(A sequel to my previous posts
"Fragments of PTSD" and
"Fragments of PTSD II")
(This post is a little rough. My excuse is that it's a particularly hot topic for me, so it's hard to think straight about it.)
One of the things I've been spending a lot of time trying to explain or even describe, even to myself, is a certain feeling that comes up that I am, for lack of a better way to say it, so awful I belong in Hell, or maybe that I've already gone over the edge of the cliff and am falling into Hell. Or maybe that, without knowing it or being able to know it, I'm on the edge of that cliff and won't realize I've gone over the edge until I land in the pits of fire. Or something. It's a terror or dread of something unnamed and unimaginable that is far, far worse than dying. In fact, when this hits me, I wish someone would kill me so I wouldn't have to feel this any more.
It seems to hit me when I'm criticized, especially if the criticism seems to be judgemental. When they imply or say that I've broken some rule that everyone knows about and so I should have known and there's no excuse for my crime. But sometimes I seem to supply the judgement myself. And sometimes I supply the criticism, too. And sometimes it just hits me out of the blue, like the ghost of Alexander's stepfather at the end of Ingmar Bergman's film
Fanny and Alexander.
It would make sense for me to feel this way if I'd grown up in a stern, fundamentalist religion, but we were members of an Episcopal church which was more of a social club than a religion. I was mostly ignored, like sparrows in Times Square, which was better treatment than I go most places. It's just that the sense of insecurity and dread I feel is most like the sort of terror Jonathan Edwards was trying to evoke in his famous sermon.
To the extent I can remember how people reacted when I did something wrong (and it seemed like I was
always doing something wrong), I remember feeling devastated. It always felt like they thought that I
did know better but, for some perverse reason that I presumably was refusing to explain, was doing it on purpose, and after a while I got to believe it. Frequently I was asked, "don't you
know better than to ...?" Sometimes I did, afterwards anyway, and sometimes I didn't, but I knew better than to say anything in response. My father had this way of being stiff with anger and expressing his corrections as "don't you ever ...." My mother would act hurt and disappointed. The headmaster at That Awful School always sounded like the voice of God at Judgement day. Sometimes people would say sympathetic words, but always in an attempt to get me to say why I was so bad or see how bad I was, so I soon came to see "sympathy" as simply another way to stick the knife in. I don't recall anyone having compassion on me or seriously try to understand what it was like to be me; it seemed like I didn't deserve anything but punishment and condemnation. It was always just "stop being difficult, do what we expect you to do (and don't do what we expect you not to."
One thing that happened a number of times was when I would be among adults outside the family, enjoying myself with them, and then when my parents took me away from them, they'd explain to me how I had really offended the adults or behaved in a terrible way, implying that they thought I was a bad kid. So I learned that my own judgement in social situations was never to be relied upon. Not that anyone ever tried to help me figure out what the "right thing" might be. It has taken me decades of therapy, not to mention hard experience, to discover that my intuitions about things are actually pretty reliable; at least, with people who aren't my family.
Nowadays I ask myself why I took all this to heart so much. After all, a lot of children in my position become defiant and even take pride in being told off so much. My best guess is that it comes from the early experience of abandonment, reinforced by the times throughout my life when my parents weren't there for me when I needed them or even did something to make me feel stupid for having wanted them to help me. I imagine that the nameless terror I feel is the terror an infant feels when their only source of security disappears, and that terror never went away because it kept getting triggered. I learned that no one could be relied upon to keep me safe, not even me. And, with time, that terror morphed into a sense of being bad or defective (and intense pain.) Because obviously there was something wrong with me (and plenty of people rhetorically asked me, "what's
wrong with you?") and I deserved to feel awful.
Even now, when someone comes on judgemental to me, I get triggered and freeze up, unable to do or say much of anything. I need time to myself, with no one around, to build my self back up enough to be able to function again. But the judgemental types often won't give you that space.
