Dear nycartist:

The lack, the void, the dark hole that can never be filled, the Dreadful Emptiness, is created within a child who is repeatedly threatened and no longer feels safe. It’s a scary, empty space that feels so bad that the child is desperate to fill it in any which way and as quickly as possible, so to no longer feel empty, but whole and safe. The biological motivation behind the Dreadful Emptiness is to motivate the child to do all that it takes to survive.

When a child is threatened by a parent (or by a person the parent allows into the child’s life), the child does not have an adult’s experience and education to know that she (the child) has options such as going to the police by herself, contacting social services, and so forth. The child intuitively feels that her life is in real and present danger. She’ll do anything to please and appease the parent and stay out of trouble, or she will fight.. whatever has a chance to save her- and her parent’s- life. In a child’s mind, if her parent dies, so will she.

On Dec 2, 2020, you shared about the physical danger that you believed you were in, as a child: “my father… I was there every weekend. He abused me…  I didn’t come forward for years because he convinced me that…  he would kill himself if he couldn’t see me. At home my mom was in an abusive relationship with my new stepdad and I felt like I had to protect her. I saw lots of physical abuse happen to her and many times tried to stop it“- in a child’s mind, if her father’s or her mother’s life is in danger, so is the child’s own life. You felt that dreadful emptiness and to fill it quickly, you did all that you could do: from not telling your mother about your father abusing (so to save his life), to trying to stop your step father from abusing your mother (so to save her life).

You wrote on that day: “I am trying to keep in mind that everyone whom this has happened with in the past is still alive. No one killed themselves or is left destroyed“- this is what you feared as a child: that your father and/ or mother will no longer be alive, and as a result, neither will you.

The Dreadful Emptiness is nothing less than the fear of physical death.

On Dec 4, 2020, you shared that before your mother married the abusive step father “she had some really horrific boyfriends. I remember one jerk used to light matches in my face and terrify me!“- this added to that Dreadful Emptiness within you.

After the step father left, “She hid in her room and was depressed and I was 14 years old“- I imagine that the fear that she will kill herself in her room added to the Dreadful Emptiness.

“Then a few months later she met a new man. He was also horrible…. Then when I was 16 my poor mother had a massive stroke while we were living with this man… She was in a hospital for months for rehabilitation after that, and I just had to live alone with this man and his sons and wait for her“- this added … more to the Dreadful Emptiness.

Fast forward, you are married to a safe, loving man but your focus is naturally still on what scares you (when any animal is scared, it focuses on what scares it), and what scares you is not your father or mother or any of her boyfriends or step fathers… but “friends”. I think that it came to be that you focus on friends as a source of danger  (and correct me if I am wrong) in this way: growing up with dangerous parents and the adults they brought into your life, you found refuge in friends, people of your age that you met and befriended in school, college and elsewhere. They became a source of safety, substitute to safe parents. And so, at one point on, your fear of parents was transferred to fear of their substitutes. Therefore, you focus on any sign that friends may be upset at you and hurt you (“this gnawing fear that I’ll have someone mad at me“). And just like you were “ALWAYS the peacekeeper” within your family (so to save your parents’ lives and your own), you became the peacekeeper in your friendships.

When you come across toxic friends, as you refer to them, you are not motivated to leave them and end the friendships. Instead, you are compelled to keep-and-fix the friendships. When you were a child and a teenager, you didn’t have the option of leaving your mother (and her boyfriends and husbands), nor did you want to because you needed to stay with her and… fix the danger, that is, to protect her and save her life, and in so doing, saving your own. You felt that your life depended on your mother being alive. Fast forward, you are compelled to keep-and-fix your friendships as if your life depends on it.

I wrote in the first paragraph on this post: “the Dreadful Emptiness, is…  a scary, empty space that feels so bad that the child is desperate to fill it… so to no longer feel empty, but whole and safe. The biological motivation behind the Dreadful Emptiness is to motivate the child to do all that it takes to survive”- fear, that terrible dreadful feeling of emptiness, motivates the child to fix a bad situation in which she is stuck. But there is also another motivating feeling: a euphoric, wonderful, narcotic-like feeling that the otherwise terrified child experiences at times when daydreaming of safe, wonderful life scenarios, or during holidays perhaps, when everyone in the family seems calm and happy. And that euphoric feeling, naturally produced in the brain, is designed to replace the fear for a while and motivate the child to endure the bad times, hoping for better times.

I remember my fear all too well, although… naturally, most memory of the fear is as repressed as can be. But I do remember the euphoria I felt for hours of daydreaming every day. It kept me motivated to .. keep going. I remember one time, I was 23 or so. I stayed in the home of two parents and their school age children one afternoon through the morning after. It was a magical, euphoric experience that morning: the sun shone gently into the room as I woke up, hearing the gentle voices of the mother and father coming from the kitchen downstairs. I heard the mother kindly calling her kids. I walked downstairs, and so did the kids (from their separate rooms). I felt like one of the kid. Downstairs, we sat around the breakfast table, voices calm and optimistic… all a very different experience from what I knew.

I remember that morning forevermore. But it was only yesterday, as a result of writing to you, that it occurred to me for the first time in all these years of remembering,  that most likely, her kids- now adults- do not remember that morning because that morning was business as usual for them, nothing memorable about it.

anita