I’ve spent the majority of my life – my childhood and my first marriage – being directly and indirectly told that it’s my responsibility to make everyone else’s life work. I need to make sure my opinions aren’t too strong, my emotions aren’t too intense, and that I don’t do or say anything that might indicate that someone should be held accountable for their own behaviour. I should behave in a way that makes it easier for others to look good – I should anticipate their bad behaviour or weaknesses and moderate my behaviour accordingly so that they won’t be upset (no matter how much that upsets or invalidates me and my feelings). My focus should be ensuring the emotional comfort of others without giving any thought or priority to my own emotional wellbeing.
Words (reading and writing) were my solace and refuge during my childhood and marriage, but they were also the way I maintained the facade of a happy life. It’s amazing how easy it is to be truthful without being authentic, and how willing people are to hear what they want to hear and not look beyond the surface of what you are saying.
I often described my relationship in my first marriage as ‘functionally dysfunctional’, although the reality was that it was only functional for him, and was miserably exhausting in its dysfunction for me. It’s amazing what you can gloss over and hide, even from yourself, with the use of a well-turned phrase.
I remember a planned get together with friends visiting from out of town towards the end of my marriage, where I cancelled at the last minute because I couldn’t bring myself to go and pretend that we functioned in any way as a couple. I was exhausted and I simply couldn’t find the energy to do what I usually did, which was actively manage social situations so that my ex didn’t have to deal with anything that was inconsistent with the completely inaccurate version of our family and our lives that only existed inside his head. [side note: the husband of that couple refused to talk to me after the separation once he established that I wouldn’t go back to the marriage, except for drunk texting me on two separate occasions. His upsetting, insensitive behaviour helped relieve some of my lingering guilt at not going along to the planned catch-up mentioned above.]
’s inability to connect emotionally, and to talk myself into believing that I was okay. And I allowed the words of others – particularly my parents and ex, but also church friends and leaders I turned to for help – to become the foundation for how I defined myself. I let them tell me that I was a disappointment and inadequate, that the things that mattered to me weren’t important, and that I was to blame for my own unhappiness. I allowed them to make me responsible for the failings of others and accepted their explanations that it was my flaws, rather than their actions, that were making me unahppy.
I was confronted recently by a counsellor questioning a positive statement I made (with some confidence) about my ex-husband and his ability to function emotionally. I made the statement after giving a range of examples earlier in our conversation demonstrating his complete inability to respond to the emotions of others. She asked why I believed that in the hypothetical we were discussing he would be capable of acting differently. And the truth was, I didn’t believe he could. Nothing in my 25 years of experience with him gives me any reason to believe that he’s capable of responding to any emotions other than his own, but my default is to use the words that help people believe the best about themselves and others. Part of that is innately who I am, but a significant part of it is a response conditioned by my parents and reinforced by my ex-husband. My only value comes from my ability to prioritise others whilst minimising the inconvenience of others having to acknowledge me. Always. Regardless of the cost to myself.
And there is the reality of why I’m finding it hard to write. I can’t trust myself to be authentic. It hurts to be completely honest about what I’ve experienced and what I’m feeling, because confronting my past means accepting that I’ve been complicit in creating the fiction that made it easier for others to treat me so badly. I masked what they did, accepted the way they treated me, and used words to convince others, and myself, that it was all okay. I used words so often to deflect and obscure, I’m not sure if I can trust myself to use them now to honestly describe the truth of my experience. I’ve even talked around the edges in the examples I gave above, both of which were events that were extremely upsetting to me at the time and which remain significant, distressing memories.
It’s tempting to say that I don’t need to write about this, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think writing is going to be the most effective way of processing the thoughts and memories, but I’m not sure I’m brave enough to take the first step. My experiences involve very few examples of major trauma. Instead, it’s a seemingly neverending list of small moments, words, actions, assumptions and expectations spanning my entire life where the people who should have loved me most constantly reminded me that I was a disappointment in every way. I start with one thought (like the time in my mid-30s when my mother took me aside to remind me I needed to behave at the funeral of a beloved elderly relative because I had to make sure I didn’t trigger the bad behaviour of my consistently self-absorbed and unpredictable sister [who wasn’t given a similar warning]) and before long I’m feeling overwhelmed by a series of connected moments, comments, and criticisms that leave me feeling exhausted and bereft and desperate to wrap it all up in words that make it less painful.
If I choose to write now, it can only work if I am able to be authentic and I’m not sure I can, because it hurts to go beneath the surface. It hurts to examine the reality of my childhood and first marriage and to accept that so many things I worked so hard to convince myself were okay, were actually abusive and cruel. Writing now means pushing through the compulsion to edit and re-edit until the words are smooth and non-confrontational and to gloss over events that can’t realistically be described as anything other than awful.
And I don’t know if I can.