now i think i understand

[traveler]

I have spent hours over the past several days writing out a complete and detailed analysis of the family dynamics and personal histories of my mom and the step-dad that led to the verbal, physical and sexual abuse and allowed it to continue from the time they married when I was 5 ½ until I left home at 18. It ended up being 4 pages of solid type that I find too long and intimate to share here. (Even this summary is pretty long!) It has been a process prompted by a desire and need to reach a point of acceptance and let it all go and put an end to the internal turmoil. I have learned some facts in the past couple of years that shed new light on both of them and why they were the way they were and now I think I know as much as I ever will and also understand as well as I ever will.

Mom was raised in near poverty by a single working mother after her father abandoned the family when she was young. As a child, she never had a reliable father figure or significant male in her life. She had a very passive personality – reinforced by the church denomination she was raised in that emphasized the submission of women and children to men. She was abused as a young teen which traumatized her and made it impossible for her to finish high school. She had no job skills and was always very dependent – both emotionally and financially. She was always desperate for security and to have someone take care of her and make decisions for her. When my father died when I was 3, she was devastated and fearful of becoming destitute and jumped at the chance to remarry. Because of her insecurities she would never question or object to anything that an authority figure decided or did. After she married the step-dad, she would not make waves or rock the boat or do anything that might jeopardize her comfortable lifestyle with her provider. She was a champion at denial and edited out of her consciousness anything that did not fit with her image of the perfect, nice life. She may have been triggered by her husband’s abuse of me and repressed the knowledge of it or dissociated so that she was not consciously aware of it. She always seemed to be lying down with a headache or because she was not feeling well when I was being assaulted. All of this may explain why she did not attempt to protect me and even seemed unaware of the abuse that was happening right under her nose.

The step-dad was raised in poverty in the same super-fundamentalist and super-legalistic church denomination. His mother was an extreme hypochondriac and his dad was an unskilled laborer who could not keep a full-time job. He was a self-made man who rose from janitor to high-level executive in an international corporation without a day of college education. He seemed to be jealous of the social, material, and educational advantages that I enjoyed at his expense. He was a stereotypical macho-man who loved sports, mechanics, camping and fishing and despised the arts – where most of my interests and talents lay, causing him to label me a sissy queer. He was not only homophobic but also suffered from guilt and fear of the enjoyment of any kind of sex, instilled by the church denomination. This caused conflict and denial and erupted in some twisted forms of punishment that he inflicted upon me, as a distortion of the church’s “spare the rod and spoil the child” teaching. He was responsible for the deaths of his first wife, son and daughter, who were all killed in a car crash while he was driving. The unresolved grief and unacknowledged guilt made it impossible for him to move on and fueled his strong anger issues. He scapegoated me as an apparent release and transference for his guilt and anger with himself. He was not a pedophile but had some symptoms of narcissism and I would almost say sadism – except that there was no obvious sexual motivation or enjoyment in his punishments and assaults. For him, it seemed to be self-expression or corporal punishment that crossed lines that he did not even seem to recognize existed. We kids were like objects that he owned and that he could treat as he pleased without questioning.

The combination of these two wounded and warped individuals in a marriage provided the setting for the abuse that I experienced. I do not excuse their actions but my understanding of their own circumstances now explains a lot. Given their backgrounds and the time we were living in, when there was very little in the way of therapy for emotional/psychological problems, it was almost as if they were unable to behave in any other way than what they did. I do not believe that either of them ever even considered that they had alternatives or choices in their actions. And I certainly and absolutely never had any choices at all.

Coming to this conclusion was a long, slow and painful process. I now feel a sense of relief that I understand how and why things occurred and can accept what happened as facts that are in the past and cannot be altered. I feel much less resentment and almost a peace about it – there is profound sadness but no longer the stress and questions that have plagued me all my life. I actually feel a measure of compassion for those two tormented souls that seemed to be locked into courses that they did not understand and apparently could not control.

I think that this may be close to what forgiveness is like.

LEE

 

[AlexBoyd]

Wow. Congratulations on that hard work. Your analysis has inspired me to try writing my own. Thank you for posting it here.

 

[Banjo596]

((Lee))

 

[Ceremony]

Lee, I'm moved by your work. I too congratulate you for seeing all of that, and finding a sense of settling one part of your life.

 

[George]

Hi Lee,

I too picked apart my own broken family situation to figure out how and why things went wrong. My Mother died when I was five. A large part of the brokenness turned out to be my father's selfishness for not being around & attentive, the other part of that was his own broken childhood, him not having his own father, even though he gained a stepfather at 12-13. While his stepfather was a good man, he was not a warm fatherly type. This man was my Grandfather, again not a warm grandfatherly type, but a good & honorable man none the less, especially when compared to the rest of the drunken men in the family this man was a saint.

I've long since forgiven my father for his many failures as a parent. Like a broken clock being right twice a day, he did manage to do some things right now and again, so I'm grateful for those times. I do know that he loved us and he did apologize to me for his failures as a father after I told him about my abuse years later, but even after that he still never was the father or even the grandfather we needed him to be. He lived what I call an unfinished life because he left so many loose untidy ends as a father & grandfather. He missed out on so much happiness & fulfillment that being a parent & grandparent could've brought to his life.

Children need both their parents, their mom & dad in a healthy, happy supportive home (as much as possible) to get the solid start in life that we need. Childhood is such a small part of our lives, yet it is the very foundation that the rest of our lives will either stand tall or falter on. Not having that solid foundation leaves us so much more vulnerable to all kinds of abuse, manipulation, and even bullying. I can easily see how needy & vulnerable I was as an eight-year-old boy, easy pickens for the grooming and subsequent abuse.

 

[Esterio]

Hi Lee

Thanks for sharing this story of how your family life was. while I do see similar paths in my family. It was not my step Dad it was my Dad. I am going to try and write about it. I know it will be long as there is a lot there that would help me understand. Thank you for sharing this it has sparked a little motivation in me to try and write about my family.

I am in the middle of feeling very rejected by my extended family, I only have a sister in my immediate family and she tells any one that will listen or she can corner every bad story she can make up. My Mom ,Dad and my Brother have all past away now.

Thanks again for sharing

Be safe
Esterio

 

[WG]

Lee - I have done this same thing with my T. Since I'm older than a lot of you, my story would begin in the late '40's. Dad had been a soldier - a tank driver - in the Philippines for 4 years (back then there were no furloughs after 6 months - you stayed the duration). Left the US when he was 17, returned when he was 22. Saw war for 4 years - snipers, bombings, air raids, and helped liberate a Japanese prisoner of war camp. I cannot imagine what a 19 year old from Kansas is supposed to do with all of that. My mother was, of course, stateside. Working in munitions like nearly everyone else in that time period. My folks graduated from high school - Dad in '41, Mom in '43.
After writing all of that out -plus more of course - it, too, like you Lee, helps me see that they dealt with what they had in their lives in ways they knew how - for that generation it was drinking and smoking. No one in my family drank, but my Dad smoked until I was 9.
My folks were ok at first but life cascaded down on them and we kids suffered from the fallout. Hit, slapped, food kept from me, shoved and talked down to. No wonder I found the neighbor......
All in all I was able, through my T, to see that they weren't all bad nor all good. Just like everyone else, they were a mix. I had a birthday with a cake and gifts. We kids always had Christmas presents to open Christmas morning. We had a big yard, a car, traveled to see family in Kansas each year, etc. It was what went on behind closed doors that was the nightmare and they could become all bad then......my folks are dead and gone, my extended family are too - aunts, uncles (when you get up there in age like me that's pretty common). My brother is alive in Idaho, but that's it for me.

 

[TJ jeff]

Hi Lee,

I did something similar years ago - it was very important to me at the time to try to understand the background of the "why" things where the way that they where in the house that I grew up in

I hope that writing this out will help you gain a deeper level of understanding of "the past" in your recovery journey

 

[traveler]

thank you all for your responses.

just a PS here:

for a long time I did not recognize what the step-dad did as sexual abuse because it was so atypical. that made me feel like I was sort of an impostor here at first. it was my first T who convinced me that it was definitely abuse and not me exaggerating something out of proportion. likewise with the bullies who harassed me at school and scouts - it wasn't just hazing or "initiation" as they called it, but full-on sexual abuse. sometimes when there is no grooming and the scenario does not follow the more common patterns, it can be minimized by either the survivor or his friends and family.

lee