It’s a place that still haunts me.
The past few months for me have been emotionally difficult but also revelatory. Ever since that dark day two months ago when I was within less than an hour of ending it all, my emotions have been a complete jumble. Life was happening around me yet I felt completely oblivious and unaffected.
As I continue to dig my way out of this latest depressive episode I know it’s vital that I start socializing again. My first attempt was to join my run/walk group this morning, but my anxiety got the better of me and I bailed within minutes of my arrival. I barely even muttered a word to anyone.
It’s later that same day right now and I just had my latest therapy session. I told my therapist that I’m still having a hard time trying to take a leap of faith and to start trusting people again, even though every instinct in me was telling me that it would be better to stay isolated rather than risk getting hurt.
It’s nothing new for me. I’ve always had a hard time trusting other people. The parade of losses I’ve suffered over the past two years has done a number on my psyche, and the idea of letting my guard down again is absolutely terrifying.
This same old song and dance of mine has grown stale, to say the least. It’s maddening that after all the work I’ve done on myself that I could find myself feeling so tempted to abandon relationships altogether and to live out the remainder of my life in isolation. I know it wouldn’t make me happy, but it would make me less vulnerable to getting hurt again.
It’s also maddening that I keep feeling this way about my friends. My friends are wonderful people. They would never hurt me in a million years. They have expressed their concerns to me about my absence from social gatherings and have shown me nothing but kindness and support.
Yet I still hesitate to socialize.
So, if part of me knows that my friends are good people, then why am I still consumed with this overwhelming belief that I still shouldn’t trust them, or anybody else for that matter?
I wrote in my last blog article about the fact that due to my childhood abuse I became conditioned to believe that acts of kindness are danger signs. For most people, being on the receiving end of a kind gesture feels wonderful. For me it fills me with dread, because to me acts of kindness are “tricks” that are being used on me to get me to lower my defenses, so that the so-called “kind” person can hurt me while my guard is down.
I also know all too well that all of this is from my parents. I was constantly getting emotionally set up and betrayed by them, especially by my mother. It got me to a point where I became so wary of expressing my emotional needs that I developed an instinct to keep my emotions to myself, lest my mother use them as ammunition against me.
But I know my friends aren’t my parents. I know they aren’t anything like my parents. So why do I keep treating my friends as if they aren’t to be trusted?
My therapy session started off on an interesting note. Over the past month or so I’ve let my facial hair grow out a bit. It wasn’t anything I had planned, merely something I just let happen without thinking much about it.
My therapist started the session by complimenting me on the “new look”.
“Well, funny you should start off with that,” I replied, “because every time I get a compliment I have this built-in fear that it’s not a compliment at all, but a set-up to get me to lower my defenses so I can get hurt again.”
Of course, she knows where this fear comes from. Yet, even though I’ve had countless conversations with my therapist about this issue I can’t seem to shake this belief that other people aren’t trustworthy, and that anytime someone says or does something nice for me that I should treat it as a warning sign instead of a demonstration of kindness.
I started to break down and cry, because I am beyond frustrated that I have been stuck in this pattern. I hate feeling this way. I hate not being able to trust my friends. I know on an intellectual level that my friends are wonderful, caring people. And I also know that if I carry on the way I have that I will inevitably lose them, not because they want to hurt me, but because I am hurting them by my unwillingness to connect with them while I’m feeling so down.
My therapist decided it was time for a new approach to combating this pattern.
She started to talk about the place I grew up in, mainly the place where I spent the majority of my childhood and teenage years. Because my family was broke we lived in a trailer park on a dirt road. My room was at one end of the single-wide trailer and my parents’ room was at the other end.
The name of this not-at-all-elegant housing complex was Cobblestone Court. As ours was the first trailer in the park, our assigned lot was number One.
“So, here’s what we need to do,” she said. “We need to take your parents’ behaviors towards you and leave them back at One Cobblestone Court. The problem is you have been carrying their behaviors as a template throughout your entire adult life. Because of this you have this fresh expectation that the people in your life are going to hurt you just as your parents did. So, let’s find a way to keep that abusive behavior back at One Cobblestone Court. Make it tangible. When you left that place you didn’t take the old afghan with you, or the sofa, or the carpets, or the linoleum in the kitchen, so don’t take their behaviors with you either. Leave it all back there. It’s a place you haven’t lived in for decades. Put all of those “bad parent” behaviors back at One Cobblestone Court.”
It’s an interesting concept, because it gives me a more tangible tool to be able to compartmentalize what my parents did to me. It’s also a way to keep those behaviors in the past. I haven’t lived in that place in decades. Even if I were foolish enough to want to go back, which fortunately I am not, I wouldn’t even be able to because the trailer park was demolished a long time ago.
As we talked about this it led to another revelation, one that is incredibly important in my quest to break out of this toxic pattern.
I started talking about what life was like for me back then, living in that horrible trailer with those two horrible people. Yet, when I spoke of my parents I immediately started making concessions for their behavior. I know that both of my parents had terrible childhoods of their own. I know they were both terribly damaged people. I know that, as ironic as it may sound, that I feel a level of sympathy for them.
This is a compassionate statement, but my therapist had her own statement to make about my parents.
“Yes, you are right in that both of your parents were damaged people. But, they were also both adults when they raised you. They were adults when they abused you. They were adults when they blamed you for their money problems. They were adults when they made you feel guilty whenever you got sick and they had to pay for doctors’ visits and medications. They were adults when they ridiculed you for not acting the way they wanted you to act. They had agency, whereas you did not. They could have worked on themselves or at least gotten some help so that they would be better parents to you. Instead, they chose to take all of their damage out on you, you who were helpless and trapped. You had no choice but to accept everything they did to you back then. But, now that you’re a grown man, you do not have to accept ANYTHING that they did to you, because all of it was wrong. It was cruel. It was abuse.”
I needed to hear this. While it’s understandable that I might feel some compassion for them, I also know that they did a tremendous amount of damage to my psyche, and this damage wasn’t inflicted on me involuntarily. They CHOSE to abuse me. And the more excuses I make for their behavior then the more I normalize it, which makes it all that much easier for me to draw associations between my parents and other people, including my friends.
It makes me realize how important it is not to soften what my parents did to me, because by doing so it makes me feel that it’s normal for other people to treat me like this. It also makes me feel that every single person in the world is like my parents, which means that everyone has some deeply hidden desire to hurt me.
As I have been thinking about all of this, for the first time in many months I am starting to feel like I’m turning a corner in the right direction. Just having this tool in my emotional wellness toolshed has helped me start to feel a little better already. I know this is just one small step, and I know it will take time and a lot of work for me to shed myself of these beliefs, but having a tangible place in my mind where I can assign these beliefs has given me hope that I can start to dismiss them.
More importantly, by placing these beliefs back in my old, toxic household, it’s helping me to disassociate these toxic expectations from other people, including my friends. It’s horrifying to think that any of my friends would treat me the way my parents did. But by assigning those beliefs to my old home it has helped me to separate them from other people. I am very, very fortunate to have my wonderful friends in my life. I want to rid myself of these horrible thoughts so that I can rejoin them, to repay them for their kindness, and to finally prove to myself that not only can I trust in other people, but that I will have no fear in letting my defenses down around other people again.
It’s time for me to leave One Cobblestone Court in the past.