My Story (possible trigger warning)

Before I continue I’d like to say two things:

1. The subject matter of this post may be triggering for some individuals.
2. This is my first time posting, and it is entirely possible that I have done something wrong. If I have I would like to apologize and say that it was not my intention to do so.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try to work through some of my feelings regarding how I grew up by writing them out. I decided to share because my panic attacks have grown in frequency and I don’t really know what to do anymore. I’m unsure what (if anything) I hope to gain from this, but at the very least I think I might feel a little better for it. Also, I apologize in advance for how disjointed some of the thoughts may seem.

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I have a great fear of being helpless. I don’t just hate yelling or anger for the noise, but also because I fear being struck or held down. Yelling, arguing, anger, are all precursors to those things. I’m scared that they will hurt me and no one will help me. Sometimes I find myself so overcome by that fear that I begin to shake and cry, not the loud heaving way, the silent way, the way you cry when you don’t want people to notice - the way you cry when you have to clamp down so hard on your emotions that it feels like your chest could burst - but you are so terrified that no matter how hard you try to keep it in the tears still fall. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m so scared of. My parents were maybe a bit liberal with their use of spanking as punishment, but in all fairness I wasn’t l necessarily an ‘easy’ child. I think what scared me so much as a child was how cavalier they sometimes seemed when threatening us with it. My dads temper was probably what scared me the most. I found it to be unpredictable (there was always a cause, but we often weren’t aware of that cause until after the matter). My dad was laid off a couple times when I was younger (2008 and all it’s bullshit). I remember he would sometimes fly into these fits of rage over something (we were rarely the cause of these) where he would scream and slam doors and kick and throw things. My mother worked, so when these fits happened there was little me or my brothers could do other than make ourselves as scarce as possible if we couldn’t do anything to help. Sometimes I would hide in the closet, or under a bed. I only remember one time where my dad comforted me when he scared me with those. While my dads temper was unpredictable, my mothers was not. The only problem was that for her to be mad enough to strike you it was probably because you had just done the thing that made her mad. So while my mothers temper was not unpredictable, it was sudden. From what I can remember my parents have only struck me in the face a handful of times. There is only one instance I vaguely recall were my father was the one to do it, every other time it was my mother. I don’t ever remember it being an overly excessive amount of spankings in a row, but that may be because at a certain number the pain of the punishment becomes more scary that whatever pain you may receive for resistance, as it is much more difficult to hit the child hard if said child is kicking and contorting every which way. I always found it particularly painful (emotionally), when my parents would kick us, because no matter what it was I had done it meant that they wanted to cause me pain. Even if they did so because I was fighting back (something which occurred more frequently as I grew older), I don’t think I ever struck out first, and when I did strike out my main goal was not to cause them pain, it was to defend myself or get them to release me, if how I retaliated caused them pain that was never my purpose, it was just a byproduct of my attempts to achieve that purpose. The way I see it is that it is one thing to spank your child, this is accepted as ‘discipline’, but for a parent kick their child their goal is simply to inflict pain and to hurt, not to regulate said child’s behavior. It is an action done out of anger. Sometimes I think about these things and I think about how I react to entirely harmless actions now and I worry that I am missing something, because the fear I feel at those simple actions does not seem proportional to what I have experienced. It makes me worry that there is something else that happened, something that I don’t remember because I didn’t want to remember, only what ever that occurrence was affected me so much that even if I don’t consciously recall it the fear was deep enough to stick.

Every noise that is sudden spooks me. It can be worse at home, because there any noise I hear is immediately followed by memories of a similar noise and the events that followed it. I hear the sound of my father walking down the front hall in his boots, and suddenly I am hearing his thundering steps as he charges up the stairs, throws open my door so hard it rattles in the frame and dents the wall, and grabs me by the foot to drag me off the bed as I screech in panic and he begins to beat me. It’s so vivid that even though I know it’s not happening in the moment I can feel the terror, helplessness, panic all burst forth and cause my chest to constrict. I would liken the feeling to the one you experience when you dream yourself running down a hallway to escape something terrifying and choosing to jump from the ledge rather than face whatever it is. That’s how I’d describe the feeling, however with those dreams the feeling is relieved when you wake up: the feeling of tension in your chest and of your stomach dropping to your feet dissipates in seconds. When this happens to me it’s like a flash of a memory: like when you recall something that spanned a number of minutes in a matter of seconds. It’s like that. In less than a second the scenario has flashed in my minds eye, but unlike when recalling a memory it’s like I’m reliving it because all of the feelings are fresh and real. It’s enough to knock the breath out of me. What’s worse is that because the feelings all feel so real I can have trouble telling which experiences are real and which experiences are an amalgamation of others. The one I used as an example, for instance. With that one I am 60% sure that everything in it is true except for the beating part because I just curled up in a ball and cried as he hit me (even as I type this and try to dissect and analyze it I become less and less sure of which parts of it are real). It’s scary. The not knowing. Because on one hand this could simply be a product of faulty memory and an overactive imagination. On the then hand, if this is real… well, I don’t know. It’s not as though I can explain so sudden a drastic change in behavior. Thinking of all of this makes me feel tired, and like I want to cry. Feeling helpless or cornered often makes me feel that way. That, or I am flooded by an almost overwhelming rage that makes it hard to think and makes me simply want to lash out and (RipTearCrushClawBreakBloodHurt) cause them pain, it doesn’t even have to be physical, so long as it hurts.