Dropping the Albatross

 

“These children suffer trauma as acute as soldiers in combat; they also carry the trauma like an albatross throughout their lives.”

Forty-five percent of the U.S. population is exposed to it, and 28.6 million of them are children. These children grow up with three internal rules—don’t trust, don’t feel, and don’t talk.  Since they are inculcated to deny the reality around them, they develop a resistance to talking about urgent, important, or meaningful aspects of life. 

When they reach adulthood, they are sometimes labeled as extreme introverts and hard-to-get-to-know; they are ‘shy.’ As adults, they may suffer depression and anxiety, and are often characterized as control freaks. The most important emotional leap for these adults is to separate the past from the present.  They must learn to realize that overreaction now, is really feeling pain from the past. Psychotherapy and psychopharmacology can do them a lot of good. (Psychology Today, February 2007).

Psychotherapy and psychopharmacology can do them good.  There was a weird comfort in reading that.  Maybe I'm not as crazy as I thought.

I’ve told myself forever I’m a well-developed adult.  It didn’t affect me. Denial reinforced from many angles. “You left home, you don’t know what it was like,” or “You should write again about how AWEFUL your childhood was (this is where I need a sarcasm font.”  I wasn’t going to write about it, because I wasn’t going to admit it affected me.  I didn't even know how profoundly it DID affect me.

Inculcated to deny the reality around them…

I wasn’t going to write it until I read that statistic—45% of the US population. I’m not alone in my shame and guilt. It DID, and still does, affect me, in ways I don't even know yet.

I don’t know why it’s happening now…this reckoning, this awakening. Maybe, it just is, and maybe there is no rhyme or reason why shit happens. Maybe it just does, out of the blue.

All I know is that I can’t handle more broken-down people, and I can’t handle being broken-down anymore.  I look at life, and realize I’ve worked hard to be where I am, but I really don’t know who I am.  I need to stop telling myself I don’t deserve the things I have.  I’ve got to stop thinking that when things are going good, the bottom of this MFer is going to drop out, and I’ll again have to feel like that little kid sitting at the top of the stairs crying and listening to the yelling and the dishes breaking;  I’m not going to have to run down some dark alley in the middle of the night to get away.

Somewhere along the way, you have to face the fact that it wasn’t your fault.  That no matter how much you try to be perfect, you can't make sick people change.  The refusal of people to heal and change, doesn’t define your value or make you unworthy of anything, especially self-love.

So, I’m told that the first step in dropping this albatross is acknowledging two things after coming out of denial—1) I have no idea what ‘normal’ is, and 2) I have to regain the ability to feel and express emotions.

Three weeks into this shit, and as far as I’ve gotten is that feeling really sucks. It’s terrifying and it comes, wave after wave, crashing down and tightening my chest. In a way, I feel like I’ve been running down that dark alley, terrified, my whole life. And being scared has somehow always been easier than feeling the pain that comes when shit breaks down and the brokenness feels like the heavy dishes crashing on the kitchen floor.

So, I’ve been trying meditation lately—letting the feelings come and trying to process them.  It’s damn hard, and most of the time, I just end up in tears, taking an anti-anxiety pill, and having a good old fashioned cry—more like sob-fest, really.  It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve tried to do in my life.

Some days, I wonder if I’m just wallowing in self-pity, drink a cup of tea, and try to think what my Nan would tell me.  She’d tell me to get my shit together.

Then I remember that's why I'm on this new journey. I’m trying.  And nobody, so far, has told me that dropping this albatross would be easy. As crazy as it sounds, this heavy bird is all I know.  It's almost like I've fed it, nourished it, and held it so tight, that letting it fly means I have to nothing left  to keep me tied to the ground. But, I'm trying like hell to let it fly away, because maybe I'm supposed to fly too.