“You are not sorry! You are ungrateful and terrible, but the last thing you are is sorry! Get out of my sight before you make me do something I’ll regret!” (Sidenote: why did she say things like that, she isn’t the one who would have regretted it, duh.)

She said more words as I jumped up from the chair, and it teetered for a second. I was so glad when it didn’t fall over, as that would have pushed her anger over the edge. I ran for my room, and collapsed onto my bed to fall asleep. I didn’t have tears surface anymore when this happened, I just wanted to escape into sleep. I couldn’t keep my eyes open for one more second. Curling around my pillow, underneath my Benji poster I fell into a deep sleep, which I knew would be interrupted when my father came home. He would come in the door from the garage, calling hello and my Mom would corner him in the kitchen, to tell him of my latest, greatest transgression. She would say I needed to be paddled, and he would protest at first, but she would get more and more insistent, until that moment when he realized that he would pay dearly for standing up to her, for months possibly after this infraction had passed. Sighing quietly, he would pull down the paddle from its perch on the ledge behind the empty salt and sugar jars and head upstairs. Then would came the refrain, ‘drop your jeans and grab your ankles.’

Cue back to present day. What I didn’t know at the time was how impactful those daily, weekly, normalized emotional beat-downs would have upon my life. I was a ‘freeze’ when triggered. I couldn’t stand up to her, she was my Mom and she told me how perfect she was, and how imperfect I was. When she was cycling, I was in constant hypervigilance and I had no control over the freeze response. I could never fight with her, the pervasive fear and shame was overwhelming and the only escape was sleep. I didn’t even care that I was going to get beat later, as long as I could sleep now.

Later on, my response became the fight response. When I felt threatened, I came back at the person with teeth bared and fierce, cutting words. She taught me well how to bombard someone, slice into their heart with insults and rage, totally show them that they were less than and I got to have the last word.

But I could not fight with her. Never with her. You can count on two fingers the number of times I stood up to her in my life, and clumsily asserted my needs. The first time she cut me off, walked out and would never speak of it again. The second time, she cut me out of her life and four months later shot herself in the heart, and died. I remember thinking in a very surreal way, this is what setting boundaries does? Yeah. Pretty dark.

Perhaps after years of being controlled and dominated, you would think that I would have gone off the deep end in terms of men, drugs, alcohol…but no. I was such a good little codependent, I thought she knew everything I did, all the time, knew what I was up to, so I just worked harder to live up to her idea of perfectionism. She knew what I was really like, it was a given that no one could ever truly care about me, because she thought I was an abomination. I kept reaching to her for validation that never came. For her eyes to shine with love. For anything that didn’t involve screaming. It was a cycle of my own, and while I hated it, it was familiar. My personal uncomfortable-comfort zone. I was a grasping child in an adult body, yearning for acceptance from the one person who could never give it. This was the result of years of systematic emotional abuse, grandiose overt narcissism. It was the concrete of perfectionism, in which I was buried up to my choking neck.

I put myself in therapy in my early 20’s and started to learn that I wasn’t the only one who had suffered from this type of crazy-making behavior. That I had PTSD (wait, I thought only veterans had that?!) and the pervasive shame was something that I could work through, which was beyond tough to imagine at the time. I learned tools to deal with my fear of never being worthy of love, of real love that had no strings attached, that wasn’t based on sacrificing your own needs to show the other person that you had worth. Healing has been such a long road, and some days I’m so tired of accepting that this is where I came from and I can be better. Other days my motivation keeps me plowing ahead and I get to experience internal joy as well as external happiness.

It’s not a linear process, where we work through something and it never pops up again. It’s a bit more like whack-a-mole, where I get one thing somewhat managed and another thing jumps out to be looked at. I had to learn to be content with me, and her opinion didn’t have to be my reality. I remember asking her so often, ‘do I feel this way mommy?’ and her response, ‘no you feel like this…’ Insanity inside the walls of my mind, manifested in codependency, shame and helplessness.