A Timeline of Lessons (2012)

Re-posted from a closed blog.

(I came across this while looking through a folder. I have left it as is and thought it worth sharing even though I had considered this blog closed. I think it shows an insight into what it is to be raised in an abusive home and can only hope the reader will pause to consider their own situations for what good it might lead to. Non-physical abuse is very insidious - it doesn't leave blatant marks, but it marks just the same. Please guard your own actions from doing that to anyone, yourself included. And if you realize there are parallels in the life of someone you know, please be there to lift, help, support them through, and if possible away from, the nightmare. Just as I always wished someone would do for me.)

  

When I was youngest, you taught me that no matter how hard I tried to be good, I'd have to try harder than everyone else to even have a  prayer. 

  

You also taught me that for every thing I did wrong, the value of my soul would shrink and nothing could every make it better. 

  

You'd never think it, but listening to your hateful words about your brothers and parents taught me that your saying you 'loved' someone meant nothing. 

  

I learned that there was no point in telling anyone that you were mean because no one would believe me or care because you told me so. 

  

A little older and a big, yet innocent, mistake later and you taught me that even horrible criminals would think I deserved to die and they would want to kill me if they knew and would kill me if I were older. 

  

That Christmas you taught me that I was not worth as much as anyone else in the family. 

  

During these years  you taught me that everything had to be done exactly how you said to do it even if it was harder your way and didn't make sense and didn't even matter how the bathroom sink was  cleaned so long as it got cleaned… 

  

Then we moved and you were around a lot more. 

  

And I learned that you got mad at me for daring to sleep when you were mad at me for something else. 

  

I learned that anything that made you unhappy could be my fault. 

  

I learned that I could get in trouble for not knowing what you wanted me to do even if you never told me. 

  

I learned that I would be in worse trouble if someone helped me do something you had secretly planned as punishment. 

  

I learned that being darn good wasn't good enough - I had to be the best and I had to remember I was  nothing at the same time. 

  

I learned that if I ever had the audacity to speak like I had a claim on something you promised me, you would take it away so I would know better. 

  

So I learned not to want or expect anything because it would just be used against me. 

  

I learned to convince myself that I must be nothing - a slave - for if a slave, then nothing wrong could be done against me since, by definition, a slave has no rights to violate in the first place. 

  

I learned that you loved the animals more than you loved me, even though you could make them yelp and scream and cry like you couldn't get away with doing to us. 

  

I learned how to manage full time school, work, caring for a bed-ridden mother, three younger siblings, cleaning the house, shopping, cooking, driving any and all to appointments, and well as maintaining my own spiritual state through church activity, all at the age of twenty. 

  

I learned all this while I was also expected to somehow be a professional painter with no realistic help and that if I dared get overwhelmed that I would somehow sink even lower than rock bottom in standing. 

  

I was terrified to learn that all you had to do was tell me 'something' I had done for a low-down, heartless, selfish, cold, dark reason and I would not only believe you, but I would forget what I had really done and why I had done it. 

  

I learned that my health was of no concern to any of you.  

  

I learned that you would be furious if I dared talk to anyone about how overwhelmed and stressed I was because that reflected badly on you. 

  

Therefore I learned, once again, that I didn't matter. 

  

I learned that if I behaved any way other than you thought proper that I was shaming you, even if it was an emotional outburst related to recent trauma. 

  

You taught me that Jesus despised me and that turning to God in prayer was slothful on my part. 

  

You taught me that if something wasn't working then I must not have done my best. Never-mind the fact that no-one is capable of actually doing everything. 

  

So I guess I learned that if anything was not succeeding then it was my fault. 

  

In fact, I even learned that life almost got easier if I just accepted fault for everything and anything that anyone was upset about. Because then, if it was my fault, I could fix it and they wouldn't be mad at me anymore. And there would be a reason to my existence. 

  

I learned that mom had considered divorce up till I was five and often couldn't wait till you went out of town again so that the fragile stability she maintained in your absence could be restored. 

  

I learned that it was safer to not let anything show on my face since I was always getting in trouble for the thoughts you were telling me I was having. It's a good thing you didn't know as much as you thought you did… 

  

I learned that even if I managed to do 'better' at just about everything, it was only treading water and to do less than best left me in the red. 

  

I learned that you would stop at nothing to keep your control. 

  

I learned that you wanted me so isolated, I would get in trouble for confiding in my own sibling or a teacher/bishop. 

  

I learned after mom died that you only thought mom was considering divorce for the first year of your marriage and you disregarded the lifelong story where mom had known I was waiting to be born as her desperate attempts to preserve your marriage. 

  

I learned that I could get in trouble for being so selfish that I was not doing my siblings' chores. 

  

I learned that you trained the family so well that my siblings knew they could use me as a scapegoat to get out of trouble themselves. 

  

I learned that you knew you were being unreasonable and you just didn't care. 

  

I learned that you not only had no care for my physical well-being, you were doubly willing to endanger it to lessen my dignity so you could get a laugh. 

  

I finally learned that it would never matter how hard I tried, how much I gave, how well I kept all of your arbitrary, multiplying demands  - it would never be enough. 

  

So I left. 

  

Since then, I have also learned. 

  

I learned that you betrayed yourself far more than you may ever realize and would ever admit. 

  

I learned that you think love means satisfying your expectations and that you've brought your own stupid misery on yourself.  No wonder you never feel loved and I could never do enough because every time a demand gets met, the love expires and the next unmet expectation is the only one that matters. 

  

I learned that I was not the lazy one - you were. 

  

I learned that all the things that never occurred to me but that you blamed me for 'thinking' had to have come from your own head. 

  

I remembered you scoffing at a crying child and mocking her with the words, "What are you going to do, tell the Bishop I'm emotionally abusing you?" Years before I had any clue to what that even meant... 

  

I learned that you are the selfish and self-centered one. 

  

I learned that even though you expect everyone you come in contact with to think you're the smartest person they know, you're not nearly as smart as you think you are. 

  

I realized that you gave into having me because it was you who feared divorce but at some point you must have realized my birth didn't accomplish your intended purpose so the unwanted child became the despised child. 

  

I realized that for all you complained of how much money you had to spend on me, I saved you far more than you've ever considered and my debt has been more than paid in full. 

  

I have learned that even if I was born to you and even if our religion believes in forever families, I do not have to stay with you and that does not compromise my immortal standings one bit. You have more than lost your right to me. 

  

I have even learned some of what you did to mom. But I will leave that to stay between you and God. Fair warning - you can't hide the truth from Him.  

  

I tell you this because I have been learning all along since I left that you haven't been changing. You are only targeting others. 

  

I have always thought that you consider yourself too sophisticated to be physically abusive. And as early memory proves - you either think emotional abuse illegitimate or you figure no one is smart enough to recognize what you are doing. Indeed, many are quite naive. But many are not, and tearing apart a person's identity, spirit and mind does greater violence that a simple fist can ever do. 

  

Ultimately, I have learned that you are pathetic. 

"It's Abstract"

I cannot explain why my brain likes to kick into writing gear as I'm getting ready to go to bed. Were it a two-year-old, it would make sense. However...

Some ten years ago, I spent time working as a summer camp counselor. Another counselor, a ceramics major in college, would often remark on various incomprehensible attempts at artwork saying, "It's abstract." It is this idea of 'abstract' that I have been pondering since second grade and wish to explore here. I can't say whether I'll manage an ultimate conclusion, but continue to read and perhaps you will understand why that is. And maybe you will have insights that can help me pin down the abstract.

As I mentioned, this kinda (I'm a fan of understatement...) started with something I remember my second grade teacher saying. She said that kids tend to think more in images where as they mature and get older, develop more, it shifts to thinking in words. I remember remembering this in Junior High, High School, and more frequently as I have gotten older and I have concluded that I must lie rather outside that pattern. This may not be readily apparent as a lifetime of much reading has created a rich vocabulary to pull from, but the large majority of my thinking that does not relate to interacting with people is done without language. It is, in essence, abstract.

I'm sure that many people use non-lingual processing at times here and there, but as I have tried many times this past year to try explaining what I've been pondering with little success, it seems to be less common than the literal thinking that language creates. (This idea finally helped me understand what the critical theorist, Jacques Lacan, might have been getting at when he claimed that 'Language Speaks Us'. I.e. Our ideas are shaped by the language we have available to process our world and influences our realities more deeply than our natural perceptions. Not fully legit, but I finally get what he was thinking...) Language is naturally structured meaning thoughts in language form automatically have some level of inherent structure. They may have horrible grammar, metaphorically speaking, when they race and jump about, but they have a definable structure none-the-less.

So what do I mean by saying I tend to think in the abstract? How do I think without a reliance on words? If you have seen the recent BBC version of Sherlock Holmes series, think to the episode where they explain his method for remembering and processing details and information. Sherlock says he builds a memory mansion - castle? palace? house? I forget the classification - and stores the details away in that house in a way that makes sense to him. When he is pondering the mystery at hand, he focuses inward to this mental creation and wanders through the memories till he has puzzled out how it all fits together. The episode even gives a visual representation of him doing so. This is a step approaching the expression of abstract thinking. There is the concept of space, movement, image, and connections between objects of ideas.

Now go look at the last paragraph again. See the part where I stumbled over what the proper classification was? That is evidence of my abstract processing. I think it was not called house because the sense of the designation is large, grand. And it is a living location. But I do not need the words to have the concepts. That means when I try to put what I process or file in abstract into words, I actually have to translate from one 'language' into another. It makes for difficulties in communicating and has been a direct cause of problems as people have assumed my first pass at trying to translate is what I actually meant. But if it is considered a rough draft at translating (which it is) it can be understood why I am often inclined to adjust what I'm saying as I realize the words I had picked did not give the meaning I was aiming for. And in direct communication, there is not time to puzzle everything out over weeks to ensure the closest translation possible. It can be quite frustrating.

If you have been following my other posts, perhaps you can look back and see more evidence of this. In the ones I had pre-written, I had time to focus and simplify and make my thoughts as direct as possible. In the posts that are written as I type, they tend to pull on multiple thoughts weaving about with perhaps not every connection explained in a direct, literal way. It can also be seen in how often I will use multiple words separated by commas to express the essence of an idea. That is because the single word does not completely express the sense of the abstract in my head. I do actually think in language, mainly when I think of talking with someone (such as to you unknown readers), and most of what I have written about are things I have considered and pondered over many years. These have helped with the translation process. It also helps to try to translate, express abstract considerations to others to get a gauge on how close I manage it. Doing so, with feedback, also lets me make my thoughts literally accessible.

It may seem that abstract thinking is too divorced from the actual to be of any real value, that it would rather be a hindrance. As with the translating troubles, there is some truth to that, but it's not as problematic as you may assume. In some ways I believe it made school easier for me. Being an abstract processor, I do have a rather hard time remembering details like lists of names, dates, places (more problematic when I tried being a history major...) and my brain often doesn't file away lists of facts or memorizations (though I can bully it into some short-term filing). Instead, as I sat in classes, did homework, and processed the information, my brain metaphorically converted the information into pieces of a giant machine where everything new learned helped fine-tune the mechanical workings. Once each piece was in the right place, I no longer had to think about it. When I took tests, like the In-Out function machines, the question posed went in one end and the pieces directed it through to the appropriate answer.

Like those science flow charts where it asks if this or that is or isn't present and based on the answer it sends you to the next test until you are finally presented with the outcome. Only, in my head, it feels more like movement and the sense of testing against other sensed but not necessarily worded entities. Like a wood maze where the tests determine whether the ball should drop or not and the ultimate drop defines the answer. Or like high-speed flying through space where the gravities of relative concepts create small shifts in the overall trajectory till you come to an ultimate destination.

A recent recognition of abstract processing came while watching my favorite movie, The Avengers. It can also be seen in any of the Iron Man movies as it was recognizing that the displays in Tony Stark's helmet with multiple gauges and readings would require a certain level of abstract removal to process the needed information. Consider everything he'd have to concentrate on - the mental link to control the flying, the power levels, the suit/body functioning, altitude, location, communication with others, and then throw in some level of tactical attention to fighting off whichever bad guys happen to be attacking at the moment.

Now Iron Man is a fictional character, but consider the other places where a person must actively process multiple shifting variables in order to accomplish a task. I think of pilots with tons of gauges, soccer and hockey athletes, even police officers, firefighters, and active-duty military personnel. You may consider it more of a trained 'instinct', which has some accuracy, but that 'instinct' operates by processing in the abstract. It is quicker. It bypasses the definitives which slow things down.

I can keep trying to express and define the abstract, but it clearly becomes rather ponderous. There are reasons we use symbols to represent ideas. They become simplified enough to use in communication. Ultimately, I am interested in any thoughts you, as the reader, might have regarding this idea in any respect. As I said at the beginning, I have been trying to process this concept for many, many years and still have trouble trying to simply translate the concept. Other ideas are difficult, but are inherently more accessible than the meta-abstract.