Category Archives: Journal Entries.

The Grass isn’t always Greener

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About 18 months ago my father had asked to talk to me about birthday and Christmas gifts. He gave me some form of lecture, or rather speech, pleading his poverty to me and explaining how he couldn’t afford Christmas and birthdays anymore and that perhaps he and I should just leave them, because of course I am all grown up now and don’t need those things from him.

Whilst I somewhat agreed with what he was saying, it did make me wonder. What birthday gifts? What Christmas gifts? He doesn’t even know when my birthday is, I think he only knows Christmas because it’s an international celebration and there isn’t much escaping it, but these gifts? I didn’t ask where they were, I just said okay.

He has never sent me a gift. Well that’s a lie, when I was 31 he gave me a gift and then made me split it with my older brother whose birthday is a few days before mine. grass-greener-fence-iStock_000011126842Small-resized-600.jpg

However, It got me out of the yearly commitments that my status as son gives me. Except for father’s day, he still insisted on cards for those, but for the last two years I haven’t given him any. Since writing Teddy things like father’s day cards feel like a lie, and unless Hallmark brings out a range that says, “I only bought this because I was obligated,” this will be a yearly battle for me not to get him one.

It was his birthday just recently; I had to go around to his house to take something there. I hadn’t been for a good year after telling him to get out of my life. It’s always odd to walk into the house that I grew up in. I still go and stand in the spot as a child that I was only permitted to stand in. I still don’t use the bathroom without permission first and often I just don’t use it and I don’t under any circumstance venture into any other rooms in the house without permission or invitation.

I stand there, feet slightly apart, hands held together behind my back, quiet and watching, just as I did when I was a child. Waiting and on guard. Stood where I can see every angle. It’s an automatic thing. I didn’t go near my father as I placed the card down that was from my children to him to wish him a happy birthday, and I know maybe some readers will say he doesn’t deserve it, but he does actually bother with my children on their birthdays and as far as manners are concerned, I think the children should at least give him a card on his day.

My brother arrived as I was stood there, his arms laden with gifts for our father. He and his girlfriend wished our father a happy birthday and talked like normal people. I felt so out of place stood there. Once again not fitting with them, there was me, stood outside this family which I am biologically related to, but as always treated like I am stranger.  Such a stranger that I don’t even have a father I am allowed to with happy birthday too.

Sometimes it is the little things that I realise I had taken from me.

When I had gone home again, my brother called me, he asked why I didn’t get our father anything, not even a card. He thought I was being shitty, but found it strange because he knows that is not me. I told him, not the full story of course, but that I had been told I wasn’t allowed. My brother’s response was shock. He suggested perhaps our dad was in a bad mood that day or something. Of course my brother doesn’t know the things my father would do to me. He doesn’t know about the sexual abuse, as strange as that may seem.

I don’t know who has it worse, the son who has a father he loves and loves him back, but it’s an illusion, or the son who knows everything and aches for the father he never had, knowing and feeling that there is no love there.

The grass isn’t always greener.

 

Why did you do that?

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Why did you do that?

Have you ever been on a diet and tried to resist a bar of chocolate? Been in a shop and wanted to buy something, but know you can’t? Smoked that cigarette when trying to quit? Have you ever tried to resist something that your mind wants but you know you can’t?

It plays on you right? The want gets bigger and bigger and it becomes all you can think about until you give in. Of course there is a little guilt after, feelings of slight shame that you gave in?

Imagine that want or desire for something so much stronger inside. That is what it is like for someone that suffers OCD. It is no secret that I was diagnosed with it. Probably not really a surprise either. Right now I have a really bad spell of it, my hands look like I have ran them along a cheese grater a few times they are that sore and because as a child I developed the need to be able to feel and hear letters pronounced properly and the fact that I am slightly deaf is driving me crazy, because I have to try and block out the outside noise from that ear in order to receive the satisfaction from hearing letters and sounds.

It’ll pass I’m sure, right now I just have things to deal with that come out this way for me.

One thing I wanted to talk about in this post was family members, not mine necessarily, but in general. Family and friends. Why when they know someone suffers this terrible illness do they think it is funny to tease? Stupid things like moving something out of place on purpose, removing soap, putting dirty hand prints on something and various other ways that people like to tease. man-eyes-120227

I was at Uni not so long ago when someone made a passing comment about their house being so messy due to studying and perhaps they should advertise for someone with OCD to come and clean it for them, of course a lot of the class found this to be a funny comment.  Would they say something like that about a person with a physical illness? Would people mock a person in a wheelchair because they can’t run? Put something up high and laugh because the person can’t stand to get it? No, I don’t think they would. So why is it funny to mock the mentally ill?

Perhaps these people don’t realise with these laughs and jokes, and teasing’s they do don’t just make the sufferer feel ashamed to be ill, but they also make the illness worse in that moment.

***Contains Swearing***

Freak!

That’s the word. I say it to myself so many times. Over and over until the tears are rolling down my cheeks and I can’t stop them. I try, but I can’t breathe, my chest feels so tight as I force my tears not to become heaving sobs. I stare down at what I’m doing.

Why do I have to do this? I don’t understand.

Please stop.

Stop.

 I can’t do it anymore.  I can’t. I can’t breathe.

I don’t want anyone to look at me. I’m a freak. I know I am. I can’t help it. I say it loud to myself. “Freak, freak, freak. Fucking stop it. You stupid fucking freak. Stop it. Stop it right now.”

I can’t. I can’t make it go away. Nothing makes it go away.  I wish I could die. Maybe it would stop then. I wish I could be normal, but I’m not. I don’t want anyone to see me. I don’t want them to look. They will hate me. They will know I am a freak too.

“Stop it, step away.” I take a deep breath.

Another minute more is another minute my chest aches inside. I try not to cry, bite my lip, hold my breath, anything to keep it all away, but I cant. The pounding in my head, I open my mouth to let out a sob, quietly so that no one can hear me. I don’t want them to see this. I don’t want them to see me.

What would they think? What would they say?

Freak!

I take another deep breath, glance out of the window. The sun shines outside and for a moment I close my eyes and try to imagine the feel of the sun on my skin, the way the warmth seeps inside and makes everything right again. Just for a second I can pretend that I am normal and I am okay, but then the sting brings me back to reality and I remember. I am not like everyone else.

The niggling feeling inside beckons. I look at my hand, the blood that comes from them, like tiny bubbles from each and every cut, but still I pump the stuff into my hands, try not to wince as the antiseptic sting feels like a million needle bites. I rub It in, all around and try to fight the pain. Like someone is peeling the skin from my hands. I want them to stop, but I can’t, because it’s me.

If I just did everything right, took it slowly. I stand, not moving for a moment and then I rinse the solution from my hands, the warm water offers some comfort for a moment as it eases the pain a little, enough that I can think and gather my thoughts. So that I can calm myself down. “Just do it slowly, get it right this time. Don’t fuck it up.”

I start again, reach over, pump the stuff into my hand one more time. It hurts again, makes me lose my breath for a second because the pain is sharp, but it is good. Slowly, slowly. Do it right. I rub my hands, the tears still roll down my cheeks, it hurts so badly, but I have to do it right. It’s the only way out. The only way to stop this.

Happy now? I rinse the solution off again, slowly, watching that its right this time. I did it correctly.

“But what if?” that voice again, I hate it. What if I did it wrong? What if its still there? What if they are not clean enough?

I sigh. Begin again. Do it right this time.

Freak.

If you saw this would you laugh at me then? Would you think it funny to make jokes? I wish people could see these moments, so in the times they chose to laugh, they see this is what they are laughing at.

Holier Than Thou

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Holier than thou, one of those sayings I never really heard nor understood until I decided to quit smoking. A failed attempt many many years ago, I had tried to use Allan Carr’s method of quitting smoking and it was a term he used, “do not become a holier than thou ex-smoker.”  Of course I wondered what he actually meant.

Then I came to learn that it was those ex-smokers that try to guilt trip, belittle the smoker into also quitting. Why? Because they managed, they quit, now they are superior or holier than thou. I find this mind-set also with abuse survivors and although I know what it means, I do not understand how it is people are like that.

There are a couple of online support groups that I have left because such people like this run them. I survived my child abuse; you do it like this, just get on with it.

It feels somewhat like a pool filled with people struggling to climb out, but when one survivor gets free they stand on the edge looking down and gone is the empathy, but it is replaced by some odd form of judgement. Like they forgot what it is like to feel that grief inside.  drowning

I followed someone’s page, which I have since left; the man who runs it is a survivor. He created the page to help others such as himself, commendable of course, but what I have seen is that if there is someone not at the same stage of healing as him, they are told to pick themselves up, get on with it, get over it, he can do it, so can they and they he spouts on about himself.  He created a page to help others, yet he doesn’t seem to have the patience to help those that need it. However, when someone congratulates him on what he is doing for survivors he replies, thinks it’s great himself, almost like they are putting him in this pedestal for how much he has achieved. It feels as though the term I am a childhood abuse survivor is like an heroic medal.

I see this kind of thing often though, it is not just this man, it is many others, I hope I don’t become like that. I hope that I can remember what it is like when I am distressed, hurting and in pain that what I needed was a hand or an arm, not a beating. I’ve had enough of those.

Helping a survivor I think is not about standing on the edge of the pool saying you can do it, just jump, it is holding their hands, wiping the tears and allowing them to stay in that pool until they feel safe enough themselves to climb out.

I ramble once again 🙂

Dental Fear

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Dental Fear

It wasn’t until coming out into the world about my childhood did I learn and understand that my totally illogical fear of the dentist is actually quite common amongst people that were abused as children. I found this fascinating because I didn’t understand that there would be a link at all, even though my own irrational fear does trigger many of the things from childhood, I never saw that there was a correlation between the two.

I found that I wasn’t the only one with this fear. I know dental fear isn’t just in those that have been abused, it is a common fear in general, but what I found about the link between child sexual abuse and dental fear made a lot of sense to me and explained why I have it.

I stare now at the letter that has come from my dentist, just a copy that is referring me to the hospital for sedation. I’m only having a rebuild on a back tooth that I smashed a couple of months ago, nothing major.  But there is no way I can get in the dental chair for work to be done. In fact just to have it looked at, I couldn’t lie back, he had to view it with me mostly sat upright and my other half in the room.

I asked him to please not use any instruments in my mouth, not even the mirror. I was shaking and my breathing was going, all he was doing was looking into my mouth to assess the damage I had done to this tooth. “It’s easy to fix,” he told me.

Easy? Not at all, just sitting in that chair wasn’t easy. He said he could fix it there and then, I asked if instead he could remove all my teeth. And yes I really did ask, because I hate this fear, I look after my teeth so much to save myself the trauma of the dentist, that I thought if I just had them removed, the only thing I’ll ever have to endure is having a cast of my mouth taken. He said no. At 36 years old, he said by the time I reached my 60’s my gums would have receded so much that not even dentures would hold and he wasn’t about to start removing teeth that were healthy.

Of course I understood what he was saying, and told him he couldn’t fix my tooth. I saw my other half sigh. But I just couldn’t bring myself to say yes. I asked to be sedated.

So now I have this letter that states severe needle fear, which is funny because it isn’t. Needles don’t bother me, the ex-drug abuser in me laughed. I am not afraid of needles at all.

But what the dentist does cause:

  • Having to lie back while a dentist examines my mouth (usually a man)
  • Having to trust a person of authority.
  • The anticipation of pain
  • Feeling smothered
  • Instruments in my mouth as well as fingers
  • Lack of control (which goes back to the authority figure having control)
  • Hands over my mouth and nose
  • Fear of not being able to breathe or swallow
  • Fear of gagging
  • Worried about the dentist getting annoyed
  • Feeling restrained.

It seems that many dental procedures remind me and others like me of abusive experiences.

Inside

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I really hate when it feels like I am crying on the inside and no one can see. I don’t even know why it’s there, it’s been a couple of days now, even an attempt at self-harming yesterday didn’t change it. In fact half way through self-harming I stopped because it felt pointless in that moment. cryinginside

I sit outside today on my decking and watch my granddaughter. She sits in the sun with her teddy bear, waves at me and blows me a kiss. Then she decides to get up, race over to me and in that way toddlers have, shout Par-par as she runs, because of course she hasn’t learnt to say Granddad. And even with those little arms around my neck, and the chocolate face against mine, inside it feels like I am alone. Maybe it is because I am writing Teddy 3.5, maybe it is just because of other things. I am not sure. I do know I hate when I feel this way and why I am writing this here, just to get it out.

Maybe it will pass later, I hope so, until then, if I am quiet this is why. The world feels like it’s moving and I have stopped. I’m caught in something waiting to catch up. Maybe tomorrow I can stop feeling like I’m looking in from the outside.

P.s I will remember to buy a damn light bulb today.

Strangers with Familiar Faces

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Sometimes I think of things to write about on here and then I don’t, I think I don’t want to sound as though I am depressed or only write dark kind of posts. I am not after pity, mostly support, and sharing my journey. I think sometimes I lose track of that. I post here to help me, but also to help those that might come across my words with the same issues. I know, realising  I am not alone and that one person understands means more to me than any form of sympathy.

So I think I lost sight of what I started this for and so have not posted many thoughts.

A few weeks ago, when the weather was great I had a barbeque at my house, it didn’t actually start that way, but it’s what it turned into. In many ways I am glad, what started to be something for one of my children became a day where lots of things happened for me.BBQ

For starters, I ate barbequed food. That’s huge for me. I love food cooked on a barbeque, but my OCD had stolen that from me and really it had been a good ten years since I have dared to enjoy food like that. I ate crisps with my hands (potato chips to my American readers).

I had people in my house and I didn’t watch what they touched, didn’t freak out internally every time someone wanted to use my bathroom. I didn’t freak out later that many people had used it and now I had to clean it.

I didn’t panic at my children eating food with their fingers. I didn’t panic when the children and friends took their empty plates and things into the kitchen or when someone other than me opened bread rolls or salad.

Maybe these are little things, but to me, these are things that would have sent me on some odd kind of anxiety day until I couldn’t breathe.

Perhaps though, the most important realisation was my father. I hadn’t seen him for the best part of a year, my choice really. He came with my brother and they sat away from everyone else. I talked to them and I was pleasant enough, but really, I didn’t fit there anymore. I didn’t want to. I realised that I didn’t belong with them. They were just strangers with familiar faces.

When he asked me how I was doing with my schooling I wasn’t afraid to tell him, maybe it was because there were a lot of people around and I knew that he wouldn’t belittle me then or maybe it was just because I’m happy and I wasn’t letting him spoil it.

Afterwards when he left and I saw him out, we stood around the front of my house and for the first time I looked at him, really looked at him. I thought to myself, I know what you did to me. That kind of thing has never crossed my mind before, I don’t know where it came from, but maybe that in itself was another achievement for me that day.

Therapy

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After much deliberation, I have decided that I am going to give up on therapy. It’s ironic I guess, that this is what I am training to be yet, I find that it is not right for my own things. Maybe, I am just a better listener than a talker.

Recently I did a session of EMDR. This was probably the session I realised therapy is not for me. I cannot connect with this therapist or any that I have gone to, before him. The textbook answers, and the fact that they are paid to listen, hinders my mind, and I know that really, they don’t care. How can I give my darkest, and deepest things that are so hard for me to say, to someone who after I leave, will probably think nothing of me for more than five minute?.

I found myself going over this in my mind a lot and then I thought about the therapy itself. I really don’t think healing is a thing that is possible, not in a way that it is all gone. How can a lifetime of things be undone by talking to someone? How can the broken parts of me ever be put together the way they were so long ago, when its before I can even remember? The most I can hope for is to learn how to calm the child inside. To care for him when he is sad or upset. To understand when triggers happen, and not to fight them, but to sit down with that part of myself, and just allow it to be there.

I’m not really sure how I will achieve this, but as I learn more and more in my psychology classes, I understand myself better, and the child from long ago.

Writing the Teddy books helps me. It’s giving him a voice when he has never had one. I am not sure what I will do when I finish this final one. I plan to write it all to the end now; Teddy 3.5 as it is called, and if you have read my others, then you understand why I cannot called it Teddy four.

My father suffered a heart attack recently, and whilst I know many readers of my books will perhaps think, this is a good thing, I found myself shocked at my own reaction. I put the phone down after I had been told, and wondered what if he dies. That would be it. I would never have a chance to tell my father what I thought, and never the chance for him to be a father.

I know these things will never happen. I have to find some way to accept that. I think what shocked me the most, was my own upset and breakdown, on the phone. So much of a breakdown that I couldn’t even talk, and someone else had to take the call for me. I realised that I care, somewhere inside, for my father, because he is, after all, my dad.

Not Cutting Today

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Yesterday, not here but in a place I seek support I questioned healing. If it was really possible. I don’t think it is. Not properly.

Often child abuse is referred to like scars, but scars don’t heal, not properly, they are wounds that are just there as reminders. I don’t think full healing is possible. Perhaps it’s just possible to understand.

I always feel like I am searching for answers, and trying to understand the things that go wrong in my life. I try and find the why of everything.

Last night I was plagued with such flashbacks and fear of the bad man, I wonder how I’m ever going to heal that part. I felt like a 5 year old so certain that he was going to come for me. Sure that he was in my house and the moment I closed my eyes, he would be there. I could feel the imprints of his hands in my hair holding me down, his teeth biting into my shoulder and the weight of him as I tried to fight.I’ve been afraid of the shadows forever, perhaps I always will be.

And today is day four since I last self harmed. Small, but it’s still days where I have healed physically, but I’m tired today and feel stupid for my flashbacks the night before.

I don’t want to cut another day.

Self Injury Awareness Day

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Today is self-injury awareness day. It’s one of those things that has many sides. Many people do not understand it, it can be brushed off as an attention thing, yet in truth those that do it, do it alone, they hide it and they are ashamed, there is no attention in that. Most self harmers go to great lengths to hide what they have done. 370px-Orange_ribbon.svg

Last year I, self harmed to the point of needing it to be stitched, I had to go to the walk in centre for this, and it was probably one of the most shameful things I had to do last year. The staff knew what I had done, I didn’t tell them, but there’s nothing like them making you wait to see the on call psychiatrist to be assessed and the fear of being admitted to hospital. In a world that’s so silent in my head, how could I let my family know what I had done to myself? I would never be able to tell them why.

It’s been two hours since my last self harm. It is something I hide and were it not for the day today, something I wouldn’t say.

Blame Take Two

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Blame: Take Two

I guess, like anyone, blame and shame are my biggest issues. In reality, I would never blame a child for the atrocities of its parents; I would see him or her as innocent, and a victim of their parent’s wrong doings. Yet, when it comes to me, I cannot. I blame myself and no matter how much the evidence is stacked up against my parents, I cannot change it. If I even try, it feels like lies.

One of the factors of blame, is understanding the’ why’ question, and because that is almost impossible to answer, the only conclusion a child can draw on, is that it must be their fault.

For those who read this blog and don’t know, I study Psychology and during a recent lesson, we studied a Psychologist named, Stanley Milgram.blame_700

He investigated why Nuremberg war criminals in WWII, carried out acts of genocide. Was it simply because Germans were made different and, therefore, cruel?

He believed they were, and tested his theory with an experiment. He asked ordinary people to volunteer as teachers and had actors as the learner. The teachers thought they were simply there for a memory test, but that was not the case.

Milgram set up the teacher and the learner in different rooms. The learner was strapped to a chair and attached to a buzzer that gave them an electric shock. The teacher was in another room and asked the learner a question. For each question they got wrong, the teacher would administer an electric shock. These shocks went along a scale, starting at nothing more than a quick nip of volts, to 450 volts, which was fatal.

In the room with the teacher, was an experimenter, (an actor) who appeared to be taking notes and watching. The teacher could not see the learner, only hear them.

However, what they really heard, was a recorded voice. They weren’t really electrocuting people, they just believed they were. Eventually, as the voltage got higher, the voice would plead, asking for no more, and eventually it went silent, leaving the teacher not knowing if the learner was unconscious or simply not responding.

Of course, as the cries or the silence got worse, the teacher often became stressed, but the experimenter in the room would simply state that it was vital to the experiment and to please continue (they did have the right to leave at any time).

Milgram found that over 60% of people went to the fatal 450volts and, when asked later, he concluded that like the Nazi, it was not down to ethnicity, but rather obedience. If people did not hold the blame, they could continue.

My father, like many the same, told me, it was my fault. I wanted it. I asked for it. I liked it and his personal favourite that I gained everything in my life through sex. It would seem the case, even using it to gain my father’s love and attention. The way he worded thing caused me to  take the blame because what he said was logical.

What if Milgram’s theory applies here? My father convinced himself that it was what I wanted. He believed his own lies, removed blame, and gave it to me. He believed he was doing what I wanted, what I liked and what I offered.  He was being obedient.

Making it my fault and not his, made it okay for him to do what he did.