I have survived two lives – at least that’s the way it feels. Two lives. Two sets of memories.
First Life
The first is the one I have always remembered. The traumatic memories there I discounted long ago as really not that bad on the abuse scale:
- My father beat me severely 3 times (ages 3, 4 and 22)
- I avoided other violence only because my sister shielded me and took the beating herself.
- A drunken doctor attacked me during an office visit at 10 and I dissociated.
- I saw my pets slaughtered at 10 and dissociated again.
- My brother-in-law molested me at 11.
- My mother began attacking me verbally at 12, something that continued well into adulthood.
Not a particularly gruesome list as child abuse survival accounts go but still painful to me.
Initially, I rejected every thought of abuse in my childhood. But they kept coming back. Then gruesome reports of abused children in the local news hit me pretty hard. As a result I came up with some comforting rationalizations.
- “At least I wasn’t locked up somewhere.“
- “At least I wasn’t tortured.”
- “At least I wasn’t raped.”
But abuse is abuse. You can’t rationalize it into something less as I tried to do. And you can’t win in a contest of who was traumatized the worst. All abuse is destructive and despicable. Eventually, I accepted that.
New Life
Now I’m juggling a second life, one I didn’t know about until recently. This new list of traumatic memories is rather more disturbing. It’s also proving me wrong on all counts in that list of comfort statements. But the problem I am facing today is one of my own making because I have been keeping these two lists of memories separate.
That small bubble of memories above greatly impacted my childhood. I remember that life. That was ME. More importantly, those painful childhood memories flow seamlessly into memories of a happy adulthood. I loved becoming a wife, mother, grandmother, missionary, and occasional adventurer – and I have the photos to prove it.
This new list? Those memories – that life? Surely they happened to someone else, someone not Me. I try to slot them in as a part of my life but they don’t fit. Not yet.
Unfortunately, that’s just another form of dissociation. I dissociated so many times as a kid that I got really, really good at it. But that is not something I want to do anymore, even in a small way. Somehow I have to mesh these memories and come up with the new Me. The revised Me. The healthy, whole and happy Me. Hopefully, this blog will help me tackle that.