Ruminations
Driving home from spending time with Jenny's family, we repeatedly had a conversation about how devalued Jenny felt when no one asked her about her work that she wasn't important and that her worth was devalued. In their eyes, she would say, I am just a teacher. I would reassure her that her work was the most important work any of us did, and that teachers have historically been paid less because the workplace is so gendered. She looked for insult at each successive visit at any family event, and took greater umbrage.
It is absolutely true that other people's work would be discussed, and that it was rare that we would discuss Jenny's work. I don't know why that is, but it was a thing. I can say that when she was a new teacher she would regale all of us with stories, like when one of her students in her special ed class, would routinely pull his pants down and eat his flaking penis skin and how she dealt with it. As time went on, and maybe because she became more inured to the weird things that would happen, she told fewer and then really no stories. She would often sit quietly as we would talk about people's work lives. She was very clear, when driving home, or in post-family discussions when we were alone at our Renton home (I can see it so clearly in my mind's eye), that she should be the most highly paid, that she should be the most respected because of the work she did. While I agreed with the latter and sympathetic to the former, it struck me as odd even then. She had no idea what other people's work involved, but with the certitude of the newly-converted zealot, she would explain to me over and again why she was being ill-used in this world by not getting the respect she demanded and in her mind's eye, deserved. It is difficult to make this clear to the reader how this theme ran through her life. That she was directing contemptuous and disgusted emotion toward all the others, including me, is clear today. But, ostrich that I was, I really looked at it through a prism of raging against a system that was unfair. If that was the basis of her rage, she could have opted out of that system and used her second teaching degree (top of her class) from Columbia University's Teacher's College, and go be a corporate trainer. The career prospects, pay and respect would be much different, and would tick off all the boxes. When suggested by me repeatedly (usually when she was angry I didn't make enough money and demanded I find a better paying job), she would reject the suggestion out of hand. She expected people to be naturally interested
The idea that my obsessive compulsive and overtly ruminating self believes: not only did my wife have co-occuring disorders, depression and BPD, she also shared her father's narcissism. Whether it was the disorder or not, I can't say. Dr. Ramani has a great talk on this. But it may be, as Dr. Otto Kernberg posited years ago, that the overlap--which is not rare--reflects that we have categorized these disorders incorrectly. Narcissism isn't co-occuring, then, but part of the disorder itself. Me, I'm no analyst. I just know that Jenny had it rough.
Jenny told me, after I came home from New York with depression in 1998 (before returning back to school the next fall), this is three or four months after we were
She did come and rescue me and get me home, and she didn't leave me. I made it through. That I recognized the empathy deficit in both instances, but didn't connect the dots, really says more about my ability to ignore dysfunction than anything else. Off to work.
I'm gobsmacked at her comments, (especially around the depression in NY). We were closer then and I knew about some of your experience, but not this. Or maybe you did say something and my early-20s self didn't know how to take this in. In any case, my heart goes out to then you, so alone; as well as now-you, processing many years of that.
ReplyDeleteIt makes me think of the way we learn how we deserve to be treated as kids. To the young mind, unmet needs are never the fault of our parents/caregivers. To find fault in them, at a time when we are so utterly dependent upon them for survival, is a cognitive impossibility. At that age, recognizing our grownups' faults as a part of our reality -- as an explanation for our unmet needs -- requires a child to accept a kind of hopeless abandonment that doesn't seem survivable. It is just too painful to comprehend. So we find other ways of explaining it to ourselves.
"If I were just smarter, they'd love me." "If I'm perfect I won't need more compassion." "They'll let me in if I'm funnier." "I can't be so sensitive this time or he won't want to spend time with me." We learn to explain the treatment that we get from others as something we deserve, and if only we'd do X differently, they'd treat us differently. It's a neat bit of mental gymnastics that allows us to retain a shred of hope for a different future, and, most importantly, a sense of control over that oneway future idyll. It allows us to believe that "I could be loved, if I just hide enough, work hard enough."
You marvel at your ability to ignore dysfunction... but I'm curious about whether there was a time in your young life when you might have been well-served by a belief that you, as-is, were not worthy of compassion and empathy (or friendship?). Believing ourselves to be worthy of this treatment is a lot easier than demanding something different if we have reason to believe we'll be left alone after making such demands. Was there a time -- before Jenny -- when such a belief protected you from a kind of emotional exile? (Injuries that might lead to these beliefs don't even have to be big-T Traumas, especially for such sensitive, deep thinking souls as you and I.)
If so, then I don't know how you'd do anything *other* than ignore (accept) that dysfunction. To do anything else would be too much cognitive dissonance. It would require you to topple a whole system of beliefs (a system which had, at one time, as far as your amygdala is concerned, saved you from certain death in exile). It would have required you to make incredibly brave changes to your identity and relationships, and even daily habits. All at a time when you were quite vulnerable, without enough neurotransmitters to manage the tasks of daily living, let alone take on such a monumental project.
I was raised by a bipolar binge alcoholic single mother. She wasn't diagnosed as bipolar until the new millennium. We knew she was a drunk. She was often drunk on weekends, and her alcoholic boyfriend lived with us. She explicitly told us she was using him to buy a home, and that men were all terrible. It was a mantra. As the youngest and the only boy, i was the golden child, because my feminist mother had terribly antiquated views of how girls were supposed to behave. Her lack of being home meant my middle sister raised ourselves and made terrible decisions unchecked. By the time she tried to intervene, my mother was far too late. My middle sister was also incredibly violent, and would beat me routinely--and by routinely that means daily. She once pinned me up against a wall and took a butcher's knife and thrust it at my chest repeatedly, turning the blade just before it hit my chest. She beat me with a vacuum cleaner pipe, hot wheels tracks, broom sticks. She would dig her finger nails into my skin for long periods of time, staring at me with a hatred I can't describe.I have scars on my hands and arms even today. Meanwhile, my mom just wasn't around much of the time. She used to get drunk and pick fights with her barroom brawler boyfriend, as if she had a death wish. He threw a typewriter at her once--an antique, and it broke into a dozen pieces. Another time he threw a spice jar at her and she ducked. The jar hit the wall and left a perfect imprint of its base in the wall.
DeleteSo yeah, a bit of childhood trauma. I expect I will never date again, given the history and the choices I made after leaving home. The irony of this home life is that my mother, much like Jenny, was beloved in the community. First, in her career in the public schools, where she did intervention in homes with child abuse (no irony there, Jess), and then in her work with people with terminal diseases, ALS and muscular dystrophy. She was a saint in the eyes of many, or at least on the road to canonization. I'm not sure Mic Jagger will get more people at his funeral.
I knew my childhood was not a normal childhood. It took until 2020, when I told the following story, for me to hear my therapist clearly tell me that I was emotionally abused. We were at a party at a friend--a coworker of my mom's in Laurelhurst. My mom got too drunk very quickly. It was a cocktail party, I suppose. I was in third or fourth grade, so I don't really know. We had to leave. My mom got my sisters and I in the car. We had to get to Renton. My mom could barely walk. About every block or so, once we left, my mom pulled over to throw up. She was ranting and raving at us the entire time about how much she hated us, how she wished she would have put us up for adoption. I can still hear her, it was rather hurtful. (I had a brother, I learned the year my mom died, who she had put up for adoption 3 or 4 years before I arrived--so there's that).
You deserved better, my friend. And your ability to come through all that as functional as you have been is a marvel. Sending hugs and wishes for healing to you.
DeleteI’m so glad you have a therapist to help you make sense of your experiences. Have you considered somatic therapy? I’ve done talk therapy forever and still do. It’s done a lot for me. But I’ve made some of my biggest leaps in processing developmental trauma through somatic therapy. I think my tendency towards cognitive (over)analysis often makes it hard for the talk therapist to extricate me from my own thought labyrinth. Thoughts and language are my turf and it’s hard for the therapist to move me out of my heavily myelinated ruts. My experience in the body, however, is a black box to me. The body is the somatic therapist’s turf, and I am much more susceptible to their guidance. And some people believe that the body is the main path to liberation from trauma (Body Keeps the Score, etc).