Coping with Cruelty

This essay is a breakdown of the main coping mechanisms I developed in childhood in order to survive.

#1 Disassociation

Infant Anxiety

“We know now that when infants are frightened and not soothed, the biological response to fear creates a certain shutdown. And in that shutdown, which children and infants are not meant to experience on a regular, ongoing basis, a pattern of loneliness begins. If we’re not tended to in those earliest months of life when we experience let’s say something as benign as hunger and we cry out but no one’s there, and we’re left alone to cry in the crib because that’s supposed to make us “independent”, when in fact, what that makes is a child who is going to learn how to be alone. And because being alone is intolerable for infants and children, it’s a death threat, the body will disassociate. The body will disconnect from itself and its surroundings and play possum, go numb.” — Kelly McDaniel

Disassociation is a common coping mechanism for children who live in abusive and neglectful environments. Leaving the body is one of the only things you can do when you have no control over your surroundings. I don’t have much to say about it because when you’re disassociated you don’t remember much. As an adult I think of it as being “spaced out”. When you’re body is there but mentally you’re somewhere else. It’s a state of non-feeling. I’ve heard people describe it as feeling like they are not “real” and I would agree with that explanation. It’s like pretending you don’t exist. I remember I used to “play” like I was “invisible”, which I understand to be a child’s way of saying “not real”. Kelly McDaniel explains it as “disappearing” which I think is another great way to describe it:

“The child learned early on, if I am going to survive in this family system I am going to have to disappear. And that disappearing act is so thorough that the self doesn’t develop. And this is also why there can be so much ease and comfort with dissociative states. There is a lot of dissociating that goes on when we have to swallow who we are and not be present because it’s just too unbearable.”

#2 Sucking, My Earliest Addiction

“Mix loneliness and fear and it’s a breeding ground for addiction to grow.”- Kelly McDaniel

“Thumb-sucking has been considered an activity that serves as an adaptive function by providing stimulation or self-soothing.”

“Thumb sucking is a natural, instinctive behavior that provides comfort. Babies and children begin sucking their thumbs as a reflex, making them feel secure and safe. Thumb sucking could also be a response to trauma. Psychological trauma is a mental and physical response to events a person finds extremely stressful.”

Some kids suck on their thumbs, I sucked on my right pointer finger. My first (of many) addiction(s).

So here I was, a little disassociated baby playing possum, and at some point in my baby journey, I found my finger and my belly button. I would suck on my finger with one hand and with the other hand, I would “play” with my belly button (I feel like I was “hanging on” to my belly button but people in my family would say, “there she is, ‘playing’ with her belly button again”). Nearly every single picture I’ve ever seen of myself as a baby and small child, I have one finger in my mouth and another in my belly button. I still have a scar on my pointer finger where my tooth would hook in. When I was a freshman in high school I had to have tooth surgery and braces because the permanent tooth behind the baby tooth that hooked into my finger began to grow horizontally, it couldn’t grow downward because my finger was there all the time. The placement of my finger was preventing the permanent tooth from coming down. What I remember about this is how deeply I was shamed and how my mother bought this “poison” (that’s what I called it) and painted it on my finger to try and get me to stop. It tasted awful and it was hard to scrub off but I always managed to find a way to get it off. I don’t remember when I stopped but I think it was because I was getting to a certain age and felt embarrassed.

“According to Chakra or Energy healing, the index finger is associated with the air element, the large intestine, and the deep meridian of the stomach. It is also connected to the Anahata Chakra (heart), responsible for balance, serenity, and intuition.”

Interesting that I chose the finger associated with the Heart Chakra.

#3 Fantasy/Overlay

“Imagine a person is living in a prison cell and has no way of getting out of that prison cell and the reality of being inside that prison cell is just too much for them. When this is the case imagine that a coping technique they use is a game of pretend. They start to create a fantasy, an overlay if you will, that makes that prison a palace. It is not really a game though because their mental and emotional survival depends on it. This pretend reality sits over actual reality like an overlay.” — Teal Swan

After I learned how to leave my body, and found my finger and belly button, I was introduced to Disney movies. My papa (mom’s dad) gave me the entire Disney VHS collection. There was a TV in my room and I would suck on my finger with one hand, holding on to my belly button with the other hand while watching Disney. This was my safe place. Cinderella, Beauty & The Beast & The Little Mermaid were my favorites. I love how in all of these there is the unhappy environment element and then a prince who comes and takes you away to an entirely new place, never to return again. This is where I got my idea of what love was, from Disney. This was the birth of my Rescue Fantasy.

When I got older my favorite movies were A Little Princess & The Secret Garden. Both are about strong girls who refused to let meanness win.

THE FALSE MIRROR

“Without intimacy in childhood, we don’t develop a sense of who we are. We come to know ourselves as children through reflection. What that means is the reactions we are getting from other people, or even them mirroring the way we feel, “Oh, you feel sad right now. Let’s meet the reality that you’re in right now”, this lets us know who we are. So obviously if there is an absence of that we don’t develop a sense of self. If it’s particularly bad mirroring we get, we develop a negative sense of self.” — Teal Swan

The only positive reflection I remember receiving as a child was that I was “pretty”. Another message I received as a young girl was that the best thing that can happen for a pretty girl like me was to find a rich guy to marry. I remember this making me feel sad, I remember wanting to be loved for my heart. But was my heart admired? My sensitivity? My strong will? My vibrant spirit? My creativity? Nope. In fact all of my greatest gifts are what were most shamed. I have what they call The Golden Shadow. What I hide most is my light because my light is what was most shamed as a child. “Smart Ass” is a term I remember. It was considered a negative term. “Don’t ask questions”, “Do what you’re told”, “Be quiet”, “stop being so sensitive”, “don’t use that voice”, “Children should be seen and not heard”, “Don’t talk back”, “Who do you think you are”, “People only like you because you’re pretty”, “You’re conceited”, “Don’t be a show-off!”, “You just want everyone else to feel bad”… Expressing my creativity, vulnerability, talents & perspectives always seemed to get me in trouble. I learned that being myself caused shame, rejection, punishment, loss, pain & grief. I learned that if I was myself then I would get hurt.

Gaslighting also comes into play here- I’m doing an entirely separate essay on gaslighting because there’s A LOT to say but here’s an excerpt from my gaslighting essay:

My mother Gaslit me, telling me she didn’t say the thing she said, didn’t do the thing she did, and didn’t feel the way she felt. She certainly didn’t acknowledge how I felt. My mother’s big thing was that she wanted desperately to be seen as a “good mother”, she wanted desperately to be seen as “good”. She couldn’t say, “I am struggling with being a mother and I need help” so instead she made my emotions bad and wrong. I was too needy, I was too sensitive, I was making that up, I was a liar, I was a bad kid. Her lies went from little, like lying about how much something cost, to bigger, like telling my dad we went to go see a movie that day when we didn’t or telling her friends, or our family members, that she read books to me every night when she didn’t. She would even make up things like what my favorite book or movie was or whether or not I liked a certain kind of food… she was just making up this entire story about who I was and what our life was like.

The main messages I received when I was young were “Shut the fuck up and make us look good”, “No one cares who you are or what you want”, and “you’re a bad, ungrateful kid”. My three core beliefs were “I’m bad, I don’t deserve love and not only do I not deserve love but love doesn’t even exist”. I also developed the belief that I don’t have needs.

As I got older I expanded my movie horizons past Disney and began to study characters from other movies, tv shows and books. I became a master mimicker. An actress of sorts. I could probably win an Oscar. This became my main survival pathway, the way I made it through the world. I picked different characters who I felt I would want to be like (and also who I felt would be accepted/safe) & made them my own. I chose characters for other people, too, projecting onto people who I’d like them to be rather than who they actually were.

Katherine May put it like this in her book, The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk In The Wild To Find Her Way Home:

“But I was a master by then of the surface appearance, I had watched, carefully, the way that other people behaved and mimicked it precisely. I had all the social errors and graces, encouraging smiles, and the kind inquiries and I could chase the lineage of each of them back to the person I stole them from.”

Pretending I didn’t exist (dissociating) by ignoring my pain and intuition (gaslighting myself) while acting like I was someone else and pretending other people were different from who they were, too, (fantasy/overlay) and numbing my body (addiction) was how I got through life. My main desire was to find someone (a man) who would take care of me. The subconscious programming I received through media around the idea of the Rescue Fantasy, that someone was going to come along and save me, is what I thought was going to happen for me in my life. I believed I was going to be rescued because as a child, I thought that’s what I deserved.

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful & The Damned

Spoiler Alert: You are the only one who can rescue yourself ;)