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