Saturday September 29, 2018; 8:13 PM EDT
My father was an alcoholic. He was a mean personal alcoholic. I think he learned it from his father. My mother was my father's enabler. She also was a victim of sexual abuse as a child. Her father was her abuser. She learned to be the enabler from her mother, who she hated. Her mother knew what her father was doing and was okay with it. As my mother knew what my father was doing. #- My mother had a life, became a teacher and a school psychologist and ultimately a professor. I saw my mom in Dr Ford, the mother I wish had. My mother never told her story. She couldn't talk about it. Only once, in the middle of the night, she called me, and told me a tiny bit of the story. It was like a confession. Before and after she refused to talk about it. I hope she talked about it with her therapist, but I don't know if she did. I have reasons to think she didn't. #
- I learned what happened by going to therapy myself, for eight years, in my forties. My personality formed as the inverse of my parents. They were the mold, I was the product. You could infer their abuse from my issues. I learned a lot about myself. I learned that it wasn't my fault that my childhood home wasn't like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver. My mom often implied that it was my fault. Kids are amazing at absorbing the judgment of adults.#
- I mention this as we start to discuss abuse more openly in our society. What I've wanted to say, I've ached to say, is that it's not an extraordinary event, it's the context within which we exist. We talk about abuse as if it was exceptional, but it's so much more. It's like talking about the game of chess by talking about chess pieces. Or a soup by looking at the peas, tomatoes, carrots. There's a gestalt. And that is still unmentionable. The abuse forms us. It gives us our issues. It creates problems that we have to overcome, or not. We each are assigned roles to play as children, it's hard to break out of the part you're given. To really get started healing, we have to pop up a level and look at our environment. #
- When I watched Kavanaugh this is what I saw. A person failing to maintain the pretense that he has had a wonderful life, when his life has been a horror show. He drinks to avoid looking. He is so much my father, I feel I know him, and while I loathed my father for most of my life, I eventually saw his struggle, one he never overcame, a child who was never accepted by his parents. It's no wonder he couldn't cope with being a father. Same with my mother. Again Dr Ford provided a perfect screen for me. She did what my mother never could do. My mother never got within 100 million miles of what Dr Ford did. She couldn't even talk about herself to her children, maybe not even to her therapist. She never made peace with her father and mother. And as a result never made peace with herself. She longed for love, for acceptance, for peace, she never attained it. #
- I think we're on the cusp of a huge revolution in humanity. Living in a soup of abuse and having to pretend everything is perfect, that's the world we're coming from. It's the only world we've known. At least I learned to tell myself the truth. That's progress. Now maybe we can get to a place where it's common to tell each other our truth. Then evolution can take off in a huge way. #