“Emotional Abuse”

After my homegroup Friday night, some of us went out to dinner for the usual post-meeting fellowship. There’s this great taqueria a few blocks from the meeting and it’s a pretty regular sight to see some number of us there on Friday’s. The staff all knows us, knows what we like to order. Whether it’s just a horchata, or a big wet burrito and a side plate of French fries.

As we sat, chowing down on some of the best cheap Mexican food in town, we talked about a whole range of subjects. It’s like that for us. At one point, we were sharing childhood stories. One member talked about how they were always getting beat on, and how their response to it was to just turn and laugh as sort of a ‘is that the best you got??’ response.

For myself, the childhood experience was almost the exact opposite. I was very prone to crying. In fact, the bullies learned early on that they didn’t need to hit me at all; they could tease and taunt me to tears, and they did so. Frequently. After I shared this, one of our dinner group quickly made the point that my experience was much worse than that of the other member’s. I demurred, saying that no one’s pain is better or worse than another’s.

These days, psychology circles are beginning to recognize emotional abuse as capable of causing far more damage, being even more destructive to a person, than physical abuse. They also recognize one of the common themes of those who suffered emotional abuse is that they tend to minimize their trauma. Emotional abuse can be a tough one to get my head around. I find it easiest to think about as a form of abuse that isn’t so much about the things people did to you, but what they didn’t do. Emotional starvation, lack of validation, making someone (particularly a child) responsible for emotions that aren’t theirs, the lack of an accepting and loving environment, these are the things I think of from my own past.

I sometimes write about how much the 12-step program has done for me—that I’ve tried religion, psychology, pharmacology, and on and on, and nothing worked until I got into Recovery. That’s mostly true. What’s also true is that I have done a HELL of a lot of therapy, and a lot of work on myself on my own. I’ve had to accept and learn to deal with some basic truths about myself, not the least of which is that I have a lot emotional depth—especially for man. This can make life pretty damn tough at times, but I’ve found that by staying in touch with what’s going on inside me, it’s manageable.

This is not to say that it’s easy. I can still have strong emotional reactions to certain types of people and situations. Sometimes things come up that are very hard for me to deal with. Things like when someone lies straight to my face, or is having a bad day and throws their shitty attitude at me; when my integrity is questioned, or if someone is making constant crises out of situations that don’t call for it. To me, these situations can get interpreted almost like… well, actually, sometimes they don’t get interpreted at all. When stuff like this happens, sometimes my brain just shorts out trying to process. If I had to put them all under one umbrella, I’d call it times when my reality is called into question. Hmm. That might not make sense.

Say I know things to be one way and someone insists to me that they’re not, or say someone tries to make me responsible for something that I had nothing to do with, my brain can short out. It’s like I’m left without footing, without a leg to stand on. And there is definitely a part of me inside that regresses to that young child who wants to burst into tears. Even today, I don’t do well with being teased. Someone may be trying to goad me, push my buttons, maybe for no other reason than to fuck with me or see what will happen.

That’s the kind of stuff that I really have a hard time with, and even though I’m much better at dealing with it than I used to be, I’m well-aware that it can be dangerous territory. Sometimes, someone will be pushing me and I reach a point where I have to tell them, straight up, “stop fucking with me!” This bear-ish response, of course, is the defensive cover-up for the child inside who is crying the much truer, “stop hurting me!”

I’ve been accused many times in my life of being overly sensitive and overly emotional. I don’t see myself that way anymore, but not because I’ve stopped being sensitive or emotional. That awareness, those perceptions, and the thoughts and feelings that go with them, have been tempered. Good boundaries have helped. Resolving issues from my past has helped a lot to. Learning to recognize the things I can’t change and let go of them has been an immense relief. But I remain who I am.

I don’t think of myself as sensitive and emotional anymore. These days, I am merely someone who has a lot of emotion and is in touch with it; I am sensitive to the world around me and the people in it, but I don’t have to let it affect me. Like anyone else who has endured trauma in their life, I retain the scars of those experiences. They may have healed, but they are still there. And with that healing, I am able to move on.