Recovery: It's More A Verb Than A Noun (Part 1)

Prologue

I've been contemplating -- and outlining -- this article for a couple of weeks, and trying to find the time (a sustained period when I can work non-stop) to write it. Various other projects come about which get in the way of its being addressed, and then, today, when I wanted to finally tackle it, my health took a nasty turn. But it's that kind of 'health issue' that is involved with the issue of recovery itself.

I used some therapeutic saline (given by my eye doctor) to add moisture to my eye, much like most people use eye drops. He told me that, given that it is 'pure' liquid, the side-effects would be so much more tolerable than eye drops with chemicals in them (the most majority on the market). Mmmm…. Yes and no. The problem is that, as a person who suffers from PTSD, and who therefore has quite 'taxed' adrenal glands, I tend to have hypersensitive reactions to medications, foods, materials, liquids, etc. that don't even affect other people. That said, I put a couple of drops of the saline in my eye last night, and for the last 18 hours my GI tract has truly been 'blown out' with serious nausea. Thankfully, for me, Maalox is kind of a 'magical elixir', as it tends to be the one medication that I can tolerate, though even it makes me frightfully nauseous for the first 45 minutes after ingesting it. So, I've taken two doses today, 'babied' my stomach, and slowly I'm recovering. But, of course, now I have the other issue, in that my eyes are drying out and I have no solution that I can tolerate. One of the many serious dilemmas that survivors of traumatic abuse face! Damned if you do, damned if you don't….

Anyway, let me get back to the subject at hand. I want to write this article about recovery, and I realize that, both due to chronic health issues, and the shear volume of topics I want to address, I need to write it as a multi-part article. Hence, here is Part 1.

Recovery

The title I have chosen for this article refers to something that arose for me recently, as I've slowly healed from my own traumatic childhood sexual and physical abuse, and which I've observed in other survivors, both whom I've personally talked to, or have read about. That is: that often we talk about recovery from traumatic abuse as though we "had recovered" from the abuse, as though an 'end point' had been reached. As though after years of working diligently on our emotional recovery, we had 'graduated' into the light of true understanding.

And what I've realized, after more than 30 years of my own mental health recovery work, is that I'm not so much reaching a point of recovery, as continually being engaged in recovering. As in the 'action' of living life that leads toward recovery, rather than reaching a destination of 'being recovered'.

Hence, what I want to do in this article, and subsequent ones under the same title, is address 'aspects' of the process of recovery: what I've learned, what expectations I've had and how my life has taught me whether those expectations are realistic or illusionary. I will do this by using a subtitle for each subject area and then giving my response to the subject. So, here goes.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood

Well, actually, it is too late. Childhood 'happened', it's in the past. Like virginity, you can only experience it once. If it was loving or if it was horrific, it's past and gone. On the other hand, what you can do, as an adult, is work with the 'inner child' who experienced the trauma -- and continues to experience it, in dissociative flashbacks and triggering mechanisms, fairly often.

The child whom you were experienced trauma; he or she had to deal with that in whatever way was available to them. Often the options were extremely limited, and many times our inability to defend ourselves (especially when we were infants or very young children) has resulted in feelings of shame. That we now know -- with good mental health intervention -- that it 'wasn't our fault', that it had to do with the dysfunctional behavior and unresolved emotional traumas of our so-called caregivers [parents, siblings, teachers, priests/religious personnel, the weird pervert in the park, or whomever subjected us to traumatic abuse] is helpful, and allows us to move toward resolution of the initial abuse. But have a happy childhood? Not really. Nice phrase, fine sentiments, but not realistic. It is too late to have a happy childhood, but it's not too late to help that frightened child, who experienced that traumatic abuse, to move toward 'knowing' that there is an adult who can come to his or her aid, now, in the present. That's what healing is about: not changing the past, but healing in the present, in the best ways that are available to us, hopefully with the assistance of competent mental health providers, friends, loving partners, and personal self-confidence. No easy task, but possible 'in the here and now'.

If I had only met my parents' expectations, they would have loved me

Very, very unlikely! Our parents are living out and through their own emotional issues. As the cliche goes, people have to take a driving test to take a vehicle on the roads, but no one has to take a parenting test in order to produce children. (And, frankly, who would conduct the training and test, who didn't have their own issues to confront? Which doesn't mean some helpful 'parenting training' wouldn't, indeed, help a lot of prospective parents.) To small children, our parents are 'like gods': they control every aspect of our lives, they rule our worlds, and they are a lot bigger than we are.

Which is fine, except when those parents decide -- either consciously, because they see their children as 'property' or  'chattel', to do with as they so choose, or unconsciously, because they are acting out their own unresolved emotional traumas -- to engage in sexual, emotional, religious, or physical abuse of their children. No matter how hard those of us who are survivors of abuse tried as children to meet our parents' expectations, and therefore not be subjected to that abuse, we couldn't 'measure up'. This was primarily because what was considered appropriate behavior today -- or even an hour ago -- is tomorrow, or the next hour, considered to be inappropriate behavior. 

And, of course, it really has little to do with anything we are doing, it has far more to do with the 'crazy-making' discipline system of our parents. Abuse is abuse and there is no way, in most cases, to escape it. Our parents (or other caregivers) were bound and determined to 'get what they wanted' and whether that resulted in competent child-raising is rather beside the point. We were going to be abused, no matter how much or how little we met our parents' expectations-of-the-moment; it was about them, not about us. 

And that is a hard lesson to learn, as we grow older. We often end up trying to meet the expectations of our intimate partners, or our supervisors, or our teachers, or almost any other person with whom we interact, instead of realizing that meeting our own expectations (once we figure out what those are, and once we construct ones that lead to our emotional and sexual healing) is a far more important and critical 'life lesson'.

If I were the other gender, I would have been (or would be now) safe

Unfortunately, that's a bit of 'magical thinking'. What cross-gender abuse studies have consistently shown is that boys often think that if they could have been female, they would not have been beaten or raped, and girls often believe that if they had been boys, they could have adequately defended themselves from rape or other abuse. And, it simply isn't true. Being a different gender would not have changed the abuse. As most rape crisis counselors point out, sexual abuse is an issue of power, not sex. Yes, the perpetrator is 'getting a sexual charge' or 'obtaining a sexual release' when perpetrating the rape of a child, but that's not why they are doing it. Adults can obtain sexual release through other means -- such as masturbation or sex with other adults, as two examples -- that do not involve the abuse of children. Pedophiles may have diseased minds and be quite adolescent in their understanding of adult sexuality, but I would suspect (though I'm not an expert in this area, by any means) they know that the abuse of children is not only criminal, but has little to do with the well-being of the child, no matter how much they twist the 'concept of love' to obtain their dysfunctional outcomes.

I surely thought, as a boy child, that if only I had been a girl, I would have been loved by my parents. But I now know, as an adult, that if I had been a girl, I still would have been raped by my parents, and frankly, I surely would not have had access to any more of an objectively 'true love' than I was as a boy child. My father, in particular, thousands of times stated "I only beat you because I love you". Really?? Under that rationale, I would have been far better off to have been 'loved' a lot less!

Now, from my perspective, this is different from the issue of 'gender dysphoria', where children of one sex have, since childhood, a deep-seated sense of 'being the wrong gender'. I've read numerous studies of about transsexuality and have read over 20 autobiographies written primarily by transsexual females, and a few written by transsexual males, and I feel strongly that there can definitely be 'good and logical reasons' why having a sex-change, when a person reaches adolescence or later, 'makes good sense'. But I also know that some children are motivated in that direction by sexual child abuse, which, when competently addressed, allows them to make other choices which are less socially and sexually traumatic. (No matter how much many studies say trans-people are 'more satisfied with themselves' post sex-change, in spite of the often rampant social and cultural discrimination and violence that they end up experiencing, such as change is, nonetheless, often wrought with serious physical, sexual, and emotional disruptions on a somatic and psychological level, at least initially.)

So, what I'm addressing here is not gender dysphoria, but the illusion that "if I were only the other sex, I would have been safe". I posit that often that simply is not true; abuse, especially sexual abuse, would likely have been perpetrated regardless of one's sex. Power is the issue, not sex, and as a result, the sex of the child is secondary to the abuse of power by the 'caregiver'. Sad, but often true.

The other point is that when we are small children, we are truly defenseless, regardless of gender. I strongly suspect that I was raped as an infant, and my being a boy didn't help me nor allow me to defend myself anymore than if I had been a girl. Small children are quite simply at the mercy of their 'caregivers' (somehow there must be a better and more accurate term here -- maybe 'dysfunctional parental perpetrators').

I'd rather have had any other life, than the one in which I was terrorized

While the sentiment is quite understandable, it isn't very operational. Any other life? My intimate partner and I, over the past month, watched a PBS video series, Russia At War, which covered not only Russia during WWII, but the whole period of Stalin's rule of the U.S.S.R. My God, the horror, violence, duplicity, treachery, terror, and 'no way out' for the people living in Russia! Truly, damed if you do, damned if you don't!! People who had done nothing wrong at all were brought to trial on trumped-up, completely fabricated charges, and thrown into forced labor camps and gulags for long periods of time (often, with the intent that they would not live through the experience) long before the Nazis invaded Russia. Then all the extermination of the Germans during WWII, followed by Stalin being paranoid about the Russian prisoners of the Nazis (they had been exposed to outside ideas), who following the end of the war were thrown into prison by their own government!

My point is that, truly, sometimes bad things happen to good people, for no defensible reason. The only rationale being the insanity of madmen, or racists, or people who want what you have for themselves, at any cost, including your life. So, while childhood sexual, physical, emotional, and religious trauma is horrible [frankly, if you're the one experiencing it, it surely feels like a holocaust], there can be and have been far worse situations people have been put into that make your own abuse seem trivial by comparison.

That's not to say, by any means at all, that childhood sexual and physical abuse is a trivial matter. It isn't, by any stretch of the imagination. I know that, and every survivor of such abuse and competent mental health providers, know that it's a horrible existence. My only point is that, no matter how horrible it was (or continues to be, due to ongoing abuse or dissociative flashbacks) it was the life that you had and frankly it's the one you have to deal with, face up to, and heal from. Wishing you had lived another life isn't very helpful. Wishful thinking and dreaming sometimes help to relieve the stress, but such fantasies don't help resolve the issues at hand. This is the life you were born into, no matter how dysfunctional it was or continues to be, and wishing you had another life doesn't lead to a solution-orientation. There truly can be worse lives to live, and thank god you didn't have to live those. What you did live through was bad enough, all by itself. 

No one will ever love me; I'm not deserving of love

That was surely a feeling I had as I grew up. Coming from a family where 'love' meant 'sexual and physical trauma and emotional neglect' (often, though not always -- my parents did try, at times, to show nurturing love; that supportive behavior, though, was often cruelly trampled by their other dysfunctional behaviors) I doubted, as I entered adulthood, that I was ever going to find nurturing love. And frankly, didn't quite know what to look for, since I had only rarely experienced it as a child.

But, thankfully, it turned out to be an illusion. A quite negative illusion, to be sure; but slowly, with the assistance of my mental health therapists, I gained trust in people around me and made better determinations about whom to trust and whom to avoid. One of the major 'lessons' we learn as survivors of childhood sexual abuse is (1) that our only 'human value' is as a sexual object for use by others [with our own sexual pleasure a profoundly secondary issue, both to our partners and to ourselves], and (2) that, since we were victimized by our parents, we continue to 'act out of that victimhood', almost encouraging others to victimize us further. Now, I'm not saying that we are being consciously masochistic; what I'm referring to is that having been raised in an environment where our victimization was real, we often don't know 'how' to behave in any other way.

For a very long time (until I was in my late 30's), I rarely had any idea how to ask for or manifest an intimate outcome that would not result in my further sexual or emotional victimization by my partners (or in my emotionally victimizing my partners, which is the other side of the same coin). I'm also now aware, looking back, that I often probably chose female partners who were themselves sexual abuse survivors. After all, that's the 'sense of the world' that I was used to myself. [Like the old psychological observation that if you're in a room of 100 people, and most are reasonably healthy emotionally, the one you'll pick for a partner is one of the few who are equally dysfunctional as yourself, because 'that's what you're used to'.] But, as I slowly gained a stronger 'sense of self', as I healed more of my 'open emotional wounds', I started attracting more healthy people into my orbit.

To further the 'orbit' cliche, I know from my study of cosmology that the larger a celestial object, the greater its gravitational pull. The problem for myself (and I suspect the problem for many sexual, emotional, and physical trauma survivors, who are still suffering from rampant PTSD) was that I had no deep 'sense' of an emotional center. I had no 'core' upon which to start building 'an emotional mass that would then start attracting healthy people into my orbit'. I often felt like there was no 'center in my heart' from which I could move into the world. And therefore, it took many years of emotional recovery work to construct, almost 'whole-cloth', a 'self of sense' that was competent and felt 'like me', at least a 'me' that I felt comfortable with and upon which I could begin to build a 'solid core'.

For now, that's enough

As I said at the start of this article, I have many subjects to discuss under the title of 'recovery', so it's not like I'm going to run out of material! But I am running out of energy, for now. So, I will stop soon, and return to this subject at a later time, with more 'parts' to this article.

In closing, for now, let me reiterate that the journey of recovery for sexual, physical, emotional, and religious trauma survivors, and for anyone experiencing PTSD, including warfare-related mental trauma, is about 'healing' as an active, ongoing process, not an 'end point' where one reaches a conclusion and then stops.

At my Unitarian congregation here in St. Louis, I'm the Chair of the Public Relations Committee. For our church 'slogan', we've chosen "The Search Is The Answer". By that, we mean that the essence of truth is that one needs to search for it. If at any point, you stop searching, you've lost truth, because what is important is the search, and the ongoing, continual, life-long search. "The Truth" is continually changing, we as individuals are continually changing, the world in which we live is continually changing -- as the paradoxical spiritual phrase goes "the most constant, never-changing reality in life is change".

Hence, for me, recovery is about an active, ongoing, continual quest for healing and emotional resolution. It doesn't have an end point, except our death, and we have no idea if that's truly 'the end' of the search; we only know it's the end of the search on this plane of existence. But for practical reasons, let's say that while I'm around now, in this world, recovery will continue. Exhausting, to be sure, but what else is there? Once you're on the journey, you're on the journey. There's no getting 'off', and there's no going back. And surely, after all this work, I don't want to go back to the older, more frightful world I inhabited.

So, onward. On to the next realization, the next breakthrough of this most important life work, whatever that may be.