Childhood Victimization & Domestic Violence

I experienced violence up close for over five years cyclically month to month with my addicted, mentally ill, abusive partner.  I experienced fear I had never experienced before.  The intensity of it created mental, emotion distortions that repeatedly wounded my spirit.  I lost perspective.  I became insane, locking myself into a addictive relationship that I wasn't able to free myself from year after year.  My lover was very young, beaten down by the end of his adolescence, a victim of abuse.  He followed the father who raped him repeatedly in childhood and adolescence; he became an abuser and in doing so continued to victimize his true self.

When my lover became triggered by something in his environment, I could see the boy, the silly, sad, sentimental drunk flip into his sadist persona.  I was no masochist, but I did put myself in a position to become a victim.  Sadists are drawn to victims like a honey bee to honey.  Victims are nourishment to this brand of violent insanity.  My lover, in this mode, in this part of his personality, fed off me.  He fed off my fear.  In his eyes he was a righteous judge.  He was the high king and I was an offending slave.  In his eyes my fear was confirmation of my culpability.  The more afraid I was, the more justified he felt in condemning me if not to physical attack then to psychological torture, though the threat of attack at any moment remained.

What is the lure of violence?  For a more powerful attacker, it is the lure, the high of power.  For others, the chance to dominate and control.  For people trained in sadism might does make right.  A sadist might think that he has honor and justice on his side, but when it comes down to it he or she really enjoys having the power to generate fear and through that fear to control behavior, to set the stage for a cyclical, unending play.  My lover was both the director and the lead in this play.  I was no threat.  I was literally a trapped animal, the prey for the predator.  Without me, there would be no play and he would have searched for another to play the victim role.

At some point I realized that he was associating me with his father and was punishing me for the sins of his father and family.  He became "the father" and I became the despised child, a representative of himself as a child.  He tried to convince me through the shame of humiliation that I was not worthy of love and kindness, that I deserved what I got.  It was projection, pure and simple.  Only he didn't know it.  To be aware of just what he was doing would be to ruin the play and the thrill of the act.  And yes, I know that to abuse me as his child self gave him deep pleasure, at least while he was inside this part of his personality.  When he did this he was also inside his insanity.  He lost perspective and was psychotic.

He could lose himself for a night of sadistic pleasure.  He became the-one-with-the-power.  There was nothing to stand in his way and it felt good.  But something that initially feels real good and is at its core harmful to self and others becomes an addiction.  It traps the predator in a different kind of cage.  And so there were two people trapped in the abusive cycle continuing the seemingly unending play.  Predator and prey.   Abuser and victim.  The father and the son.  Perhaps the initial goal was catharsis,  but anything so negative cannot be cathartic.  It is addiction.  The interplay during the play or abusive episode is the drug.

Because his father had raped him, he judged himself unredeemable and his deep ambivalence towards his father had a strangle hold on him.  Though in times of self revealing anger at his father he said he wanted to kill him, but he did not kill him, did not expose his crimes, did not threaten him at all while he was with me.  He did not place blame where it needed to be placed - with the sins of his father.  Instead he sacrificed himself, branding himself over and over every time he acted out his addiction.  He associated this with honor.  The injunction was to protect the family, especially the image created for others to see.  He took on the role of the black sheep while actually becoming the scape goat for the family.

But that was truly unbearable and so he sacrificed me and made me his personal scapegoat continuing the cycle of shirking self responsibility.  His family never took off their masks and costumes and let me really see them and I learned that the way to survive was to put on my own costume and mask and deny my true self, go along with the sickness, letting my spirit start to wither.  But somewhere in me I was still saying NO to all this sickness.  I continued to think my truths though I rarely opened my mouth and spoke them - too dangerous.  And I prayed.  After all, I was addicted too and I was powerless over it.  I prayed to be released.  When opportunity knocked a year later, I took it and took off.

Before, during and after this relationship I was one of the walking wounded.  After I became darker, harder, my heart difficult to access.  I said NO to my abusive lover and turned away I thought in order to re-embrace myself.  When I sang and made up songs I found bits and pieces of me but they were mostly distorted because my thinking was still distorted by the conditioning of my love/relationship addiction.  I was far from my true self still laced with residual self-hatred passed on by my lover to me during his sadistic projections.  I refused to enter into another romantic relationship but was willing to swap a relationship addiction for a romantic fantasy addiction that only left me frustrated and ashamed.  Still self hating.

My mysterious voices which came forward during life threatening moments during my relationship resurfaced after I left my partner.  They showed me that I was on a spiritual path despite the residual web of self hatred.  They led me to the study of Buddhism and to the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching; they led me to practice yoga and meditation and mantra.  They also led me back to art and songwriting and writing.  They led me back to art school.  And, after a year at school, they led me to an even deeper, more dangerous place along the path - they led me into psychosis.  I saw that my relationship with my lover/abuser had been a sort of boot camp to prepare me for what I would have to endure through in psychosis.

I Do Not Deny The Negative

It's true, I don't. I know that people are suffering every second of every day and night; I know that I dip into suffering throughout the day/night. I wrote this song a few months ago (don't know what it's called yet) and these are the lyrics:

I've been crazy,

Down on my knees and begging,

Paranoid and isolated,

Out of my ever loving mind.

Lucifer's in recovery

I was told.

Just be patient a little while longer

You'll be brought back into the fold.

Chorus:

Life's a struggle for everyone I know,

And everyone I don't know, I'm sure.

Just because you lost your mind along the way

Don't let it stop you from opening the door--

To the outside, to the outside, to the outside.

I've been crazy,

But never divorced from God,

I kept turning my cheek to the Devil

To see what was left inside.

Lucifer's in recovery

I was told

Just be patient a little while longer

You'll be brought back into the fold.

Well, that's the gist of it, just that even in the worst times, there was always a bit of light, but you had to look for it. I'm a bit amazed to hear people talking about the voices as if they were solely negative, with no redemptive quality because I have never found that to be the case. I have found that when some voices thoroughly attacked me, other voices worked damn hard to make sure that I kept holding on to what little positive I could find in the situation. Yes, there were times when I was overtaken. I especially remember being consigned to Hell for I don't know how long, could have been an hour or a few minutes, but it felt way too long and I was terrified that I would be stuck there forever. But even then I could tell that the Judges (there were a couple of them) were not fair judges, but judges corrupted by suffering. And I'd felt that before, as if I was connected to some being that was submerged in all the suffering in this world and I was there to share in some of his burden. A heavy, heavy burden indeed. But I knew then and I know now that it is not the whole picture. It was like looking at and experiencing life through the dark half of a yin yang symbol with just a touch of light and no more.

Negativity is part of life and some of it is probably essential to life, but negativity can be like a whirlpool, and once you're pulled into it you get sucked down into an abyss that is hard to pull yourself out of without some outside help and inside determination. Some suffering is instructional, some even akin to spiritual, but too much of it is just unnecessary. To say that people have suffered and are suffering right now is true. Suffering is pervasive. But to say that by noting the existence of suffering that you are being more realistic than some about the Truth of Life I don't think is true.

It sucks, but the negative is easier to embrace than the positive; we fall into patterns of it and get worn down by it. The negative has an unfair advantage. In its very nature it obscures the light, but that doesn't mean that the light doesn't exist and that it can't return to balance out the night. I freely admit that I am someone who was influenced by the 12 step literature in the group Al-Anon (a self-help group for people who are friends and families of alcoholics). I didn't really follow the steps very closely, but I did pick up on the idea of having an "attitude of gratitude" about difficult circumstances. I lived with an abusive alcoholic who very often saw life as the glass half empty rather than half full. His attitude coupled with his regularly abusive behavior towards me wore me down, but I didn't believe all the dark stuff that came out in his talking or yelling. I never embraced it. I didn't become anti-semitic, homophobic and essentially pessimistic about people and life, though I did get very depressed, just worn out waiting on him. So, though I didn't embrace his attitude, I still was deeply affected by it, to the point where I had to shut him out of my life.

In retrospect, I regret that now, but I also understand it. Without knowing it, I did suck up some of that prejudiced negativity. Instead of softening and seeing how close I was to hope, I shut down and got numb. I'm still not as sensitive as I could be, but I'm thawing out. And part of why I have been thawing out is because I practice gratitude. Just after my third and last breakdown in December 2001, I began instructing myself in my journal to practice recovery behaviors: take the medications, therapy once a week, read support literature, write in journal, get plenty of rest, eat regular meals, etc... I also wrote down warning signals of impending psychosis: any delusion, talking a loud too much, driving when in a delusion, paranoia, not sleeping enough or too irregularly, getting too tired after being around people for 4-5 hours, an inability to concentrate, etc... In effect, I was trying to work a program by loosely basing it on the 12 step program for co-dependents. It wasn't a perfect fit, but it was something to hold onto. I still wish there was a daily reader out there for people who suffer from any form of psychosis. For now, I still return to the Al-Anon daily readers when I get particularly stuck.

Okay, so the negative exists; people commit suicide or die young of disease or accident and ultimately we're all going to die. Being negative doesn't make the negative go away or lessen; it intensifies it. But being positive in the face of the negative does have the power to decrease it and sometimes even transforms it into happiness. I have often thought that the fact that I can use language to form ideas and express feelings is a wonderful ability in itself, even when I've had negative voices hammering away at my psyche. I've looked at the negative voices this way and have seen that despite their darkness they are creative, imaginative and intelligent. Most people look upon an enemy as the scum of the earth, not worth anything good, but there are some of us who can try to find the friend inside the enemy. Believe me, I don't always succeed. There are times when I succumb to my anxiety and fall back into my corner believing the conformist belief that some people are unredeemable, or worse, that I am unredeemable. I fight that. I hope I always will.