This Is Your Family

People have said this to me my whole life, like that is supposed to mean that I have to comply or even care. They say it in a way that makes it seem like I am supposed to be okay with the creepy uncle kissing me on the cheek. Or that the emotional and physical abuse that I’ve endured from the people who were supposed to be protecting me doesn’t matter. Sometimes the people that said that they loved me were active participants in causing my trauma. Some things they did to me, that they said to me, kind of fucked me up.

It’s weird when people tell you to go home; it will make you feel better. But what if it doesn’t? What if it actually makes it worse? This is how trauma works. It gets held in the body until the mind is ready to unpack it all. The difficult part is that sometimes going back into those spaces triggers that emotional response, and the people there who were supposed to be your caretakers simply don’t get it. They don’t see it, or more likely they don’t want to see it.

Generational Trauma

My life felt like crisis management growing up. The only way I knew how to deal with it was to suppress everything, to pretend it didn’t happen. It’s what I was taught to do by the people around me. Don’t be so ridiculous. Our parents never really had the chance to unpack all of their own traumas. It’s sort of how our society works. Keep calm and carry on, as the Brits say. Suck it up and walk it off, as the coaches say. So we learn to carry our pains with us down this path we call life, dropping toxic breadcrumbs along the way.

It makes sense that my moon is in Leo, the great educator of family and feelings. We learn what feelings are okay from our primary family dynamic growing up, but what happens when they don’t have the emotional intelligence to teach those skills? We are taught to avoid our emotions by people who either wanted to ignore or control our emotions, while at the same time trying to avoid their own. My sensitivity wasn’t nourished during my formative years, which led to a slew of mental health problems that I am still trying to untangle. All I ever wanted was to feel loved, and to know it.

We never showed each other love in the way that I understand it. My love language is physical touch, and it is the first thing that I take away from people when I am hurt. It’s also the one thing that I was rarely given as a child, my father being disabled and my mother holding tightly onto her own traumas. Two people trying to do the best they can sometimes lead to sorrow.

Parents put this shit on their children unconsciously. My mother gave me everything that she ever wanted, never stopping to question whether or not I actually wanted it. I learned that my worth was wrapped up in how I looked, and how I performed, and how I served others to the detriment of my own well-being. I tried to love the best way I knew how, by turning into a horrendous people-pleaser.

Pain of the Unlived Life

Once you shove something into the attic of your soul, you don’t know what it takes with it. You think that you are just tucking away that one little trinket of yourself, but the reality is that it keeps pulling more pieces of you up and away. I became a shell of a human, moving through this life like the tin man without a heart. I had been beaten down so many times that it was just easier to not feel things, to dissociate in the beginning and later to numb out.

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

Chuck Palahniuk

I was trapped inside this story of an abused girl who could never live up to anything more than mediocre. I was missing out on life because I got so caught up in the tragedy of it all. Life was hard, and that is just the way it is so deal with it. I had no idea that this life was meant to be savored, to be enjoyed, that those small in between moments were the ones that actually mattered in the end.

What’s the difference between a victim and a survivor? Exposure, or in my case getting forced to stop and reassess the choices that I was making in this life. I was heading down a dangerous path, and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed help sitting with my inner child, the one who can hold all the feelings. It took me years to be able to sit alone in a room with her, let alone talk to her. All she wanted was me, and all I needed was her.

There is an underlying pain of being a women in a patriarchal society, sometimes called the the mother wound. It’s the place where we shove all of our shame and guilt, where we go into comparison-mode analyzing ourselves in the world around us. Our mothers are our first introduction to the patriarchy, showing us how to be women, all while being influenced themselves by their mothers, their religions, and the culture at large.

Years of emotional neglect, lacking the connection that I so desperately needed still feels like a sucker punch to the gut sometimes. It sucks to know that people in your life can’t give you what you need because they can’t even give that to themselves. Everyone needs a mother in their life, and elder female to show you they way, but not everyone gets that. I still have moments where I need to be mothered, and held, and made to feel safe. I have only recently learned how to give that to myself, although I am not very good at it quite yet.

Rose-Colored Glasses

When we are children, our parents are like gods to us. They are our everything, and we literally need them to survive. The problem is that we sometimes never take them down off their pedestals and look at them through the lens of reality. They are human beings, just like us.

Writing prompt: Whose love did you crave as a child, your mother or your father? And who did you feel you had to be for that person?

I am learning that it’s okay to grieve for the family that you have, to lament the family that you wanted, but never got. It’s confusing trying to figure out how to grieve for something that isn’t an actual person or a pet dying. How do I grieve for the loss of the life I wish I had, so maybe then I can start to enjoy the life that I do have?

I would like to end with Mother Teresa’s Anyway Poem to encourage us all to just find our way on this earthly plain, in any manner we like. The people in our lives aren’t always going to agree with us, or even understand us most of the time. Live life for yourself, instead of for them. For this is the path to true joy, albeit an arduous one to say the least.

Mad love, Jenna

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;
It was never between you and them anyway.