Tag: fear

Losing It

SMACK!

It didn’t hurt. It did instantly send me from a 4 to a 10.

One breath in, one breath out. Not long enough.

“What do you think you are doing?!”

I can see the path I’m going to take, as if my brain has hijacked me.

At this point, I’m barely aware of it, although I do recognize it.

I can see the space to think and the choice to respond gently instead of acting harshly for less than a flash, and then the space is gone.

Despite all of the other times before, where I have taken a second or third breath and remembered to think and choose, I stop being in control.

I’m sick with a cold. I’m exhausted. I’m annoyed. And now, I’m pissed off.

The object of my rage is my almost 7 year old. It feels good not to be in control. Until it doesn’t.

I slowly turn around. A tug in my brain to parent differently. I ignore myself.

“Do you honestly think that was the right choice to make right then?”

My voice sounds too controlled and calm. I’m no longer thinking. I’m all reaction.

6 seconds of kicking, screaming, and crying while I physically lift her from my bedroom to her bed, where I let out my anger 6 times on her back end.

Losing my temper.

Then I just stop. I remember too late that this isn’t how I want to parent.

I recognize the fear and pain, and this time, I’m causing it.

I stop hitting, but I’m still too angry to be considered safe right now. The shame of losing it this much is settling in, and it’s not helping me.

I am being too loud. Too aggressive. Too threatening. Too much like my own mother.

Clarity.

I back out of her room and tell her to stay there until her father gets home tonight.

That’s too long. I know it is. Even as I say the words, I know I don’t mean them.

I just have nothing else in my toolkit right now.

A seven, almost eight year old doesn’t have the mental or emotional maturity to calm me, a full-grown adult down. Nor should she. It’s not fair to expect from her what I’m not capable of modeling.

Her reaction understandably escalates until I close the door and take the time I should have taken at the beginning to breathe, think, and choose my actions.

I’m calm now. I’m safe again. I haven’t lost my temper like this in a few years, so I’m definitely making some progress.

Of course, I wish I never got here to begin with.

I have damage control to do.

As much as we try to justify our actions as parents, at the end of the day, our kids learn from what we do more than anything we will ever say.

Before I knock on her door. She slips me an apology note under it. My heart breaks. I’m already laying the foundation for trauma instead of peace. I somehow stop myself from spiraling.

When I go back to apologize, I tell her how proud I am that she thought to apologize first when she was so upset herself.

“Apologizing is hard, and I am so proud of you for being able and willing to take the first step.”

I tell her that I’m sorry too. That even if she hit me first, I’m the adult, and it isn’t ok for me to hit her back. 

I let her know that although I’m still not happy with her being ungrateful, I can see now that I made the wrong choice completely on how to address that.

I promise to do better. And I will do better.

It’s not easy to break cycles.

Sometimes, learned behavior seeps through even when you have the best of intentions.

Sometimes, you will make the wrong choice or do the wrong thing, despite knowing the damage and the pain it causes.

It’s important to acknowledge those moments.

It’s important to never pretend them away.

It’s important to not continue the cycle just because breaking the cycle is so hard. Never give up. Always try to do better.

No one is perfect. We need to model the same grace we want our children to live with ourselves.

If anything good comes from me losing it, it’s that my daughter knows I understand her temper. She knows that mommy loves her even after she loses her temper, too. Even after 35 years of practice, mommy still messes up, so it’s ok if they mess up with only 7 or 10 years of practice.

Acknowledged mistakes are half the battle.

Apologizing to your children when you make the wrong choice and it impacts them will build their trust in you.

We aren’t trying to be perfect. We are trying to be whole.

And we are always fighting to break those  cycles.

Practical Forgiveness

It’s rich when your abuser preaches forgiveness.

And you are completely justified in the feelings of absolute rage that rhetoric provokes.

It’s humbling when your safe friends preach the same message at the same time.

Because even though your personal feelings around the topic are complicated.

You know forgiveness is right.

It’s hard and it’s not fair. It feels like you are giving up your right to justice and recourse and closure.

And it’s still always the right thing to do.

And that is absolutely rage inducing.

And reconciling the two conflicting emotions that are at war in your soul is the single largest internal battle you will ever face.

Because as cliche as it sounds

Forgiveness is not about letting your abuser off the hook.

Forgiveness is about letting your soul acknowledge the pain.

You must acknowledge the pain you face. You must name it for what it is. Forgivness, contrary to our society’s beliefs and expectations is not pretending the offense never happened. Forgiveness is naming the offense for what it was. Becoming intimate with the damage it caused. Being honest about the scars that were left. That still hurt to touch. That are still being protected from too much stimulation because of the sting.

When we get a physical wound, we don’t constantly scrape at it, or poke it. We don’t (or shouldn’t) pick at the scab that is left behind while the new skin is forming. We also don’t ignore the wound when it happens. We clean out the irritants and dirt to avoid infection. We dress the wound with ointment, and we provide an extra layer of protection until healing occurs.

When abuse happens, and we need to forgive our abusers, in common society, we are asked to skip the steps of cleaning, dressing and healing and move on to the final outcome of a healed mark to remind us.

That isn’t logical or possible.

An ignored wound festers. It becomes infected. Try as we would to pretend that nothing is there, the bacteria gets in and makes us sick from the inside out. Sometimes, the infection hurts us more than the original wound would have to begin with.

Just like a child hides from their parent to avoid the pain of cleaning a hurt scrape, we can hide from each other to avoid the pain of repairing a damaged relationship. And just like pretending the damage isn’t there on a physical wound leads to infection and bigger hurt later, pretending that hurt and offense isn’t there in the name of fake forgiveness causes bigger hurt later.

Sepsis is an infection that stems from this type of scenario- and sepsis if left untreated can cause death.

Unforgiveness is the one thing that can cause us to miss out on heaven. Failure to forgive others causes us to not be able to be forgiven.

It is much more difficult to accept the concept of unconditional love when you realize it applies to the person you have the most problems with as equally as it applies to you.

It is much more difficult to practice unconditional love in action (through actions, not feelings) when we are loving those who hurt us intentionally and we know they hurt us intentionally and they are mocking us by quoting the command to forgive back at us.

We are not forgiving for their sake. We are not providing them a free pass. We are clearing ourselves to receive the blessings and not allowing us to be tied to earthly hindrances.

Forgiveness does not mean intentionally putting yourself in the line of fire either. It is perfectly ok to hold no wish of harm towards another person, and also not want them to be in close proximity to you.

Jesus had his circle of 12, but he treated everyone with kindness and respect. Not everyone needs the same level of access to your soul.

Memories

I wrote this piece a few months ago while I was in therapy. I was trying to pin-point the source of my constant anxiety. With so many gaps in my memory from my childhood, these are the most vivid memories that often present in the form of recurring dreams. There is a lot alluded to, but I don’t know how much of these memories to trust as actual fact. 

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Sometimes they wash over you like a cloud rolls across the sky on a cool spring day. They give you just the faintest outline of an image, that if stared at too long becomes distorted, but if half ignored takes shape in the most marvelous of ways.

Sometimes they are so jarring that you wake up in the middle of the night. Heart pounding. Palms sweaty. Nervous. Anxious. Not able to remember what caused the reaction, but absolutely certain it was terrible.

Sometimes they bring a smile to your lips. A sparkle to your eyes. You are lost in a moment of nostalgia. You can recall every word, every detail, every sound, every smell. And you never want to forget.

Sometimes, you push them away. You don’t want to remember. You try to distract yourself. You force your mind to focus on other things. You remember, but you desperately want to forget.

A seemingly unrelated event brings everything rushing back.

The strange, metal, army green chest and the single bed. The bedroom that had nothing else in it. But where was it? Why were you alone? Why were you afraid? Was it even real?

The whispers. The looks. The sadness. The anger.

The fat lady singing about a fire. Being woken up because you had to evacuate because a gas station down the road actually did catch fire.

The questions that suggest something terrible and unspeakable might have happened to you. But you don’t know. There’s a gap, a blank, a void. You want to remember, to put the questions at ease, but you don’t trust what’s real and what’s imagined.

The punishments for being a kid. Being forced to double over backwards as a time out. Until the pain became so unbearable you give in to the spanking for moving because that’s better than the numbness you feel.

The fear of doing anything wrong.

Ever.

You might think people are nice, but if you make them angry, they might become someone you don’t recognize. You just don’t want to take that chance.

The recurring dream of there being a secret passageway in your school’s cafeteria. If you find it, you can finally escape. But, you can also get lost and never be found.

The realization that you are just a shell of who you want to be, because you are scared of what your genes might have made you.

Am I strong enough to change history for my own family?

They aren’t all bad. You know there are some hidden good ones scattered here and there. The problem is braving the process. Not knowing what will trigger a fleeting image. The eternal impact.

The yellow big bird slippers that only had one eye. The doll house, that you loved, but don’t remember, other than it being given to you.

Your babysitter’s son telling you that you have to do what he says or you will be in trouble, then being led into his bedroom. You can only imagine what happened next, because like so much else, everything after that point is blank in your mind.

You want them to stop. But you also want to understand.

When do they end?