I have promised myself that I would be as honest as possible in the course of writing on this blog, no matter how uncomfortable or painful or imperfect. Before I write out more about what happened to me after Mike died, I want to take a second to address current day things.
I am a Latina who is also half non-Latino white and grew up mostly in white middle class culture/socioeconomic status. My father is a retired federal law enforcement agent white male with a power-complex and authoritarian style parenting/leadership style. My mother is a brown immigrant woman from Brasil who didn’t learn English until after my dad brought her to this country to marry him. My ancestors on her side included indigenous peoples, European settlers, and stolen people from Africa. The ones on his included Mormon Pioneers and European settlers. I feel like I represent a little bit of almost everyone in this country to some degree.
I was obviously raised with a heavy focus on Christ-centered teachings and belief-system. The core of that is actually still there. The truth at the center of it is. From what I have gathered by having an avid interest in religion and spiritual belief: all religions are based off of core universal truth, with added distortions and mutations meant to control people (added by powerful men throughout history). The bits of truth are the parts that make people feel good, and they do a great job of covering up and justifying all the control tactics otherwise imbedded into these religions that cause people to feel inherent shame and unworthiness. Making people feel ashamed of themselves and unworthy are mind control tactics meant to keep us small and compliant. When you understand how shame works in the mind psychologically, you just cannot unsee this. What Christ actually taught and the point of his whole mission was actually quite the opposite of that. He vehemently opposed the powerful religious and government systems of control at that time and he encouraged people to break the rules the powerful had set in place (rules like no helping others on the Sabbath day) that kept people small and compliant. He focused so much on compassion because he was trying to break us out of the shame and unworthiness tactics the powerful used to keep us small and compliant even back then. He challenged the notion that any of us are better than another, often standing up for those with the least power or influence or social status and the most judgement and shame thrust upon them. Leaders at that time hated this. He was waking a lot of people up. Why do you think they wanted him dead? And then what better to do than to use his story, his mission, his truth, as a part of their system of control? To twist and distort those truths in a way that still supports control and compliance, but in a much more covert way.
It really saddens me to see how religion, particularly Christian religion, is being used by the powerful to turn some people out there away from or justify the harm being caused to other people on the planet. The way they use it to justify all kinds of violence and harm to innocent people, both overseas and right here at home as well, is something that should put alarm bells in every human being’s mind.
We have all been programmed to some degree, by the religion we’ve grown up into, by the political party our parents brought us up into, by the worldview of our closest friends and peers, and by anyone and everything that has had any influence over us at any point as we were growing up. It’s a very normal part of human psychological development that we first take on the reality and viewpoint of our parents, regardless of what that is, and then later in adulthood it becomes natural to deviate from the path they brought us up in as we have our own life experiences that teach us different perspectives. Not everyone develops to a point where they are able to easily take on a new viewpoint/worldview, but plenty do. Then beyond that, there is a stage where an adult is able to form their own self-authored ideology/viewpoint. Very few adults ever reach the last stage of adult learning development where they are able to understand the limits of their own self-authoring view and able to hold complexity and contradiction within it. Or, at least, this is all psychologist Robert Keegan’s theory on Adult Developmental Stages. It makes sense that many get stuck in certain stages and some may never develop beyond them if they keep their circle of influence small and to only include those who are the same as them. This happens a lot and it stunts that progression of natural adult learning and growth.
I share that because at the very least, we all start out programmed by whatever environment we grew up in. The less experience some of us have with anything outside of that programming, the more likely we are to fear and even justify harm to others who seem like a threat to our programming/comfort zone. The more we interact with others who haven’t received all the same programming as us, or received wholly different programming, the more opportunity to see for yourself how much of a danger to you it really is to step outside of yours. It also affects how likely you are to be susceptible to propaganda that is meant to stir up fear on both sides. Pit one side against the other and there will be fear and chaos, and no one is looking while those in power do whatever they want. One side is too busy charging at the other, seeing them as criminals or lazy or sinful/immoral or whatever, and the other side is too busy trying to survive through the harm being inflicted at them by their own neighbors turned against them, sometimes also fighting back, which is arguably justified.
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**To be clear, having the ways you have contributed to harm or the pain of others pointed out to you isn’t the same as harm being done to you, that’s just discomfort with uncomfortable truths. When I talk about people trying to survive the harms their own neighbors and community members have inflicted upon them, I mean people who are legitimately struggling to exist in safety, dignity, health, freedom, and fair treatment, due to the actions, inactions, or ideology of others around them. Just because I recognize how those in power use our differences to pit us against each other doesn’t mean I don’t also see how much more harm is done to certain groups of people, based on where they fall within the social hierarchy of this country and world. I don’t condone violence because I understand how it reverberates and ripples out throughout all of humanity and just continues the cycle of harm and abuse, but I can certainly understand how some people can be pushed to that point and feel they have no other option. Particularly when using words hasn’t worked, it’s just made those who refuse to see truth doubt your pains and experiences as real. How long is a group of people expected to endure continued harm while also being told they aren’t really in pain and are just being too sensitive or too divisive for trying to alert others to their pain?
Did you know that crying serves a sociological and biological purpose? The purpose is to get others in your vicinity/community to notice you are in physical or emotional pain so they can comfort you and/or help you. It is a very normal response to want to try and make others aware of your pain. It is not a very normal response to have others simply not believe you. That part of the equation is what these systems of control added in. They make us so beholden to the programming they set in place (religion, political party, etc), that any threat to their systems/structures/programs feels like a threat to us as a human, to our very identity. They have successfully tricked us all into thinking we ARE these programmed identities so we will protect the programs/systems/structures/whatever your preferred terminology is, at all costs. This makes us protect them over one another. When faced with a person in pain or what we have come to see as our own identity, we choose our own identity because being wrong is filled with shame and because we naturally feel afraid of losing our identity (aka ego).
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The truth is that most of us want the same exact things. We want safety, comfortable living, peace, opportunity, love, kindness, trust. Our programming gets in the way of us having that. The programming upholds all the current systems we exist within, as the programs are created by and encouraged by the powerful. The programs are very useful tools of control as they only need to make us afraid in order to justify doing any unethical or harmful thing to another group or to the planet. I took out many of the most prominent parts of my programming (but undoing all of it will likely take a very long time) and I encourage anyone who is capable of doing the same, to do so. Take it all off and just see one another, human to human. Anything that justifies violence or harm of any kind coming to someone else is something that harms us all. The task is to transform pain into light when it comes to you, rather than continue the ripple of harm out to others. It is also to try and prevent harm coming to others whenever possible. These tasks are not always easy, but this explains my stance on forgiveness, so we are back on track now.
I am committed to being honest, so I won’t lie and say that my parents didn’t contribute at all to the factors that kept my brother locked into addiction. Many people/things going on around him contributed at different times, including me. But the way I see it is that my family lineage has passed down quite a lot of pain that no one knew how to properly process and release, mostly pains caused by the faulty structures and systems we exist within (poverty, grief, shame, abandonment, neglect, abuse, toxic power dynamics, emotional avoidance etc), and I won’t hold a grudge against previous generations for not having had the tools, knowledge, awareness, or ability to hold, face, heal, or transmute the pain. I believe in free will and I believe I am here by choice, that I wanted to help, and so here I am. I don’t have control over what anyone does, only what I do. I don’t have authority over anyone but myself, including the authority to assign judgement when I myself have plenty to be judged harshly by others about if they wanted to. I am an incredibly flawed parent, so who am I to determine how good or bad of a parent someone else was when they were handed different experiences and pains than me? I can speak on what they did that hurt me. That much is my truth and my experience to speak of, but being honest about how I have been hurt and how I have needed to heal should not be an assumption that I hold a grudge or any anger towards those who have harmed me. Honesty does not have to equal judgement nor shame. It can just simply be acknowledgement of how behaviors have caused others harm and then it can be used as feedback to inform us on better ways to move about in the world going forward. It doesn’t have to include revenge or getting even or settling the score, and in fact it shouldn’t.
Although I had a dad who would hold the belt in one hand while telling us to pass him in order to get to our bedroom and snap it menacingly as we went by to ensure we were scared enough of him, and a mom who broke a hanger on my brother Mike’s butt, and left welts on mine, and who often wouldn’t hardly look at or speak to me for hours or days after I had done something wrong, I forgive my parents. Even now they would rather eat a shoe than talk about any of these things and when forced to talk about them they spend the majority of the time minimizing, justifying, deflecting, denying, or saying they don’t remember anything. And you know what? I believe them about not remembering a lot. The mind is a very powerful thing and people will live in whatever reality they choose, including one that conveniently locks up the unsavory memories and hides them away deep in the psyche. When someone challenges this reality by bringing up these kinds of memories, the reaction is naturally to defend it if the person is not willing to see it due to the shame surrounding it.
I have found so much more peace in not trying to rely on someone else’s reality to change in order to move forward in living my best life, but it’s only possible because they no longer have any sort of control over my life and they have been pretty respectful of any boundaries I have set in place, which are minimal because, again, they don’t really have any sort of control over me anymore. I don’t really expect or need anything from them at this point other than the respect of any current boundaries I may uphold. Anything beyond that I appreciate, but don’t expect nor need. I’ve learned to hold myself in my pain, to validate myself, and to love on the little girl inside me who was hurt. I am capable of giving myself everything I ever needed but maybe didn’t get. I am still working on that every day, and I will continue to.
It’s not as easy to let it go, forgive, or get out from under the harm if those who have harmed you still have control/power over you and/or are not respecting your boundaries. So I don’t say any of this to try and tell anyone else what the right timetable is for them when it comes to forgiveness or when it even comes to what defines forgiveness to you. Some people believe forgiveness is equivalent to saying that what happened was okay. I tend to equate it to just letting go of the anger associated with the pain. The 3 Phases of Forgiveness, according to psychologist Molly Layton, are injured innocence, obsession, and transcendence. Transcendence is the part where you release it and this is the hardest part to get to. Most people get stuck in the obsession stage for a long time, and this is where they keep ruminating on it and/or even try to get revenge or settle the score. There’s no right or wrong way to move through this process nor any right or wrong timetable. It definitely isn’t something that needs to be rushed through, especially from those suffering with CPTSD due to the harms they experienced at the hands of others. CPTSD is very complex and the forgiveness process involved can also be quite complex. Many who experience this need to allow themselves to feel everything they have had pent up inside for a very long time, and also have to do a lot of rewiring in their brain for a very long time. It’s possible to need to go through the motions of forgiveness towards the same people multiple different times as different parts of the pain bubble up to the surface to be witnessed and nervous systems rewired for peace and safety. These people should not be judged, but approached with compassion and patience. So all of this to say, I in no way seek to minimize or dismiss the struggle of anyone else who have been unable to access empathy or forgiveness yet in their own journey. But I can speak to my own experience with it, and maybe that allows someone else to figure out how to access the same.
My father was all the things I mentioned, but he was also someone whose biological father abandoned him before he was even born. And then when he was a teen his mom and dad (the one who adopted him as his own after marrying his mother) kicked him out of their house where he went to live with his grandparents for a while. I see the boy who feels abandoned. I see it every time he gets flustered at the mere mention of his biological father and the way he doesn’t ever speak of him if he can help it. I see a kid who felt like he had something to prove to the world, to earn love and worthiness. I see a kid who felt powerless and so he reveled in moments where he could feel powerful. So when I remember moments when he would purposefully scare us until we were terrified and crying, while he was laughing at us, I remember this also. When I remember the times his fury would reign over our household, the punched holes in the walls, the loss of control of his own emotions while trying his best to control the actions and behaviors and feelings of everyone else around him, I remember his pain also. It doesn’t make anything he said or did that was harmful to the rest of us okay. It does make it something I am capable of having empathy for and letting go of.
My mother was all the things I mentioned, but she was also someone who had left her entire life in Brasil behind and never really talked about it. I rarely heard tales of her life growing up. She was all too content with leaving her entire existence behind and forgetting all about her life prior to coming here. She had a brother who was murdered when I was just a little girl, after my mom had moved to the states and started her family. She never talked about him when I was growing up. Never. I still know only his name and I know my two cousins, his daughters, who were just toddlers at the time of his death. I know my mom’s dad was a drinker and he died of stomach cancer before I was even born. Her mother was a nurse and while vibrant and funny and many other things, I know she was a tough woman who could endure a lot (she once clipped the tip of the bone of her finger off, herself). I feel that she was tough for a reason. I don’t know all the details of my mother’s pain but her silence does indicate pain. Perhaps some unspeakable pain. You can especially see it in the way she tends to feel most at-home and comfortable when around small children, not older kids or adults with more complex emotional states. It’s not uncommon for people to become stuck at a certain emotional point where a major trauma occurred in their life. So some who experienced a horrific trauma at a very young age may remain, emotionally, at that same age where it occurred to them. Cognitively, intellectually, and in all other ways they may progress and develop just fine. But emotionally, they may get stuck. When I remember how when I was about 16 a group of my friends came to my house for my birthday sleepover party and they had gotten super drunk at some other party/house before coming over and one of them was showing signs of potential alcohol poisoning (slurred speech, unable to walk or stand on her own, could not stop vomiting) and I made up a lie to my mom about how she just was lactose intolerant and was throwing up from the cheese on the pizza we had my mom simply shrugged and turned away and pretended like she didn’t see/know what was happening. As several of us tried supporting this girl all the way down the stairs of my house because she couldn’t even walk, much less go down the stairs, and out to the front yard where someone had called her older sister to come get her, my mom simply left me alone to figure it out by myself. She didn’t like to see or acknowledge hard things. When I remember these things I also remember the pain I can clearly see that she has, and recognize I probably don’t even know the half of whatever happened to her. It doesn’t make anything she did or said (or failed to do/say) okay. It does make it something I am capable of having empathy for and letting go of.
It’s not hard for me to understand why it was difficult for either of them to face pain and hard things or know what to do with them. No one taught them and the world around them wasn’t normalizing or talking a lot about things like Mental/Emotional Health yet. I recognize that maybe it wasn’t their path or life purpose to work on the healing portion of our family lineage. I am not sure how the universe all works, but I am open to beliefs and thoughts that help relieve me from pain and help me let go. So I consider a thought like this as a possibility. It doesn’t really matter that much whether it’s for sure true or not because it might be. It’s a possibility. So I can choose to believe and hope in that possible reality because it allows me another access point to empathy, which helps me release and let go.
At the end of the day, we are all just trying to exist and survive off of the programming that was handed down to us by our parents and society. Some of us are breaking free from that and finding each other and joining forces in unity, some are still stuck in our old paradigms where we think being Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Mormon or Republican or Democrat or LGBTQ+ or White or Black or Brown somehow makes us actually different from each other. We’re not. We are all just people trying to survive what was handed to us. Some have the capacity for more, but some may have been handed a lot more. It’s not for us to judge the differences, but try to understand them and learn from these different perspectives, believe these different perspectives are just as valid as our own, and find where we all have common ground. We have all been handed the emotional debts of our ancestors in one way and to some degree or another. What we do with that is up to us. We can continue to choose avoidance, stick our heads in the sand, deflect and blame, or we can face it all, head on. Face all the pain of colonialism, slavery, genocide, racism, sexism, patriarchal systems, etc. etc. We can’t face it if we don’t admit it exists, if we close our eyes and refuse to see it just because it’s not happening directly to us. Believe people who are in pain and instead of deflecting their pain or minimizing it, try to figure out where it’s coming from, because it’s not nowhere. Even if someone is lying, it is still indicative of some underlying pain. The behavior that shows when pain bubbles up to the surface is not the target, the pain is. The pain always is. And if they are not lying, they truly may need some help. Either way, the default should be to focus on helping people heal the pain at the core, not judging or shaming it.
So, as I do continue to go about writing in this blog and being truthful about all that I have seen and experienced from my perspective, don’t assume that my honesty about the difficult or painful parts is either me holding a grudge/being angry about it nor dismissing any of it as justified or okay that it happened. It’s not okay, but it’s also not unforgivable. And if I do have moments of anger or sadness or anything else, it isn’t because I am bad. It’s just because I am human. And I am healing. What triggers me shows me where I still need to do more healing. It is feedback, that is all. That doesn’t give me the right to harm others as my response when these feelings do show up, and that part is on me to learn to become the master of my own actions and behaviors, despite my emotional states. It isn’t easy work, but it is incredibly important for the salvation of humanity. It’s the work we all must do, that humanity used to know how to do but when systems of control stepped in and started infusing shame and blame and worthlessness to keep us all small and compliant, we forgot.
Thirty-Three 