Dear Robi:

I just reread some of your Feb 2024 original post in this thread. Already there, you used the word “caged” in regard to your childhood.

Caged living behind a glass door in a guest room that served as your parents’ storage room.

Caged waiting in their workplace for 7-8 hours, waiting for them to finish work

Caged in the cabin by the lake, sleeping in the same room with them.

The title of your thread says “becoming adul”- childhood Trauma robbed the T from becoming adult.

What caught my eye this evening as I read through your original post is that after she brutally beat you, she cried and apologized.

Fast forward to last night (your time),

“I always felt sad for having to go back to living with them again”-

Always felt sad to.. minimally living with them again, caged physically and psychologically.

“I’ve been told by them, amongst other similar things.. that I was a bad apple…”-

It’s a miracle and a testimony of your intelligence and resilience that you survived them at all, putting everything together.

It’s Not Your Fault, Robi!

B back 2 u shortly (moving to the computer)

Dear Robi: I’ll reply later ( after the beagles’ play date)

Hello again, Sleipnir:

I’m sorry that happened to you. Reading your post, it’s clear those experiences left deep wounds.

One thing I learned is that before forgiveness is even possible, many people first need to fully acknowledge the harm that was done to them.

Many trauma survivors try to forgive before they have fully recognized what happened to them. They tell themselves things like, ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ ‘Other people had it worse,’ ‘Maybe it was partly my fault,’ or ‘I should be over this by now.’

But those thoughts keep the injury alive because a part of the person is still arguing with reality.

To fully acknowledge the harm means being able to say, without minimizing or explaining it away:

‘What happened to me was wrong. It deeply hurt me. It had serious consequences. The anger, grief, fear, and scars make complete sense in light of what I went through.’

Also, a child, a vulnerable person, or someone trapped in an abusive environment often has far less power than they imagine later, once out of the abusive environment. Survivors frequently carry hidden self-blame, believing ‘I should have stopped it’, rather than accepting ‘I was powerless in that situation.’

As long as someone is secretly blaming themselves, anger remains tangled up with shame. The anger cannot fully settle because part of it is still turned inward.

Letting go of anger is not the same as excusing what happened. Often, it begins with the opposite: clearly recognizing that an injustice occurred and that the responsibility belongs with those who caused the harm.

Once a person no longer has to spend energy arguing with the truth or carrying blame that was never theirs, the anger can gradually lose some of its burden.

.. Before someone can truly let go of anger, they may first need to fully acknowledge the harm that done. Not minimize it, not excuse it, not compare it to someone else’s suffering, but simply recognize, ‘What happened to me was wrong, and it hurt me.’

When someone has been victimized, the responsibility belongs to those who committed the abuse, not the person who suffered it. I think anger sometimes stays so strong because it is still trying to defend a truth that has not been fully accepted yet.

Your thoughts/ feelings, Sleipnir?

Anita

Dear Robi:

I just want to say, you wrote 2 days ago that your nervous system feels overloaded and that your 🧠 feels pretty fried-

So, I understand why you didn’t post since.

It’s all pretty intense, so, I’ll be here if and when you want to keep talking, at your pace.

I was just looking for a closing emoji, a green leaf, perhaps, and came across this emoji: 😎 which made me think of you.

Anita

Good Thursday Afternoon, Nea:

Thank you 🙂

I hear your sadness on this day, about how different it is from the same day last year.

You wrote that after your father called you names, he apologized- he apologized sincerely, his own initiative?

But then it happened that he called you names and apologized again?

I don’t think that you mentioned him apologizing for anything, so I thought he never did.

Six weeks of no talking between father and husband, and you survived that silent tension.

If your husband did say happy birthday to your father, to ease the tension, it might do the opposite of easing the tension. It might trigger your father..🤔?

Anita

Anytime you want to chat, be it about dogs or something else, you can come back here 🙂

Good Wed afternoon, Robi 🙂

To me, there was so much in your message yesterday that I might have been carried away. Or maybe not.

Let me see:

Looking at your words through my own experience, this image comes to mind (I’m thinking of it to be true to you and to me, but I don’t want to be carried away into saying that my experience = yours, which is never 100% the case for any 2 people, even when it feels like it, so I’ll talk strictly about me):

Like any human, I was born 3-D but had to contract and distort myself into a 2-D existence. Needs, feelings, preferences, etc. were largely repressed and suppressed, condensed into a flat existence.

My 3-D was limited to daydreaming fantasy (in your case, computer games fantasy?), but otherwise, real- life was flat, holding my breath, waiting to exhale when space becomes available.

When I left my mother and country, I felt intoxicatingly free for a while (like you did in Spain?), but long-term, a person condensed into, stuck.. entrapped in 2-D, cannot thrive in a 3-D world.

I was able to physically survive the world, not thrive in it. I remained a shell of myself- in different places, different people, different times.

It happened that new places, new people represented the opportunity to fully inhale and fully exhale, to relax enough 2 B me.

But shame, guilt and self- doubt formed a glue that kept me 2-D-ed.

The idea of being seen and known for who I felt I was (defective, inferior, inadequate.. shameful) was threatening.

It takes a particular kind of parent or set of parents to set all this in motion, or more accurately, lack of motion, long-term.

And it takes a particular kind of person to reclaim that lost or surrender 3-D.

Maybe the first step is to dissolve that shame- glue, to truly see that I reacted to very harsh psychological- emotional (ongoing, 2+ decades- long) circumstances, not because I was weak or wrong but because I was strong and there was no other option to survive.

I don’t have to become strong. I was always strong.

..

Anita

Ha-ha. I copied your message (ending with “Robie”) and responded to it part by part, ending my reply with my name.. but “Robie” is still the last name. B back in the morning