Shadow Post – cPTSD – March 2025

The following post, as well as any others I label as “shadow” should be read as having trigger warnings. They’re going to deal with problems in relationships, mostly with my family (read: Mom) and the ways I’m realizing the ripples of those childhood traumas affect my adult relationships, especially with Paul, as well as having left me vulnerable to further abuse and, recently, fed misunderstandings. Please, if you’re an abuse survivor, read with caution or just skip them. I don’t think I’m into spanking because of being abused, but the abuse definitely shaped some elements and expressions of kink that are most powerful for me.

Several people have asked if I am in a good place right now as my posts are pretty positive given how terrible the past few years have been. The answer is that I am trying to be, but generally am not. I find it almost impossible to openly discuss negative things about my life and family. My past, particularly my abusive childhood, left deep scars that continue to affect me, that I carry into any new experience of trauma or pain. One of the most traumatic aspects of that experience was and is the suppression of emotions and hiding of “bad” things. Growing up, no matter what happened at home, my siblings and I weren’t allowed and, to an extent, could not express any negative emotions. The only exception was tears, but even then, we faced consequences if our crying was deemed excessive or manipulative. We were yelled at, mocked,¹ and threatened with further punishment.² We were also told it was wrong and entitled not to be grateful for being in such a good family, being given everything we could need and most everything we wanted.

Our family had to maintain the appearance of perfection, the ideal parents and children, to anyone outside it.³ This facade extended within our home as well, except during the actual moments of abuse. There was no room for honest feelings from us (the kids), no space for our sadness, anger, or frustration. The three of us were expected to present an idealized image, no matter what we were going through. This environment forced us to bottle up our emotions, leaving lasting effects on the three of us that I am still working through today.⁴ For me, it’s easier for me to tell if I wrap the abuse into a fiction, ideally one that can have a happy ending.

First, good things:

We survived. All three of us did. One of the things I’m happiest about is that my sister and brother have managed not to continue the abuse to the next generation. Both are amazing parents whose kids come to them with problems and are able to be honest and real in ways we never could. I love them all the more for it.
My siblings, especially my sister and me, are close and always have been. She’s been my closest friend most of my life. We accept and trust each other. I think it’s because we know what the others went through and are generous with each other — we’ve never been estranged, and any disagreements pass quickly.
I’ve got a good education and (for now anyway) a good job.

Number 2 is really important. I don’t think I’d have made it to 57 were I an only child. I know the term “gaslight” is over-used, but that’s the word that most captures my childhood abuse experience. Horrible things happened, and we were hurt, but the next moment, we were expected to behave as if it never happened. And to apologize for it because we’d made my mom angry so if she said or did anything painful, it was because we’d made her do it. I think if I’d been an only rather than the oldest, I’d have doubted my own reality and memories. That’s not to say my sister and brother remember things the same way, we don’t and that’s fine. But we all remember the abuse happened and that it was wrong.

An example of why that was so important:

When she was almost 19, my sister, who’s three years younger than me, attempted suicide and ended up in therapy for a few months with a young psychiatrist. One day my sister called me and said her therapist wanted to meet me — asked me to her next appointment. At that appointment, I asked the doctor why she wanted to talk with me. She said she needed to know if my sister’s perception was true/right – that she had to be “good” all the time because otherwise, our mother would hate her the way she hated me.

Was it true? Did my mother hate me?

Answer: yes. Yes, she did. My mom hated me. She always had.

That my sister saw and felt this, could put it into words, and speak that truth, something I’d never been able to say out loud, was liberating. I’ve never been more grateful for anything except, maybe, that I was the “hated” one. Because being a “loved” one like my sister and brother was much worse. My mom’s dislike of me came with the freedom to dislike her back. My sister lived in constant fear of what would happen to her if she was me, if she wasn’t perfect, wasn’t “good” in my mom’s eyes. That terror was ultimately the source of the despair that triggered her suicide attempt. As an adult, she chose to live thousands of miles away from my mother — it was the only way she felt she could have a life. I also think it was harder for her to hear and watch the abuse and not be able to do anything to stop it than it was for me to experience it. One thing that’s true for all three of us, we abhor violence. I’ve never hit or physically hurt anyone, nor has my brother or sister even when being physically attacked. My sister and I both recoil from it — always have. We almost never argued or fought even as kids. She was the person in the house I loved best and knew loved me. She tells me now she saw me as her defender, something it embarrasses me to say I’ve never felt I did well or often enough.

I’ll write more about this dynamic between my sister and me later. For now, I’m going to list the bad – that is, some various traumatic experiences that may be responsible for the cPTSD that is making my now also my then.

Childhood abuse from my parents

Neglect as an infant and toddler to the point where I was seen as having a “failure to thrive” because I wasn’t growing or gaining weight. This was attributed to severe allergies, including to most food, coupled with severe respiratory asthma. A story my grandmother would tell as if it was a joke was of coming over to see me when I was a few weeks old and telling my mom she needed to find a way to take care of me or “give me back to the hospital.”
Physical abuse in the form of severe corporal punishment that began by the time I was 2 or 3 and continued until I left home at 18. The “controlled” version was my dad, after my mom reported on me and literally worked him up to it, “spanking” me with paddles, belts, and some other implements for things that in retrospect were pretty normal kid stuff.⁵
Physical abuse that wasn’t controlled. My mom slapped me whenever she thought I either wasn’t listening or if I “looked” like I disagreed with whatever she was saying about me. Or if I “talked back.”⁶ I remember very little of this — a few moments. My sister remembers more of it — that this happening to me was frequent enough that she spent a lot of time dreading the next outburst.
Verbal and emotional abuse. My mom would tell me she didn’t like me and “only loved me because she had to,” that I was so bad that if I wasn’t her child she wouldn’t allow her children (my sister) to be around me.

Other childhood stuff

I was in and out of the hospital (see severe asthma above) throughout my childhood. Those times were scary, but also weirdly exciting. Some of the treatments were quite painful.
Being moved away from my grandmother, the only adult I knew loved me, when I was five and then again when I was twelve.
Having any comfort object –blanket, stuffie, toys, or books–I treasured disappearing while I was at school. I was often told I was “too old” for it and shouldn’t be selfish — that another child needed it more.
I was bullied, manipulated, and, finally, sexually assaulted on the playground by a group of students when I was 13.

Adult

I’m not sure if this was a trauma or a reaction to trauma, or both, but in my first semester of college, at eighteen and two months, I got romantically involved with my freshman English professor who was more than fifteen years old than me. We married a few years later. After we moved from California to the Midwest for his job, I found out he was an alcoholic. I finally left him when I was 28, the year I came back to California and started graduate school.
Discovering my ex-husband (see above) was having an affair with a friend of ours.
Sexually assaulted at a frat party when I was an undergraduate.
Sexually assaulted by the gynecologist at my graduate student health center.⁷

There are a few other things that I’m not ready to write about, but it’s clear to me that one of the effects of this is I’ve got terrible fears of rejection and abandonment. One of the ways I damaged our marriage was never believing I was worthy to be loved. Ironically, the fear of it being taken away, and the exhaustion of having to reassure me fed into both Paul and my co-dependency and was corrosive to our relationship. Likewise, my awareness that I often feel rejected when I’m not had me not asking questions when I should have, or not insisting on help when I knew we needed it, somehow hoping things would magically be better. [Spoiler – it didn’t work because that never happens.]

One of my plans for the next few months as I adjust to living alone is to start trauma-informed therapy and (hopefully) rewire my brain so I don’t have to spend the rest of my life in a state of constant vigilance. Healing cPTSD is supposed to be possible, though not easy. That’s one of the tiny threads I’m clinging to at the moment.

So, this is me trying to be honest about the dark as well as the light.

1
Things like “Oh boo hoo, poor little you.”
2
The classic: “stop crying or you’ll get something to cry about.”
3
I can speculate on where that came from, and why this was so important to my mom, but I don’t know. I just know that was the way it was.
4
My brother and sister are too but in different ways.
5
I’m not saying that about my mom to minimize my father’s responsibility, but to explain why those punishments felt like they came from both of them.
6
For “talked back” read “tried to explain or defend myself.”
7
While this happened in the 1990s, I didn’t come to terms with it until the scandal that he’d done this to thousands of female students came out in 2019.

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