No Place To Hide

It was not easy for me to make friends.

When one feels their own essence is diseased, it is difficult to muster up the ability to stand independently when surrounded by others, and to not become overwhelmed by the agonizing fear of being suffocated by your intense wanting to feel like you belong. You must learn to survive the tug of war between wanting to belong, and the fear of that same wanting.

I was too young to know why my mother disliked me. The only thing I remember is hearing her say many times that she and I had a 'personality conflict'. If her thoughts about me ever surfaced around family or friends, this is the excuse I heard her say. It was as if the phrase soothed her as well as excused her uncomfortable feelings for me.

I know now that the discomfort she was feeling, was merely a mirror of the discomfort she felt within herself. She was unable to love her Self, therefore she was unable to love me. I may have been an innocent little being that needed to be nurtured, but so was she. And she had suffered greatly in her childhood due to her mothers emotional absence that was the result of her mother's severe dependency on alcohol.

When I was a child I never felt safe. I felt as if I lived in the Twilight Zone, as if nothing was really real. The mood between my mother and I was abrasive, and often when no one was around I felt picked on, as if I were her whipping boy. When my father would come home from work, my mother's demeanor would immediately change. It was as if she were playing a role. A role she knew would make my father happy.

My mother taught us to pretend as well. If my brother, sister or I were arguing in the house before my father arrived home, and once my mother heard the slam of his Volkswagon Van, she would stop in her tracks, glare at the three of us and through gritted white teeth say, "Shut the hell up you kids. Your father is home!" By the sound of her voice, the stiff movement in her body, and the intense look upon her face, we knew we'd better swallow whatever it was that was going on and smile, because daddy was home.

Through the peephole of awareness, back over my shoulder and while searching the lost files of my minds library, I can understand why my mother did what she did. When my mother gritted her teeth at us, and demanded we stop whatever it was we were doing, she was simply trying to make sure my father came home to a calm house after a long hot day of work. But what she didn't realize was, that in all those innocent moments she was conditioning us to disown our feelings, and to fear making others angry. Unbeknownst to her, she was in the process of creating enablers.

My mother was not an alcoholic, but she was codependent, and unknowingly the lack of awareness she had about her Self and how alcohol had effected her on so many levels, my mother ignorantly infected her children with the same dynamics that had effected her as a result of living with alcoholics.

Alcoholics consume families. They are self absorbed individuals that lack self awareness themselves, and find various creative ways to justify why it is they drink until they pass out, lose their jobs, get into fights, cannot keep a clean home or sustain themselves financially. Alcoholics lie, and expect others to go along with those lies. And when someone challenges the alcoholic, the alcoholic plays the victim, and twists reality to fit his/her personal view of it.

Alcoholics don't see you. They cannot. When a child is born to an alcoholic, that child is born to a person who is incapable of giving that child what he/she needs psychologically, emotionally or spiritually. An alcoholic may have a great job, a great house and a great car...but they won't have the ability to love authentically, or be able to take care of a child the way he/she deserves to be treated.

That child will have no place to hide. Interactions with others become feared.

Lost Little Girl

Growing up it it was not uncommon to hear my mother refer to me as "crazy, psycho, lil' bitch, liar" and so on. I can remember specifically a time when I was in my feetie fuzzy pajamas lying on our maroon living room carpet in front of the television. Both my parents were seated on the couch behind my sister, brother and myself. We were all watching a program on television about animals that were being slaughtered. My tiny heart was bursting open for these defenseless baby seals, but I felt too intimidated to show my emotions, so I kept them in.

"Lisa is such a cold fish. She is so hard. Look at her. She hasn't shed a tear. Oh my God, what a cold fish she really is", my mother said as I tried to survive her emotional surprise assault on my little nine year old soul. I felt completely confused by what I was feeling. I had been conditioned to believe that showing emotions in our home was not acceptable, and yet I was being mocked for not showing emotion.

I am forty six now and my body still has tears to shed over what happened so long ago. My mother could never have known how traumatizing her comments were. To feel rejected by ones own mother is like being aware you have been dying since the day you were born. Life is sort of like a ride on a long rolling razor blade. You're on it, but you don't know why. You want off the ride, but there is no other ride around. This crazy pain is all you know.

Surviving The Pain

When I was a little girl I used to fantasize about spending time alone with my mother. The pang of the emotional distance between us cut like a hot dagger. I yearned for her touch me to help make me feel real. But instead I felt pushed to the side, which made me feel wrong.

I was too young to realize that my mothers insufficient bonding with her own mother, was the root cause of her inability to mother me. Adding insult to injury, the sudden death of her beloved father while pregnant with me, only compounded the sorrow my already overburdened young teenage mother carried. It could have been no other way. How could have my mother been able to 'see' me? My mother had not yet discovered her own Self.

By the time I was seven, fantasy was pretty much a norm for me. It was how I survived feeling 'not real'. Escaping into a world my mind created, that I could manipulate and create was how I escaped reality when my reality became too painful.

I since understand that the emotions of alienation I experienced as a child were the result of feeling psychologically invisible. What I and what every new soul needs as a child is a sense of worthiness that is mirrored back to them through the eyes of caretakers. It is essential to a child's emotional development to have acceptance, validation, forgiveness, and unconditional love be reflected back into them so that they can adopt those feelings unto themselves.

When this does not occur, a child does not develop emotionally as fully as it should. When a child does not believe she/he is loved, the child grows feeling foreign to his/her own world. The child feels alien even unto his/her own self. It is a feeling of detachment that leaves the mind feeling fragile and assuming it is unworthy of love.

I did not 'feel' loved. Intellectually I assumed I was because my house was clean, we always had wonderful meals on the table, and my parents kept a nice home. But there was always a sense in my that I was not good, not good enough, and worse not real.

I see now that because a healthy sense of Self was not mirrored back to me, I could not connect to my own soul. Growing up in a home void of emotion, kept me yearning instead of becoming. Disconnected from her own Self, my mother could never have known what it was she was not giving me.

We Do What We Have Been Shown

My parents are both adult children of alcoholics. Neither of them were blessed with childhoods that they'd like to remember. My mother had two alcoholic parents, and my father had a father who was an alcoholic, and a mother who committed suicide when he was just four years old. My parents were not coddled, cooed, nurtured, or psychologically validated. They were ignored, neglected, disregarded, abused, and abandoned.

It is no accident that my parents met and married. Likes attract likes. One adult child of an alcoholic marries another adult child of an alcoholic. Back then these similarities were not spoken of. They were considered coincidental, silly, and amusing if they were considered at all.

I was born when my mother was just nineteen years old. Four months before my birth, my fathers mother suffered a massive cardiac arrest and died. Just prior to his death, he promised his daughter he would stop drinking once I was born.

I cannot remember, sadly, a time when my mother ever made me feel 'seen'. I felt awkward in her presence, as if my presence annoyed her. I felt as if I was a burden. The only thing that felt right, was removing myself from wherever she was. Feeling invisible to her, hurt more deeply than removing myself from her presence. In my removing of myself, I felt oddly good for doing something that was pleasing to my mother.

My mother was a caretaker and enabled my father throughout their marriage. It was common for me to witness my mother shrink when my father raised his voice on the phone. My father owned and operated his own refrigeration business out of our home, and my mother answered the business phones. If she routed the calls in a way that displeased him, he was not the type of man that knew how to control his anger. He made no excuses for taking his frustrations out on my mother.

Growing up I witnessed my mother disowning her own Self for the sake of her man. Their relationship was not a tender, nor a sharing one. It was distant, unemotional, and more like a business relationship than a marriage.

As my marriage began to draw its last breaths, it became clearer and clearer to me that in many ways I had become my mother, and in other ways I had married her as well.