tree, he also had an obsessive compulsive hoarding disorder. He visited garage sales frequently and collected garbage like it was treasure. Junk filled every room of the house and the school kids used to refer to us as Sanford and Son. There were heaps of boxes from floor to ceiling full of old jars and pots and pans and discarded shoes. Entire rooms and garages were dedicated to junk, and it lined the hallways and tables from the floor to the ceiling. My mother used to smuggle out boxes to the trash in revenge, but my father was so obsessed with it all he’d notice if it had been touched. It spilled out into his truck and the yard. We were embarrassed, and the neighbors complained. I would not dare invite people over to my house. My father loved his porn and his horde more than his family, and I often feel that we were just a nuisance keeping him from his true interests: Junk, porn, and prostitutes.
He eventually died from heart complications at a very young age, but we all know he drank himself to death. He managed to do it on my birthday of all days, and if I thought about it I wouldn’t doubt he did it on purpose; but I don’t think about it. Another bizarre reaction from me, but I didn’t cry. His passing was a giant weight lifted off my shoulders and a big relief. Afterwards I was haunted by dreams that he was still alive and bothering me, and I’d awake full of anxiety and very thankful that it was just a dream and I didn’t have to deal with it anymore. I wonder if that makes me cold and heartless?
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Fun with Labels
I’ve always known I was different, but I never knew how or why until a year or so ago. It’s quite a tale how I got to that point and it would almost require writing a novel to explain it. I met a girl, and fell for said girl, and it turned into a disastrous five year involuntary lesson in personality disorders, psychopathic tendencies, and abnormal psychology. Does she have a histrionic disorder, the narcissistic one, or a borderline personality disorder? She might have them all, or she may have simply been a sociopath. Trying to bring her back to reality resulted in me sinking deeper and deeper until I found myself questioning my own sanity. It sucked.
Its amazing what the mind is capable of when it feels the need to keep events from your awareness. It’s amazing how hitting rock bottom can interfere with that. I started recognizing that maybe my childhood wasn’t quite normal and that maybe I didn’t grow up being tougher and smarter for it. In fact I may have been damaged. I didn’t go to the psychiatrist for my own benefit, as it usually goes with personality disorders, but I couldn’t help but ask what might be going on with me. After he described it as being consistent with depression I began filling him in with everything odd about me. Its ironic that I had obsessively invested so many years studying personality disorders and skipped over the one that might apply to me. He started giving me the standard clinical interview from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for a Schizoid personality disorder and I’m fairly certain I didn’t do well on it. Thinking back I can see my childhood dream was to just get away from everybody and apparantly I’ve done a fine job of taking that to an extreme. I think my inner child and I are about to go to war.
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Folie à Deux
Folie à Deux means “a madness shared by two,” and Folie à plusieurs means “a madness of many.” It is more commonly known in psychological circles as shared psychotic disorder or induced delusional disorder. These disorders occur when a person has been exposed to the paranoid thoughts, delusional beliefs, or magical thinking of a disordered individual, and begin to accept them into their own belief system. Typically, those involved tend to be isolated with little interaction with the outside world, and spend a great deal of time with the originator of the magical beliefs. After years of narcissistic abuse, I could almost say I was certain that I suffered with a bout of it myself, but I’d prefer to call that by it’s proper term, “brainwashing.” Everyone else calls it “gaslighting.”
Filed Under Abuse, Depression, Psychology | 4 Comments