28 - You are Not Alone

TRANSCRIPT

Hi and thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. I’m Mary Young, and I wanted to talk today about my own emotional healing journey. You know, the tagline on the Facebook page says “the emotional healing journey can feel like you’re driving in fog. But you’re not alone.” and so I wanted to use today to talk about the fact that you’re not alone; that I really do know what this journey is like. To be totally honest, I don’t want to have this conversation at all. This conversation is uncomfortable for me, which is exactly why I’m doing it. Why is it uncomfortable? It’s uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.

One is that I’m a private person, and I do not tend to share this with people anymore. Back when it was brand-new, when I was first going through it, I couldn’t stop talking about it. I would tell anybody and their brother exactly what I was going through. Now? I keep quiet about it for the most part.  But if I keep quiet about it, you won’t know that you’re not alone.

I didn’t always know that I needed an emotional healing journey. I didn’t even know that’s what I was on when I was on it. What I did know was that I needed people a lot more than they needed me. I was always looking for somebody to validate me; my existence, my ideas. Somebody to be like. I mentioned being a chameleon in episode 27, and that described me. I still remember the time a friend from college asked me how I was, and I said something like I’m a little sad or I’m a little depressed. Her reply -- very caring, very heartfelt -- was I wish you weren’t depressed or something like that. And my only response to that was I’m sorry how do you want me to be? Because that was the way I lived my life. You tell me how you wanted me to be or who you wanted me to be, and that’s what I would do so that I could be your friend.

And I never knew why I was like that.

• I never knew why I never felt like I fit in.
• I never knew why I was terrified at the thought of dating.
• I know that I was quick to anger, and that there was a lot of pent-up anger inside me that I didn’t know where it came from but it wouldn’t take very much for it to kick out.
• I was passive-aggressive.
• I lived in fear.
• I walked in fear.
• I was always afraid that something was going to happen.

I didn’t trust people because they weren’t trustworthy, but I didn’t know why I thought that.

I knew how to cope. I knew that I could push stuff away and not think about it, because that’s how I was taught to do. And I learned the hard way that eventually that would come back out and insist that you look at it. But it was years later that I looked at it. Another strong memory from college is we watched a film in a class, and the film showed the life of an alcoholic family from the perspective of the kindergartner. And I sat in this class, and I watched my life on the screen. Memories that I had totally forgotten were being played out in front of the classroom for people to see. When the film was over, I lasted maybe five more minutes in the classroom, clenching my jaw, gritting my teeth, trying to breathe. And then I bolted for the door. Happily, the restroom was right across the hallway. I locked myself in a stall, and I cried uncontrollably. I called my mom that weekend, and said I watched this film in class and it brought back memories. And I told her what the film was about, and her immediate response, in very harsh tones: are you saying we were alcoholic?

And being a good little chameleon, I said no, I am saying maybe we might have had some problems with drinking. Because keeping the peace in the family was most important thing. I am here to tell you keeping the peace in the family is not the most important thing. Healing yourself...being healed...being healthy is the most important thing. And if that means that you have to tell the family the truth, then you tell the family the truth.

Now, I say that and I sound really passionate when I say that, but there are still things I don’t tell my family because I will get denial as a response. And I’m not always in a place where I can handle that.  I have told my family that when I went to Al-Anon and somebody asked me who my qualifier was, I sat down and made a list, and came up with 13 alcoholics who impacted my life before I graduated from college. That doesn’t count the ones that I worked for or with after that. while I was making that list, I realized that one entire side of my family is alcoholic, even though they never call themselves that, because to my family alcoholic means that you’re a skid row bum. And these were all functioning alcoholics, but alcoholic nonetheless.

For most of my life, my earliest coherent memories began with kindergarten. What I didn’t know until I was 38 or 39 was that I had buried a bunch of memories from my very early childhood. When a young child experiences trauma -- actually, when anybody experiences trauma -- one of the reactions to it is to repress the memories because they are too painful to deal with. We had a family friend and alcoholic (that mom and dad were friends with) that lived in our basement. We gave him space in the basement; had a mattress down there that he could sleep on, and he stayed with us cause he didn’t have any place else to be. I was three-ish when he moved in, and four-ish when he moved out. He died when I was too young to understand what death really meant.

And...this is still hard to say...some of the memories that I had repressed were about the fact that this man who used to babysit us, who mom said was my buddy, liked little girls a little bit too much. And I was a little girl that he liked. So he wasn’t my buddy; he was grooming me. And we had a secret that we weren’t supposed to ever tell.

All of that impacted who I was, and how I behaved, and how I saw the world. And all of that needed to be healed. I could cope with it. I could compartmentalize it. I could turn my brain to something else and not think about it, but I wasn’t healed from it. I hadn’t dealt with it.

When it started being too hard functioning every day, I finally went to therapy. That first round of therapy, I was seeing my therapist four days a week because I was only in town one week a month. So I’d see her the four days I was in town, and then email her when I was out of town. It went like that for probably six months before I could take it down to seeing her once a week.

I am still healing.

I will be healing for the rest of my life, because part of healing for me is just learning to be a better human being; learning to respond differently. To respond, not react. It’s not as foggy as it was back in the day when I was 38/39. There is not nearly as much fog. I have a lot more sunny days now. And I know I’m not alone. I have friends who have similar experiences, and we support each other. If you feel like you’re alone; that nobody else knows what you’re going through or what you’ve been through; you are not alone. It’s epidemic.

What you need to remember is that you are not a victim. You are a survivor. And if the healing journey scares you like it scared me. If you think: I can’t talk about this to my therapist! I can’t remember this -- it hurts too much. If you’re having those thoughts, remind yourself of this.

You survived the original trauma. If you can survive that, you can survive anything. Emotional healing journey -- it’s hard, but it’s worth it. And you owe it to yourself to let yourself heal. And you are not alone.

Thanks for listening. Go make it a great week.