Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (15 page)

If you have any 5’s or 6’s on this questionnaire, this lifetrap may still apply to you, even if your score is in the low range.

INTERPRETING YOUR MISTRUST AND ABUSE SCORE

10-19 Very low. This lifetrap probably does
not
apply to you.

20-29 Fairly low. This lifetrap may only apply
occasionally
.

30-39 Moderate. This lifetrap is an
issue
in your life.

40-49 High. This is definitely an
important
lifetrap for you.

50-60 Very high. This is definitely one of your
core
lifetraps.

Abuse is a complex mixture of feelings—pain, fear, rage, and grief. The feelings are intense, and they simmer near the surface. When we are with patients who have been abused, we are conscious of these strong feelings. Even if they appear calm, we can feel them in the room. They seem about to burst like water through a dam.

You may have volatile moods. You suddenly become very upset—either crying or enraged. It often surprises other people. Frank’s fits of rage at his wife and Madeline’s sudden bursting into tears are examples of this.

At other times you may be spaced out—what we call dissociated. You seem to be somewhere else. Things seem unreal to you. Your emotions are numb. This is a habit you developed as a kind of psychological escape from the abuse.

ADRIENNE: When Frank doesn’t want to talk about something, it’s like he can click off. Like snap, he’s gone. I don’t even exist.

FRANK: I know what she means. I know I do that. I don’t really mean to, it just happens. It’s like I just don’t want to deal with something and my feelings shut off.

Your experience of relationships is a painful one. Relationships are not places to relax and become vulnerable. Rather, they are dangerous and unpredictable. People hurt you, betray you, and use you. You have to stay on your guard. It is hard for you to trust people, even the ones closest to you. In fact, it may be
particularly
the ones closest to you that you are most unable to trust.

You assume people secretly mean you harm. When someone does something nice for you, your mind searches for the ulterior motive. You expect people to lie to you and to try to take advantage of you.

MADELINE: Usually I figure, no matter how nice a guy is, I know what he’s really after.

THERAPIST: What’s that?

MADELINE: Sex. Only sex.

Mistrust and abuse bring about a state of
hypervigilance.
You are constantly on your guard. The threat can emerge at any time: you must be alert for the moment when the person turns on you. You watch and you wait.

This stance may be directed at the whole world or only at specific types of people. For example, while Frank tended to be suspicious of everyone, Madeline’s suspiciousness was limited fairly well to men. (She had issues about women as well, but these centered more on abandonment.)

The way you
remember
your childhood abuse is important. You may remember everything, and your memories may haunt you. Things remind you of the abuse.

MADELINE: Lots of times I hate having sex. Images keep popping into my head of my stepfather. And I get these waves of revulsion.

On the other hand, you may have no clear memories of the abuse. There may be whole patches of your childhood that seem vague and foggy.

MADELINE: There’s a lot of things I don’t know about those years. Like how bng it went on. I have no idea. I say it was for the whole time, but I don’t really know. I just have the feeling that it was for a bng time.

You may not remember anything directly. But you remember in other ways—dreams or nightmares, violent fantasies, intrusive images, suddenly feeling upset when something reminds you of the abuse. Your
body
can remember, even when you yourself do not.

FRANK: Something funny happened the other day. I went into the storage closet I built, and when I switched on the light, the bulb was dead. I was standing there in the dark and all of a sudden I broke out into this cold sweat. I was petrified.

THERAPIST: Can you cbse your eyes and get an image of that moment?

FRANK: Okay.

THERAPIST: Now give me an image of when you felt that way before.

FRANK: I get an image of me as a kid, standing in the cbset in the dark, shaking.

THERAPIST: Why are you afraid?

FRANK: My father’s out there boking for me. It’s funny. I didn’t make the connection. That’s why I was so scared.

You may even have flashbacks—memories so strong that you feel as though the abuse were recurring. But perhaps the most dangerous way you remember is through your current relationships. You reenact your childhood abuse.

Anxiety and depression are common. You may have a deep sense of despair about your life. Certainly you have low self-esteem and feelings of defectiveness.

The origins of this lifetrap are in childhood experiences of being abused, manipulated, humiliated, or betrayed.

ORIGINS OF THE MISTRUST AND ABUSE LIFETRAP

1. Someone in your family physically abused you as a child.
   
2. Someone in your family sexually abused you as a child, or repeatedly touched you in a sexually provocative way.
   
3. Someone in your family repeatedly humiliated you, teased you, or put you down (verbal abuse).
   
4. People in your family could not be trusted. (They betrayed confidences, exploited your weaknesses to their advantage, manipulated you, made promises they had no intention of keeping, or lied to you.)
   
5. Someone in your family seemed to get pleasure from seeing you suffer.
   
6. You were made to do things as a child by the threat of severe punishment or retaliation.
   
7. One of your parents repeatedly warned you not to trust people outside of the family.
   
8. The people in your family were against you.
   
9. One of your parents turned to you for physical affection as a child, in a way that was inappropriate or made you uncomfortable.
   
10. People used to call you names that really hurt.
    

All forms of abuse are violations of your boundaries. Your physical, sexual, or psychological boundaries were not respected. Someone in your family who was supposed to protect you willfully started to hurt you. And, being a child, you were largely defenseless.

With Madeline it was her sexual boundaries. Her mother and her stepfather had become estranged, and her mother was abusing tranquilizers. (Drugs and alcohol are often implicated somewhere in the abuse situation.) Her stepfather turned to her as a source of affection.

MADELINE: It started as just normal stuff, hugging and kissing. At first I really liked my stepfather. He seemed to really care about me. At first I liked it when he hugged and kissed me.

This is a common scenario. The parents have conflicts or drift apart, and a parent uses the child as a replacement. The child may welcome the attention—which can become a source of guilt later on.

Her stepfather’s affection progressed to sexual abuse. At first Madeline was not sure that abuse was occurring.

MADELINE: But there came a time when I knew it was wrong. I remember he started falling asleep on the couch with me. He’d have his arms around me, and he’d start accidently touching me or rubbing against me.

It is important to note that the extent of abuse can range widely. With some people there is intensive sexual abuse, and with others it is limited to touching or fondling. The most important point is how you felt about it. If you felt very uncomfortable about the touching, then it was almost certainly sexual abuse.

Another source of guilt later is that the child
believes
that he or she allowed, encouraged, or even enjoyed the abuse. Madeline let her stepfather touch her.

MADELINE: I would just lie there. Like I couldn’t move.

THERAPIST: You had no sense of being able to protect yourself and that was very frightening.

The abuse also stirred sexual feelings in Madeline. This confused her, and made her feel bad and ashamed.

It is important to understand that you bear none of the responsibility. The fact that you may have allowed the abuse or even responded sexually to it in no way implies your guilt. The fact that you were a child absolves you. If there are people in your family who are bigger and stronger than you, and they want to violate your boundaries, there is little you can do. The situation is too complex. You were not expected to protect yourself. Rather, your family was supposed to be protecting you.

The fact that no one protected her is one of the greatest sources of pain for Madeline.

MADELINE: They didn’t care enough what happened to me. Neither one of them. They were my mother and my stepfather, and they didn’t care what happened to me.

Sexual abuse is a violation of your spirit as well as your body. No matter how you feel, you were innocent. Your innocence and your trust were betrayed.

The secrecy was another source of guilt and shame. Her stepfather would tell her it was their little secret.

THERAPIST: Why didn’t you tell your mother?

MADELINE: Well first, because he told me not to. But I was also too ashamed to tell her. I mean, to this day, you’re the first person I’ve ever really talked about it with. I couldn’t talk about it with her. And also I was worried that it would break up the family.

I would try to get her to take fewer pills, though. He used to do it most when she was passed out on pills. I used to beg her not to take those pills. She should have seen that something was wrong. But she couldn’t stop taking those pills.

The feeling of not being protected is part of most forms of abuse. One parent abused you, and the other failed to prevent or stop it. They both let you down.

We all know what we should do when a stranger attempts to abuse us. We should fight back, we should get help, we should escape. All of these options become problematic when you are a child and the abuser is someone you love. At bottom, you tolerated the abuse because you needed the connection with the person. It was your parent or brother or sister. Indeed, it may have been the
only
connection you were able to get. Without it you would have been alone. To most children,
some
connection, even an abusive one, is better than no connection at all.

In terms of the three types of abuse—physical, sexual, and verbal—the similarities are more important than the differences. They all involve that same strange mixture of love and hurt. Frank’s psychological experience of abuse was similar to Madeline’s. But because it was his natural father who abused him from an earlier age, and because it was more prolonged, Frank’s lifetrap is more severe.

Frank remembers living in a constant state of fear. His father’s rages were unpredictable.

FRANK: You never knew when he’d go off. One minute we’d be having a normal conversation, and the next he’d be shouting at the top of his lungs, or swinging his fists. Sometimes he’d yell at my brother and sometimes at me. It was like living in the house with a crazy giant.

Even when things seemed okay, they weren’t. There were no real safety zones.

To this day, it is hard for Frank to feel safe. Safety issues absorb his attention and keep him from concentrating on other things. There is always part of him searching for that threat.

It is hard to convey how chaotic and dangerous the world seems when you are a child and someone close to you can invade you and hurt you. A basic sense of security that most people take for granted is simply
not there.

In every instance of abuse we have encountered as therapists, the abuser makes the child feel worthless. The abuser
blames
the child, and the child accepts that blame.

FRANK: At the time I thought it was happening because I was so bad. I was clumsy and would get into trouble. My father used to tell me I would rot in hell. I believed him. I just thought it was happening because I was such a lousy person.

Abuse creates powerful feelings of defectiveness. It makes you ashamed of who you are. You are unworthy. You are not entitled to have any rights or to stand up for yourself. You have to let the person use you and take advantage of you. It feels to you as if abuse is
all you deserve.