Reflections: Learning to Name the Abuse and Establish Boundaries
Autumn brings the strangest blend of nostalgia and numbness with it. Pumpkin spice, chunky knit sweaters, fireplaces and warm glowing candles revive the soft part of me that dried up in the harsh summer sun, while my October birthday and the holidays looming ahead, all wrapped in trauma memories and loving new intentions, veil the days with a cozy sort of sadness. The time I spend alone transitions from the overstimulated fear-rooted isolation of avoiding summer “fun,” instead becoming my greatest delight as I study the triggers and relish deep breaths to the tune of flame-colored leaves falling to kiss the wet earth.
As the eldest daughter with trauma and chronic illness that flares up in heat and overstimulation, I thrive in the autumn season.
Sleep has come later in the evenings this week and I am content to rise earlier, savoring the chill of the morning on my feet as I flick on fairylights and get the candle and tea started.
Writing calls me back, harboring no grudge for the anxious summer months where no stories could be spun.
Finally, the kids and the parents are asleep.
The puppy is snuggled in my lap.
There’s nobody to take care of, nobody who needs protecting.
I can exhale.
I can inhale all the way into my belly.
I can relax my jaw and release the world from my shoulders.
My eyes soften and the stories return, fairies dancing in my mind and flames teasing at my fingertips.
I am alive again.
I’m thinking about being a Robin Williams household wavering between freedom and control of a covert narcissist and a mother who made mistakes.
When I was 17 years old, I wrote an essay titled Seventy Times Seven Times about forgiveness and love. (You can read it here.) I wrote it in response to a writing assignment asking students to define themselves. At 17, I was mostly not speaking to my mom. I took myself to the Catholic church and became a member while preparing for my wedding to a boy I knew was nothing like my ex step-father. I had dreams of the kind of wife and mother I wanted to be, and I found a family in the church where my gentleness was so highly praised and admired by the adults around me. (That all unraveled a couple years ago, but at the time, it was real for me.)
Plenty of reflection went into the writing of Seventy Times Seven Times, and when I considered who I was and what was most important to me in life, I saw the anger, bitterness, and resentment I was carrying toward the people who had hurt or neglected me throughout my childhood. In writing the essay, I found peace and forgiveness in my heart and started the path to making amends with my mom and began defining and implementing boundaries with my family and ex step-family.
Fast-forward 11 years. I’m still healing from the wounds I picked up in my childhood, and still finding myself in situations where similar patterns of mistreatment and toxicity emerge — and with each layer I go deeper into the healing and the old patterns, I find new perspectives, needs, and desires in myself.
This season, I’m noticing the way I tend to avoid acknowledging or naming mistreatment and how uncomfortable it feels to look directly at a wrong someone has done me, or a feeling of discomfort or violation I don’t quite understand but can’t help feeling tug at my gut.
For fear of becoming the kind of person who claims victimhood and cries wolf, or is self-obsessed and makes a big deal out of nothing… I’ve opted for silence and compliance and keeping the peace more often than not — and the times when I have spoken up have been with people who are quick to invalidate the feelings I express and defend themselves.
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Self-defense could be natural response, I imagine, to my own messy communication in an area that is all too exposed and uncomfortable for me as someone who doesn’t want to hurt people or make them uncomfortable. However, natural or not, there are a good deal of people in my life who love me so wholly that, in the face of my hurt feelings, they will try to understand where I am coming from and work through the experience with me, rather than defending themselves and ignoring the pain I’ve expressed. Do you know what I mean? It’s the difference between boys and sisters, I suppose. Especially since what feels most familiar to me in a man is probably some spin on the same type of behaviors I saw from male figures when I was little.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not throwing my hands up in the name of fate and letting who my male role models were as a child forever define the way my life looks… but I think there’s a pattern showing up and perhaps naming it and taking responsibility for it, to a point, will help me to choose differently in the future, or give me more awareness as I take the next steps in my journey.
Anyway, I grew up loving Robin Williams characters.
His gentleness, his humor, his willingness to be silly to bring joy to someone who needed it, and his ability to diffuse a situation by seeing and responding to the human being in front of him rather than becoming defensive or explosive when someone opposed him. I think a lot of what I’ve admired most in men all my life has been among those traits.
I keep finding myself pondering Robin Williams and remembering the times he was on the screen while abuse was taking place at home… And in the moments when things were “good” and there was a fragile sort of peace. It was always a walking on eggshells feeling, but I knew that if mom and all of us kids maintained the feel-good Robin Williams energy in the room, everyone would stay safe and happy for a while.
And maybe that’s how it became natural for me not to acknowledge when someone was doing something wrong.
You do not tell an abuser that they are mistreating you when it’s not actively happening. Because that’s not safe. There will be consequences. And when they are actively hurting someone, there’s no space for calling it out. There is only that moment, surviving that moment, protecting what’s precious and getting out of the way as quickly as you can. There’s no time for discussion on manners and behaviors when you’re a child in an abusive home.
There are the bad times, and then there are the times when Robin Williams is on TV. All of the other times are eggshell times, and if you break one, it’s all over. Again.
But I’m not a little girl in the care of an alcoholic and a covert narcissist anymore. I’m a grown woman now and being coy about mistreatment isn’t keeping me particularly safe anymore. It’s keeping me on self-laid eggshells — agonizing never-ending miles upon miles of eggshells.
Nobody has ever hurt me the way my ex step-father hurt us, yet I am apologetic and anxious and hypervigillant in almost every waking moment of my life…
… even after these two decades of therapy and years of journaling and yoga and daily commitment to personal growth and healing.
(And am I allowed to be angry about this yet? Am I allowed to name it, to say it happened, to wish that it hadn’t? Am I allowed to feel the depth of what was lost in those horrible years? Can I give myself a moment to be furious and devastated, without smothering it with forgive-and-forgetness and a pretty smile? Can I hold that little girl and tell her she didn’t deserve it? That she didn’t do anything wrong? That her smile is lovely and her giggles make me smile too, but that she doesn’t have any obligation to give it to me? Can I tell her that she is so good, without trying at all? Can I give her permission to be upset, in the moment, and not make her go process it and paint it into something appropriate for someone else’s underdeveloped emotional palate?)
Nobody has ever kidnapped, manipulated, threatened, or scared me the way that he did…
Yet I can’t stop the nervous giggle and plastered-on angelic smile when I feel uncomfortable. It’s even worse if I try to speak to a need being met or to express discomfort and a boundary — coming out as passive aggressive, explosive and defensive if it’s not met with warmth and gentle understanding, because expressing the discomfort and daring to ask for consideration and respect tends to throw me into fight-or-flight, full survival mode.
I’ve always been a giggly girl. I laugh a lot, I see the bright side. I’m warm and gentle and loving. And… there’s a part of me that giggles when she wants to cry or scream, that smiles when she’s terrified, and that paints a picture of the bright side trying to appease someone else for the sake of her own safety, rather than because she really believes the bright thing she’s trying to portray.
Somehow, some of the best parts of me have been weaponized; it’s all a tangled mess.
I think the only way to untangle it is to begin speaking to mistreatment. To name it, to look it in the eye. To have the courage to define it, and then to sit with the panic that comes from doing such a historically unsafe thing, so that I can learn to soothe that fear and work through it.
I’ve learned to ask myself if things are true or if they are emotions when something feels very intense.
In the case of mistreatment, asking if it’s true draws a fine line between gaslighting myself, especially when it feels so much more natural to absorb the blame and take responsibility for how other people behave when they feel a certain way “because of me.”
So, I asked myself this morning: what might Robin Williams say to me in these moments when I’m trying to say to somebody, “hey, I felt uncomfortable when you did this. Please don’t do that around me again,” or “please tell me if you’re going to do this, so I can go somewhere else. It’s not good for me.”
And, because those statements almost always lead to the thing being done around me anyway, I took it a step further. What might Robin Williams say to me if that situation happened? If I said, “please don’t do this around me, it makes me feel scared,” and then they did it around me anyway. Again and again. And I asked again, and they apologized but did it yet again.
But somehow, talking with Robin Williams about it never resolves the issue…
Wonderful as he was, he wasn’t particularly direct about mistreatment. He was also very gentle and good at dancing around the issue, reminding people of their humanity as a way to diffuse situations and bring peace. But he didn’t exactly resolve behavioral relationship problems, and he certainly never said to someone (in any movie I saw, anyway) “you are mistreating me in this way and it can’t continue.” He’s very agreeable. He makes the abused feel seen, but doesn’t make abusers feel threatened. It’s a unique role to be able to play, and he was the best.
When you’re not in a position where it’s safe to address mistreatment, like when you are a child or become ill or disabled or otherwise dependent on someone else, the best you can do is create peace and maintain safety until you have a way out… Robin Williams was really, really good at that, and he also had a beautiful ability to get people to slow down and reflect and to grow over time. But the world isn’t a movie where Robin Williams is the main character, most of the time. Sometimes, people who hurt people will continue to hurt people. Sometimes, the healing and reflection and peace don’t come, or they come much too slowly.
Sometimes, a woman needs to stand up for herself, not for the conflict, but to feel safe and strong in her own skin and to heal the broken little girl she used to be.
I love Robin Williams. But I don’t want a Robin Williams home. I want a home where, when pain is expressed, it is recognized with caring and compassion without having to humbly, silently take several blows and look like an abused puppy while waiting a long while for a change of heart that may or may not come.
The more I write, the more I notice that the speaking up, the naming of mistreatment and the recognizing of desirable boundaries and changed behaviors is more about my own awareness than it is about the communication of these things.
I think in the past I have fought for the wrong relationships.
I’ve argued with men over how their behaviors make me feel and I’ve asked for boundaries and spent hours and days and weeks and years trying to find the most mature and collaborative way to re-iterate a boundary when it isn’t respected…
But then I’ve had friendships where I began to feel uncomfortable about the frequency of communication or the amount of attention I felt they wanted from me, and rather than express that discomfort to my friend, I have pushed them away entirely and removed the relationship from my life.
Now, I look around me and the way that life has seemed to be pointless without romance (up until recently), and I understand why it feels that way. It was the boys I should have walked away from when my communication wasn’t met with care and respect, rather than continuing to express the need (and experience the discomfort and pain) over and over… and it was my friends I should have been willing to have difficult conversations with. My friends were the ones who demonstrated the caring, maturity, and responsibility to truly love me and grow through life with me. My friends, who I put on the back burner when my energy ran low from trying to mother boys who never really learned how to truly care about another person.
My friends would have cared and we would have grown closer for it, or else I would have walked away having at least strengthened my boundaries-and-relationships muscle. And because a boy who doesn’t care deeply about my feelings doesn’t deserve the depth of feeling I will inevitably harbor for him (or all that will come with it) — and also because I deserve to have people in my life who care about the way that their behavior makes me feel, who value our relationship enough to communicate (including being an engaged listener), and who make changes (not just empty apologies) when a mistake is made.
In my frustration, I mislabeled the giggly, optimistic side of myself as a fake, annoying little traitor…
Because when I am really sad, like when I received news that someone important to me passed away, I grinned from ear to ear and giggled. I was dying inside, crashing wave after wave of agony, but all I could do was grin and laugh. I felt so betrayed by my body, my face, my voice.
And when I tried to tell my ex that the way he was treating me wasn’t okay, that stupid grin plastered on my face. I felt like a liar, like it was hilarious that I could think that someone wasn’t treating me fairly, regardless of the facts.
Never mind that I was working 60+ hours per week and paying over $2,000 per month in rent and furnishing the new apartment and buying all of the groceries while he, over twice my age, drank beer by the river and video-chatted other women all summer long. Something inside of me thought it was genuinely comical that I would think I had any right to ask for more or to be upset about the situation.
Lately, I’ve been able to look at my little self and the question came up in therapy:
What would little me do if she knew the kids were safe, she was safe, mom was safe, and she didn’t have to protect them anymore? What would she want?
My mind went blank at the question.
What else is there, little me seemed to ask.
I thought of the way I used to spin worlds together for my sister and me to play in, for escape most of the time, but I did that before the abuse too. I suppose, if everyone was safe and nobody needed my protecting, little me, myself, and I would play. Imagine. Build worlds. Ask questions. Giggle. Look for snails and mushrooms and pretty leaves and good walking sticks.
The part of me that giggles and smiles and comforts and inspires and reminds people of their own goodness is not the lying traitor I’ve been painting her as. She’s just been weaponized in the past, and my fingers froze curled around the trigger.
I think, to take the weapon away from the child in me, I have to learn to recognize and identify discomfort and any needs and desires that arise from it, as close to in-real-time as I can (though I know that will take a while, because dissociation is a deep-seated trauma response that helped me survive and kept my precious sense of hope alive for years and years and it’s going to take time to feel safe facing things directly as they happen, and that’s okay).
I don’t know that I need to communicate the discomfort I notice every time. I can be more discerning about it, choosing to communicate discomfort one time, and then further actions can be more consciously based on the behavior that meets my first attempt.
If somebody scoffs, rolls their eyes, belittles, or argues with my expression of discomfort, I can recognize that they are not in a position to hold space for and receive that type of communication from me, and I can adjust my own behavior accordingly: don’t put myself in situations where I am in that space with them, spend more time in places where I am loved, safe, and respected, be mindful of how much of my time and energy I give to that person.
If they respond with intentions to honor the boundary or express their own discomfort and we agree to both adjust accordingly, I can plan a time to check back in and make sure those intentions were acted on, not just pretty words plastered over a conflict, and I can choose from there how I will continue to show up in the relationship.
This all feels like a lot of thinking, and I want to crawl out of my brain for a while…
And I also feel stronger, safer, kinder, and a little more excited for what’s next in life because I’ve taken the time to have this reflection.
I hope you found something helpful in these autumn reflections, and I hope you find your peace.
Here’s to healing the wounds and to friendship and the kind of love that meets pain with compassion. Here’s to becoming more of that kind of person each day ourselves, as well.
Written with love from the Oregon coast.
