I hold this specific wisdom (not befriending an angry men) close.
When I was in middle school, I read both Psalms and Proverbs every month. I can’t remember where I learned the strategy, but it was essentially reading 1 chapter of Proverbs (DD) and 5 chapters of Psalms (DD, DD+30, DD+60, DD+90, DD + 120) each night with a few adjustments depending on the month. I appreciated the symmetry and I love a long term checklist. I kept this up for about 2 years.
Every time I came upon the above proverb I found it uniquely frustrating, as my stepdad was a very angry man. What was a middle schooler to do when you were forced to live with an angry man. I decided my specific situation was bullshit. It took me many more years to sort out the now what.
If I’m really honest, I lean more on repression than anything else as it relates to the abuse of my childhood. Not the healthiest approach, but I am not really ready to deal with my own anger [yet?]. I know there is anger, because I have the most feminine response to anger – tears.
So annoying.
I used to insist that I was not *really* abused as a child, well except that one time…
But in fact, abuse comes in many forms and the emotional stuff is not small, it just scars differently. I don’t fully trust my own memory completely on this, as I know I have blocked many memories out on purpose. The reality is that there was a lot of abuse in my childhood, but there are two bookend events that I do remember.
I cannot remember the specifics of the first. I have a vague memory of getting in trouble and the result was a visible bruise on my face. What I do remember, was the number of times and ways that my kindergarten teachers kept asking me about it. Obviously they knew something was up. I knew that I was in grave danger of getting in trouble a second time, if I had to reveal what I had done to get the bruise. So I lied. I suspected they didn’t believe me, but I would not yield and they let it go.
The next incident was my junior year of high school. We had a few emergency foster kids staying with us at the time (because that is what 4 people living in a single-wide mobile home needed – a few more troubled kids!). I was on the phone (we always had a kitchen phone with a extra long cord) with my work and they were asking me if I could switch schedules. I was standing at the sliding glass door looking out at my mom who was giving the foster kids haircuts outside and my stepdad was behind me. He was trying to get my attention for some reason, and kept pinching my ass (this was a regular thing that I never appreciated – yes lots to unpack there) and without turning around I batted his hand away. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back being slapped and told that I was in trouble for “hitting” him. Mind, I was still on the phone – super awkward and embarrassing in addition to being generally confusing.
This out of nowhere rage was very scary and quite frequent and not to be challenged.
Things would be easy and light and then take a very dark turn so fast you had no idea what happened. I was adept at diffusing the situation, getting very submissive and contrite- quickly. Absorbing the anger and shock and taking blame to attempt de-escalation. I lived much of my life emotionally prepared for things to flip from fun to scary.
As I processed my prone situation, I employed the playbook, apologize and clarify that I had not intended to hit him. I left the room, changed clothes and went into work. I spent my workday doing mental calculations on how I would move out, making a plan to sort out how to get emancipated status. A real line had been crossed and I knew this was the moment where I could not let pass – I would not be the kind of person who allowed myself to be [physically] abused.
When I got home my mom pulled me aside and shared that she and my sister were making plans to move out already and asked me if I could wait a few weeks for them. And just like that, my mom, sister and I stepped out to begin a new life together. One that helped us live in peace. While I’m pretty sure none of us have fully processed our trauma, it did give us a new page to tell ourselves a different story of how we wanted to live in the world.
This week I watched a really fun move “Wicked Little Letters” honestly worth it for the swearing alone. The abusive father hit WAY too close to home.
“…the movie, which extends a sympathetic ear to pretty much everyone involved, save for Spall’s abusive patriarch. He’s here to embody the spirit-crushing, old world Christian order opposed to free spirits like Rose. (His performance is so scary it sometimes upends the picture’s amiable air, like he walked in from a Mike Leigh movie or something.)”
As I watched the outstanding performance of Olivia Coleman trying to predict how her response would be received by her father, I recognized my own trauma.
I have no real purpose in writing this down, outside the understanding that I owe it to myself to say out loud that it was not right that I had to learn to navigate this kind of behavior at such a young age. I recognize that the only way to really heal from generational trauma is to acknowledge and deal with it. This is a gift I am giving to myself and one I’m sharing in case it’s helpful to anyone else who has their own work to do.
While I no longer read the bible every night, I do recognize wisdom when I see it. I also am so grateful that I have been able to build a life filled with love and joy and where I feel safe to experience all my feelings without fear. I know that I have work to do to learn how to better express anger, but I have also experienced enough life to know that hurt people hurt people.
Much of the abuse I experienced was from someone who didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to process frustration, disappointment and fear. I choose to confront my own pain, to break the cycle of shame that comes from experiencing abuse at a young age, and to shed the suffering as I move into this next chapter with much less baggage.
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