Relating the Past to Present Day, part 1

Relating the Past to Present Day, Part 1

Notes on Birth to Seven

So far in my life I have been very loyal to both of my parents. I have recoiled from criticizing them too harshly. The reason has something to do with self-preservation. See, I had to put everything I had into supporting my mom's success. It's kind of like the immigrant family who toils so the next generation can have a better life. Only for me it was the reverse. Well, my mom is doing well. And my own life is stable. This stability, as well as using a pseudonym, give me the space to say things which matter to me and which are true. Even if they're not loyal.

My hope is that my words about my process will benefit not only me but others as well. I am not out for vendetta but simply to heal myself.

I basically like myself. I have a number of good qualities and I am basically a likable person. But I have some pretty big issues to deal with. On the "issues scale" they're probably somewhere in the middle, between minor and major. But they're keeping me from expressing who I am essentially and so I feel an existential need to tackle them. I need to focus on my problems and their sources because they're what's blocking me from achieving my human potential.

One observation I have is that my belief in my own basic competence is low. Why is that?

In looking at my developmental path from birth to seven, some themes have risen up to the surface. One of them involves this issue of competency.

I have clear gifts in a number of areas but I have learned about them as an adult from my friends and from my wife. I do remember my mom telling me I was good at certain things but that I didn't believe her or downplayed any of my competencies. Consequently, I have not developed my basic talents to anywhere near the degree I could have if I had been more aware of what they were or how to develop them.

When I do something well in a group I usually defer to others because I automatically assume I am not the most competent at any given activity. This lack of a sense of basic competency makes me very susceptible to the opinions of others. Self worth is not a basic psychological structure I can rely on and use to build other aspects of my life on.

My best guess as to what happened goes like this:

My parents both had a fair degree of narcissism from the time I was born on. They loved me but neither of them had a level of empathy for me that would force them to put their self-focus on the back burner, like parents need to do. I don't blame them. Neither of them had that from their parents. And they were dealing with issues (mental illness, alcoholism) beyond what I face in my adult life.

My mom did not choose to be narcissistic. I see it as more like a psychological fact than a character flaw. It is related to her brain disorder called bipolar. I can share an example of how this is expressed today.

When you're talking with her she frequently refers the subject back to her personal experience, something she did or saw. Sometimes her "related" experience has minimal connection to what you're talking about and it feels like she changing the subject. She almost never enters into what you are saying to see it from your point of view. She rarely asks questions to get a clearer picture of what you're talking about.

Today this is something one soon notices when talking with her but it's not that big of a deal. When I was a kid, however, it was more of a big deal because I really needed her to empathize with me.

So my base in early childhood had some strong points but it also had some real gaps. Then from the time I was four there were about three years of steady and increasingly damaging shocks to me which both parents seemed only dimly aware of. They were trying to keep their own heads above water.

Rather than have a stable household from which my sense of competency could emerge, the shocks between the ages of four and seven made me unsure, made me doubt the security of my basic environment.

The move to a different state when I was four probably qualifies as a minor shock. If things had been good in other places it would have been fine. The move happened to coincide with the end of my parents marriage, which in turn led to a chain of negative events for me.

The first was being separated from dad. I missed him terribly and was very angry with my mom for taking me away from him. I didn't understand. He drove out to see me only once during the year. I was in shock. My life was very very different from what it was and no one was making me feel any better.

I got a lot of earaches that year and mom took me crying to the emergency room in the middle of the night on a number of occasions so I could get a penicillin shot. She had her hands full. I think it was all she could to take care of my physical needs.

My understanding is that my dad never offered child support and my mom did not pursue the matter. There is more to say here but I'll save it for another post.

At age five my heart was very hurt. Mom was considerably more focussed on work than ever before in my short life. The fact that she was dealing with (undiagnosed) bipolar means she was "ramping up" into a low level manic state that helped her to move effectively in professional circles. She could project energy, confidence, optimism, loads of ideas and ability to work long hours.

From birth to age four my parents had enough space in the structure of their lives to be "good enough" parents. By the time I was five both mom and dad were highly focussed on themselves. I was emotionally dropped.

Here's my best guess of the connection between my developmental path and how I am today: Today I have a basic sense of the world being a good place and of myself being lovable. I like myself. I think I am a good person. This relates to my early childhood up to age 4 1/2 being "good enough".

Where I struggle is in feeling myself to be competent in what I am doing or to find purpose that matches my skills. People meet me and think, based on my intelligence and some other intangible aspect of me, that I must have skills and aptitudes beyond where they actually are.

But there was disruption in my life at the time when I was developing a sense of basic competence. And so there is a part of my psychological foundation which was damaged, which affected all of my development from that time on. I always thought of myself as average intelligence and a little slow, until feedback from a few teachers in high school and college suggested to me that I might have thoughts and ideas that could be considered "above-average".

My best guess is that this is related to what happened in my life between ages four and seven.

I present well and can seem more skilled than I actually am. I believe this comes partially from an echo of my mom. She can present very well to others and can come across as talented, charming, highly intelligent and fairly sophisticated. And she is all of those things in a certain very real way. But her illness means there are gaps in her ability to do a lot of different things. She is a wonderful person with many wonderful qualities but in the psychic structure that holds up her personality there are holes created by the disease that sends a certain flaw into those qualities.

Because my mom was my most formative model I have an echo of the same phenomena.

When mom and I moved back to the town where dad lived, my confidence had been hit. I needed life to even out and needed parents to treat me like I was very important. Spend time with me, give me their attention. Exactly the opposite happened. I did have weekend time with dad and I lived for that. But he was in bad shape and getting worse--clear signs of depression and alcoholism.

Then the sex abuse started. Mom was even busier. She was not tracking my emotional life because she was totally focussed on projecting herself into the professional world. Then dad left; that was a hit. Mom's job continued to be very demanding, and draw a great deal from her attention. Not just the hours but the demands of a professional job, being a single mom, no financial support from dad, and mental illness. In many ways it seems a wonder she did as well as she did. Nevertheless, my life was very difficult.

The babysitter who abused me gave me a parting salvo before we moved to a new home. I had colored in a coloring book page and done it very well. I could see that it represented a level of skill that was new to me. I wanted to show it to someone so I brought it outside and saw my (now ex) babysitter. I showed her the drawing. Her response was, "You didn't do that--you're not good enough to do that."

This is one of the few pieces of feedback of my artistic skill I can remember as a child. Other feedback did not take its place so this comment held a relatively large, albeit unconscious place in my self image about my ability to create. Her comment has tied into my self image in regards to my basic competence. Her words, naturally, had amplified force because of what she had done to me.

The sexual abuse was an attack on my personal boundaries. Someone used my body, against my will, for her pleasure. I have long had difficulty with boundaries on a number of fronts. One of them is, of course, sexual. If someone is attracted to me it is very difficult for me to not reciprocate their attention. I am getting much better at this but it takes real effort.

As I will speak to more in the next post, there were also serious boundary issues that came about in relation to my mom.

As an adult I have an inner response to people that has served to keep me on more of a loner's path. At a certain level my (unconscious) inner response to men is "don't abandon me". And the response to women is "Don't envelope me (swallow me up) and objectify me as only being worthy as a sex object"

Obviously these inner experiences are problematic in forming and maintaining healthy friendships. It would be inwardly easy for me to say I will more or less be a loner in my life. I also see that my dad made that decision and it didn't seem to help him much. We humans are social creatures.

No, it would be much better to continue to try and figure out where I was hurt so that I can heal and transform those parts of me which were damaged. That is the only path that has any real hope of giving me happiness and satisfaction. The other paths lead, from what I can see, to sadness and despair.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Stages of Development, pt 1

Stages of Development--Part 1

Birth to Age Seven

From the time I was a teenager I've had a nagging feeling. Maybe a lot of people feel it, I don't know. There have been two parts to the feeling. One has been a vague but very real sensing of my potential as a human being. The second is a nagging doubt about whether I have the necessary life skills to be able to reach it.

My essential self is trying to come around the traumatic experiences of my childhood so that I can transform them. If I have any chance of experiencing aspects of my human potential, I am going to have to do this work.

I believe that all human beings are spiritual in nature, and that we take on the grist of the earth in order to learn. Right now I am having a powerful inner experience of the grist of my childhood rising up to meet me. If my essential self does not meet this challenge, I feel I may be weakened until such time as I am willing to do the work. This is not an academic exercise.

In this post I will use a developmental model to try to shed light on how the experiences of my childhood shaped who I have become. It matters how old I was when certain things happened. And understanding how experiences worked into me based on my developmental stage can help me understand better the mixture of behavior, feeling and thought traits I have today.

Taking a simple developmental model from the book "Troubled Journey" by Diane Marsh and Rex Dickens, I can predict how things that happened at certain moments of my biography may affect my life today.

During my earliest childhood period (birth to 2) my life seems to have been pretty good. When I was born the general stress level of my family seemed markedly less than it would come to be. My dad had a well paying and prestigious job and my mom had just finished her master's degree. They both had high hopes for the future.

I was born at the end of 1968. My mom said she felt anxious about bringing a child into a world which had such strife and disruption swirling in it at that time. Nevertheless, my folks' prospects seemed good in many ways.

From mom's perspective, the main issue at the time in the family seems to have been my dad's drinking. Even though he was holding down a demanding professional job, he would go out drinking with a friend, stay out till after midnight and come home drunk.

I am reasonably certain that my mom displayed symptoms of bipolar at that time. I am guessing the symptoms were low-level rather than acute. As I imagine into my parents' life together, it seems to me that my mom was overly optimistic about how things were going (which could be interpreted as a symptom of bipolar). If she had been looking at things without having her thinking influenced by mental illness, perhaps she would have passed on having a child at that time. Perhaps she would have been more able to make the judgement that storm clouds were gathering in the form of dad's drinking, and that the context was not ripe for having a child. But mom really wanted a child (dad wasn't so sure) and soon enough I was born.

In my first two years of life it seems to me I had what Eva Marian Brown calls "good enough" parenting and things were off to a relatively good start. I was loved deeply by both parents. I can tell by the photos how each of them looked at me with care and devotion and both mom and dad had a warm and affectionate relationship with me.

The most important pieces of childhood at this age are basic attachment to my parents and a basic trust that the world is a good place. I can see that the attachment with parents was clearly there for me. Trust in the world was likely a little shaky as I perceived in my infant and toddler way the effects of my dad's drinking and my mom's illness.

Preschool age children (3-5) have socialization as a primary task. Additionally, developing a positive self concept, of being a valuable and competent person is key. I was becoming socialized at age three and four and I believe that my self concept was forming in a fairly healthy way. I was a very active child and had a great yard to play in and friends to play with.

When I was four we moved to a new state and so all of the friends I had played with were no longer available and I was not yet in school. I spent a lot of time with my mom as we were settling into the new home. My parents' marriage was in the process of unravelling. We moved from a warm climate to cold, and to a place which was much closer to mom's parents. I think the insecurity she felt in the marriage made her want to be closer to her family of origin.

As I turned five I remember being unhappy. It had been very warm where we lived before and our new home was cold and snowy, and I didn't have any friends. I was adapting to the climate and probably was very tuned in to the strife between my folks.

It was right at the end of early childhood and at the beginning of middle childhood when several shocks happened to me. My parents divorced and mom and I moved to a town eight hours by car from where my dad lived. I was very unhappy. I only saw my dad once that year and I really missed him a lot. And now mom had to work full time whereas before she was much more present for me. We went from living in a middle class neighborhood to residing in an aging trailer near a small boat harbor next door to a bar.

My developmental path had been becoming increasingly tenuous in the late part of early childhood, ages 4 and 5. I was feeling much more stress (of moving to a different town twice, the divorce of my parents, missing my dad) but it was likely still at a place where I could maintain my growth and development in a reasonably healthy way. If things could even out and settle down, I could probably get my footing again and do okay. Missing my dad and doing my best to adapt, I turned six.

The themes of middle childhood (ages 6-12) include developing peer relationships and academic adjustment, learning the basic building blocks that allow someone to succeed in our society.

I was under stress and felt very angry with my mom for taking me away from my dad. She started talking about "his disease called alcoholism" that made problems for him. After one year we moved back to within a ten minute drive of my dad. I was now able to see him on weekends, which was very important to me. It seems his life had suffered from being alone the past year. I remember a somber atmosphere and large bottles of wine on the table.

He and I would go see movies together and sit in the front row, where he would soon fall asleep and begin loudly snoring. I was very embarrassed. One time he took me, age seven, to see "The Exorcist" at the movie theater. I don't know what he was thinking. I was terrified.

He taught me chess and would start without his queen so as to give me more of a chance to win. Occasionally he let me win. He told me how important it was to try hard in school, especially in math and english.

During much of this time I was being molested by my babysitter after school in my home. Mom was working longer and longer hours trying to get her career going.

One weekend day when I was seven my dad came to pick me up from the apartment where mom and I lived. I was playing in the yard nearby and saw him driving around towards our driveway. I ran around the other side of the apartment building to meet him at the door but he got there first and didn't see me. He rang the doorbell twice, waited less than ten seconds, then went back to his car. I turned the corner at a full sprint just as his car pulled away. I ran after his car as fast as I could, screaming and crying, but apparently he didn't see me.

I don't know where my mom was. She had left me at home alone on a Saturday afternoon, assuming that dad would be picking me up and all would be fine. I thought a minute then grabbed my little seven-year-old bike and started peddling after my dad. I rode all the way to his house, about ten miles, along busy roads.

When I got to his house he wasn't there. I knocked on the neighbor's door and the teenager who mowed my dad's grass answered. I told him what had happened. He crawled up on the garage roof and was able to jimmy open the kitchen window and unlock the front door. I waited in dad's house for a while. No dad. I called my mom who was then back home and told her. She came and picked me up and said something about how my dad had a disease called alcoholism and was probably at a bar.

Within a few months from that day dad announced he was moving back to the state where we had lived before. My mom told me that he was seeing a therapist and the therapist recommended that he move to a warmer place because he was so sad.

At about the same time my mom was hired to a professional job and we were able to move to a much nicer house in a much safer neighborhood. A few weeks after we moved to the new house, I remember dad hugging me, getting into his car and driving away, his red VW ambling up the hill and out of my life. He told me about all the presents he was going to send me on his journeys. In fact he did send me some cool presents that summer, but the letters and phone calls got fewer and fewer over time.

As I reached the beginning of middle childhood, the shocks that came towards me were more intense: the sexual abuse, having mom gone much of the time due to work demands, and having dad visibly decline in his level of functioning, then exit my life.

When I was seven my boat felt like it was swamped and I was out swimming and looking for a life-raft. Neither of my parents seemed to be aware of the stress I was under. The life-raft I found was a way of being that I instinctively took on. I formed important parts of my basic personality at this time and did so, from my little kid perspective, in order to survive

By the time those events happened, when I was seven, I was on my way to becoming what Eva Marian Brown calls a "parentified child". This is a child who perceives at a basic level that the adults around him are not able to provide "good enough" parenting and so the child has to adjust. At that time I began to look at what my mom's needs were and so far as I was able, try to meet them. She was my ticket to survival and so her needs came before mine. If she were to disappear or become incapacitated my life would clearly become even more difficult.

By the time I turned seven, life had reached a certain level of calm, but I was inwardly on high alert for more shocks. It seems to me that this is when I made a subconscious decision to reduce my own needs to as close to zero as possible and do all I could to support my mom. Life as I had known it had changed dramatically and I was trying to get along and figure out how to manage. My mom's illness was not at an acute level and so she was able to hold down a job, shop for groceries and cook dinner. But it was all she could do to keep me fed and clothed. She had very little available, in terms of energy or skills, for the non-physical aspects of parenting.

My mom was unaware of the sexual abuse that had happened. It also seems she had very low awareness of the affect on me of her very long work hours. She did realize that my dad leaving was hurtful to me. To this day she believes that the places where I am hurt are basically about being abandoned by my dad.

That's okay with me--I don't essentially need her to understand my process. If she she ever does that's fine, but it's not necessary. I will never be able to do over again what happened then. All I can do is move forward.

When I was seven is, as near as I can tell, the moment I created "The Bubble" that I refer to in other posts. It is the life-raft that I found which helped me to move forward. The Bubble is a combination of personality traits, behaviors, feelings, thoughts, that all come out of the survival mechanism that was created at that moment of my life, and which continued to evolve over time. The Bubble has served me quite well in some ways, not at all in others. I need to understand it and transform it now in order to become a true adult.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

In the Shadowed Forest

When I had journeyed half our life's way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear:

so bitter--death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I'll also tell the other things I saw.

I cannot clearly say how I had entered

the wood; I was so full of sleep just at

the point where I abandoned the true path.

But when I'd reached the bottom of a hill--

it rose along the boundary of a valley

that had harassed my heart with so much fear--

that I looked on high and saw its shoulders clothed

already by the rays of that same planet

which serves to lead men straight along all roads.

Opening lines to Inferno, Dante Alighieri

I didn't know why I was drawn to visit the local bookstore and pick up a copy of the Divine Comedy. But as soon as I read the first stanza of "Inferno" it became clear Dante's story has some very real parallels with where I find myself in this moment of my life.

Recently I read about a court case that struck a chord. Twenty five years ago the plaintiff, then a Boy Scout, had been sexually abused by a man who was an assistant Scoutmaster and convicted pedophile. The man who had been abused, with whom the jury sided, is a few years younger than I am. As I looked at his face in the photo I saw a look that seemed familiar to what I sometimes feel in my own soul.

He looked absolutely crushed. He had a look of anguish, of having carried pain and shame over decades, and internalizing over and over the damage that was done.

Based on my own experience I can imagine he might have been working with wide-ranging damage which lies outside of one's conscious control and which re-integrates itself into the evolving self at every developmental step. I recognize the look of unceasingly carrying a burden on your back that you have to make appear as if it's not there. Or that you try to make go away. Addictions, compulsions, thoughts that are not worthy of one's higher nature. All of these come and ask you to get into their car. In order to carry on, you have to pretend away the fact that your whole being is constricted into a space much smaller than you would inhabit were it not for the trauma. And you can't talk about it because of the powerful stigma surrounding being a victim of sexual assault.

I couldn't help but think that he must also feel tremendously empowered by stepping forward into the public realm and standing in the pain and suffering he had gone through. To bring a secret out of hiding is to lessen its power over you.

Another thing that struck me me about this newspaper article was how the Oregon legislature passed a law in 2009 changing the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse. The law previously stated that victims could sue for damages up until age 24, or 3 years after they realized the abuse has damaged them. Now, the age is 40 or within 5 years of realizing the abuse has damaged them.

I was near age 40 myself when I began to realize the extent of the damage to my life, both of the sexual abuse when I was age six and of growing up with a mentally ill parent. In both cases the experiences happened in a very formative time of my life. The abuse happened over a period of 3-4 months whereas the imprint of mental illness was deeply woven into the fabric of my mental environment over a long period of time. My basic behavior, how I relate to others, my own thoughts and feelings are all deeply colored by those events.

The new Oregon law seems to acknowledge that some of us may not realize the scope of damage until we start approaching middle age, and begin to see how it's playing out in our lives.

Whether we are trying to transform sexual abuse or the legacy of having grown up with a mentally ill parent, it is tremendously helpful to know we are not alone. Part of me feels a strong urge to isolate, to nurse my wounds by myself. I don't want to be seen by others as a "victim" and yet how do I share who I am and what some of my most basic experiences have been?

As I read the two books listed in this blog's sidebar, I feel a tremendous sense of solace that my painful and confusing experiences are not unique. There are others, in fact many others, who may be able to relate to what I've gone through and where I find myself today.

In "My Parent's Keeper", Eva Marian Brown quotes an ACMI:

"I always wanted to leave my past behind, not think about it and just move on with my life. But I found that so much of me was trapped in the past, in the pain and patterns of my childhood, that I came to realize that I couldn't really move forward until I understood my history and came to terms with it."

For most of my life I have rigorously concealed the experiences which are now weighing so heavily on my soul. With my friends I have pretended to be the bubbly, good-natured me, and have been likable and valued by many. But there was a huge cost to my concealing some of the most basic facts of my background. Because I was hiding so much of what lay just below the surface, it became more and more challenging to deepen and evolve friendships. Many of my valued friendships have passed into an "inactive" state through neglect.

I see my experience mirrored in another ACMI:

"Until recently, I had never discussed how growing up with a mentally ill parent had affected me. For years I wasn't even aware of the effects. After two decades, I am finally discussing it. Not only with my siblings, but with others who grew up in homes similar to ours. We compare memories, express feelings, and admit fears. It crumbles the wall of isolation, it demystifies the illness, and most important of all, it validates who we are and why."
Quoted from "Troubled Journey" by Diane Marsh and Rex Dickens

According to the history books, Dante was about the same age as both me and the man in the newspaper article, when he wrote about being in the "shadowed forest". He describes how he descends from there into hell, with the spirit of the poet, Virgil as his guide. Clearly Dante saw that to enter into the depths of pain and suffering, one needs a beacon of light to lead the way. Virgil was, to Dante, the epitome of human nobility. He was a person who had knowledge of the path through hell and wisdom from having traveled it.

My "Virgil" comes to me in a few people. My counselor is someone who can go with me into the suffering and help me affirm myself in a basic way during moments when all I feel is despair. And my wife has been a guide and support to me in ways I could not begin to name or quantify.

Dante further notes that when we arrive in the shadowed forest and our hearts are filled with fear, we can see the rays of the "planet which serves to lead men straight along all roads". We need a guide higher than any human conception, whose very nature is healing.

My spiritual path, which I have pursued for over fifteen years, continually reminds me of my true identity. My connection with Spirit is at the foundation of my drive to evolve myself and overcome my lower nature.

So is my process connected somehow to a "mid-life crisis" that I am having? Was Dante in a "mid-life crisis" when he wrote La Divina Commedia? I think it depends on what you mean by that term. The way I see it, a mid-life crisis is about coming to, and passing through a major life threshold. We all go through the threshold whether we like it or not, but we do have some say as to how we go through it.

On one side of the threshold, that part which lies behind me, is the part of life when youthful energy and drive can accomplish a great deal. But when the fires of youth begin to die down to some degree, we must have a structure in place that will carry us through our next level of growth.

My youthful energy and drive will not be the primary vehicle for my next stage life. I must work to transform my suffering into wisdom. In order to move forward I must steadily create a structure that I did not receive as a child. I can also choose to forgo this work. The cost, however, would be an even harsher toll taken on my life by all of the untransformed pain that lies inside me.

That's what happened to my dad. He suffered a great deal as a child as well, though in very different ways. He had tremendous promise but his unresolved pain ate away at him until he saw no recourse but to end his own life. My dad was a Marine. The attitude of toughness that he learned there likely made it very difficult for him to ask for help or admit weakness. And so he drank.

I admire the man in the newspaper article. He had the courage to speak up about his pain and show the depth of his suffering. His speaking out reminds me that a basic step in healing is to find a way to say what it is that has hurt us so deeply.

I am willing to admit weakness. I am willing to acknowledge my pain. I am willing to ask for help.


Your comments are welcome.

Warmly,

Ben

Building "The Bubble"

Building the Bubble--Trauma, Neglect and Uncertainty

If I am going to figure out how to untangle myself from the protective bubble I have carried with me for years, I need to understand it. What were the events that led to its creation? What served to maintain it? And most importantly, how does it weave into and affect my life today?

As a child I was doing what I needed to do in order to survive. In the formative time of my life my perceptions and behavior developed into patterns which would make up my personality. The "Bubble" created by these patterns is a major feature of the psychic "cave" in which I am currently "spelunking". I have a sense that by describing the bubble I will get a clear picture of a certain level of my thinking, feelings and motivations. I do not associate the the bubble with my essential self, but I do acknowledge that it plays a large role in my life, and is to a large (but gradually lesser) degree unexamined.

The bubble seems to have served me well in many ways. It allowed me to survive the traumas and challenges of my childhood. I have a college degree, a twelve year professional career behind me (hopefully not too far behind me!) and a great family. Nevertheless, I have to do this work unless I want to be a man-child for the rest of my life. Part of me is still very much a child. The trauma, neglect and uncertainty of my early years still holds me in its grasp. I am going to have to steadily step out of the bubble and claim my rightful adult self. I want to be free.

Let me be very clear on an important point: I know that my mother loves me and that she always has. Places where it seems like I am criticizing her need to take this statement as a key part of the basic context. As for my dad, it's not as clear. For now, since her influence has been greater, I'll stick with mom.

When my folks were together, up until the time I was four years old, my life was probably pretty good. My dad's job could support the family, my mom had time to focus on me, and both of them really loved me, their only child. I believe it is very likely that both of them showed symptoms of mental illness at that time, though they were able to function reasonably well, each achieving an advanced degree and beginning their paths in the professional/academic world. Complicating things further, my dad had a serious drinking problem.

After the divorce, mom and I moved out and relocated to a town many hours by car from dad. Mom became a single mom. We lived in a trailer. It seems very likely that enormous stress started bearing down on my mom. And on me. After a year in that town we moved back to where my dad lived, about a ten minute drive away from his house. Mom was trying to launch her professional career as a private consultant while in in her early thirties with a master's degree but very little work experience. I was five going on six.

It seems to me there are different ways that experiences can imprint on a child with mentally ill parents. And it is helpful to distinguish between them.

One way is that the child has a normal response to his parents' mentally ill behavior.

Another is that the child models the mentally ill behavior of the parents.

A third is that the parents, because of their illness, become deeply narcissistic, and are not able to have empathy with their child or protect their child from danger.

The rest of this post is about the third one.

About the time I turned six I had a babysitter, a fifteen year old girl, who molested me in my home while my mom was at work. I find it hard to remember exactly how long it went on but I have given a rough estimate of four or five months. The molestation happened at least a few times per week during that time, perhaps a total of thirty to forty individual times.

This has had a major impact on me and how I relate to others. Some of the damage included a lessened sense of my own personal boundaries. And of course, the world seemed like a much less safe place to me. I was experiencing the world around me as very unstable and unsafe. Perhaps it was around that time that somewhere in my being it became clear that I had to do something to survive.

My behavior started to trend strongly toward supporting my mom, whatever the cost. I identified her as my ticket to survival and so I needed to do whatever I could to make sure she did not disappear (like my dad did at about that same time) or fall apart. Basically, I just started to take care of my own needs so that she could focus on having a job, shopping for groceries, cooking meals. I never thought about needs that I might have asked her to meet. When you're talking about survival one needs to make adjustments. I became a quiet person, tried to do well in school, and didn't cause any waves.

My mom (or anyone) didn't know about the sexual abuse until one day when I was twelve. Mom came home and told me, Who had she seen at the store, but my old babysitter! She was clearly happy to have seen her and seemed sure I would share her enthusiasm. We were in the kitchen area when I said to her, "Mom, I need to tell you something. You'd better sit down." I gave her the thumbnail sketch of what had happened. She asked a few clarifying questions with a grief-stricken look on her face. Then she never brought it up again. Neither did I.

On a few occasions in the past several years I have gently brought to my mom the subject of my being molested as a child. She quickly changes the subject.

The time when I was twelve and told my mom about the molestation is a place in my biography that stands out to me as an internal marker. I realized then that my mom was not going to take any kind of action in such a situation. She wasn't going to call the police and report a crime. She wasn't going to find the babysitter and go down and confront her. She didn't even ask me if I wanted to see a therapist in order to process the event. It was, I guess, just too much for her to integrate and then take meaningful action. This was going to be for me to deal with. Period.

My mom's diagnosis as I understand it is Bipolar 2: Hypomania. As I was recently looking over the symptoms of this illness one stood out to me: OPTIMISM. I did a double take. Wasn't "optimism" a quality rather than a symptom of illness? I had always thought of myself as an optimistic person. What's beginning to dawn on me now is that my mom's symptom of "optimism" allowed her mind to quickly filter out things that didn't fit into her upbeat picturing of my life. When I told her about the sexual abuse I had suffered six years before, she must not have found a way to put positive spin on it, and therefore had to banish it as a reality. Since I didn't have anyone else to talk to about such things, I was pretty much stuck with her way of dealing: Don't talk about it and stay optimistic. Which is what I have done until recently.

At the time I told her about the babysitter, my mom's work life had become pretty intense. She was holding down a professional job and was also having low-level manic swings. The previous year mom had a nervous breakdown and needed to be hospitalized for several days. I stayed with the family of someone I knew in school during that time. When mom returned home, life seemed to quickly return to what it was like before she checked herself in. She was not diagnosed as having a mental illness at that time and was not given any medication to treat the condition that had landed her in the hospital.

Trauma: Here, the example of my being molested.
Neglect: My mom's response to the trauma.
Uncertainty: Why was she in the hospital? Will she go back? What does it mean? Is it possible she could disappear, like dad did, and I would REALLY be on my own?

My whole being was focussed on surviving what was coming towards me and largely trying to do it on my own. If anything bad happened to me at school, anything I needed to talk to someone about, I just dealt with it on my own. Take stress off of mom. At all costs. This was a key piece of my survival bubble.

Life today seems pretty steady both for my mom and for me. She has had a diagnosis for twenty five years, is committed to taking her medication every day, and has a good quality of life. I am in a career transition but feel basically positive about the future. One really wouldn't know by looking at us what is archived back in our historical record. But all of that history was "recorded" on me, on my soul, and I have to find a way to make sense of this so that the universe doesn't find it necessary to suggest a more painful way of doing the same work.

Please feel free to post your comments.

Warm regards,

Ben

Transitions

Unless you're living in the southern hemisphere, transitioning out of your teaching job in November is a bit awkward. In fact, it's an altogether challenging proposition to present to others that such a thing is all "part of the plan".

Even more challenging is trying to pretend to myself that everything is rosy as far as my work life is concerned. The fact is, my work life is bit tenuous at the present time. Maybe this is a blessing. Maybe getting knocked on the head with this one will be helpful. One thing seems sure to me now: I am not going to be able to pretend my way out of it. And pretending is something I've done a lot of.

An aspect of the "protective bubble" I spoke of in my last post is the ability to pretend that something is very much other than it actually is. As long as no one pops the bubble with facts, one can keep the thing afloat for quite a while, with one's self inside of it. A problem, of course, is that the bubble may not have much of a advantageous relationship with the reality we find in places like, for example, the job market.

Maybe if I had had a smoother transition from my job, I would have been able to keep the bubble as intact as ever. As it is now I have stepped out of the bubble even more, to where I can get objective glimpses of how it's affecting me in my every day life. No doubt it will be a long process of de-tangling myself from this effective but flawed survival mechanism.

So how did I, you may ask, come to resign from my teaching position this past November? As is often the case with such events, it had been cooking for a while.

About two and a half years ago I began to experience a rising sense of anxiety in regards to my family history and my own role as a wage-earner. I knew that my dad resigned from a post as a college professor at age forty, had a very spotty working life over the subsequent nine years, at which time he killed himself, penniless. My mom had been working in a professional job for 6 years when she had a nervous breakdown and psychotic break at age 44. About the same time her supervisor began a process to have her removed from her position, which took more than a year. My mom resigned before she was fired.

I worried about following in their footsteps, of having an echo of their experiences ripple through my own life.

The anxiety prompted me to focus more of my attention on coming to greater clarity about what the hell happened in the first eighteen years of my life and what it meant for me now. The enormity of the project made me think I needed a sabbatical. My wife and I looked at how it might be possible. It wasn't.

So I began to open myself up to look at aspects of my thoughts, behavior and biography I had always shied away from considering. I needed to clarify what the affects on me were of growing up in a mentally ill household. It was increasingly difficult to do this and maintain excellence as a teacher.

A crucial step in my striving for clarity was taking the "Family to Family" class from NAMI. Through taking the class I felt my feet come down through the base of my denial bubble and actually feel some ground underneath. I was just at the beginning of the process, but at least I was starting. About a year after the NAMI class I began a counseling relationship and began to experience my pain, injury, and a deep well of anger which had been suppressed since I was very young.

I started to see that the protective bubble had rules it required I live by; primarily that I keep basic and important parts of my life and upbringing in secrecy. I was not allowed, per my "agreement" with the bubble, to share myself with others past a certain point. This secrecy, this feeling of hiding my "shameful truths", was casting an ever greater shadow over my interactions with other people. I could maintain an affable presence with my colleagues and acquaintances but none were allowed past the niceties to any of the inner courtyards one needs to share in order to be friends with someone. I have a deep and wonderful relationship with my wife, for which I am unspeakably grateful, so the contrast was seeming all the more marked in that light. I had to face the fact that, except for my relationship with my family, I was becoming increasingly isolated.

My counseling work was feeling fruitful and promising. The problem was that my pain was, seemingly by its own nature, taking more and more of my mental space. Once the school year started I was able to teach passably, but the interactions I was having with parents were becoming more strained. The shadow of my secret pain, now opened up in my process, was causing me to draw inward. Where I wanted to be open-hearted I found myself more closed. I am pretty sure the students saw that I was just holding on, rather than thriving in the classroom.

At the same time, a very dear person to me, my aunt, was near the end of her life with terminal cancer. I visited her often over the summer and knew it was unlikely we'd see her at the Thanksgiving family gathering. The same week my aunt died I learned from the leadership of my school that the class parents were, for the most part, done with me as the teacher of their children. The school leaders told me they would support me to finish the year if I so chose, while painting a fairly grim picture of what that would look like as far as parental support was concerned.

I gave notice the next week and transitioned from the class over the Thanksgiving break.

Standing at the place of middle age, life looks very different than it did at age 20 or even 30. I can see that the vitality of growth helps a great deal between the ages of 20 and 40. At about the time that NBA players retire, one realizes that the vitality that brought the previous expansion is not going to be funding the next one. A person has to find inner resources to fuel what comes after.

What I am realizing is that parts of my inner resources are strong, but that parts of them are still deeply damaged by my experience growing up with mentally ill parents. I feel like my success in the next half of my life will come through my efforts at transforming this damage. I have no idea where this process will lead me, but it feels like it's the only thing I can do.

Secrecy, shame, isolation. They seem to go together. Writing this blog is about me sharing with others what I experience in my soul, something I have done only sparingly in my adult life. A vast expanse of me has been hiding and feeling deep shame for a long time. It's time for me to start talking about it. I hope that my doing this will be helpful to you who are struggling with similar places in your soul.

Those of you reading the blog, please feel free to post your comments, experiences and insights relating to either the specific blog topic or the general topic of living life as an ACMI.

Best regards,

Ben