Surviving Childhood Trauma

As a survivor of extreme sexual, physical and emotional abuse as a child, I allowed what was happening to me to affect me as a teenager and then as an adult. I developed low self-esteem, anger issues and anorexia that almost killed me. I had no one advocate for me after I told my mother what was happening at the hands of her own brother. Her response was I must have been a child abuser in a previous life and I was getting my karma paid back to me for doing that. She did NOTHING to her brother. She actually embraced him. She forced me to endure family get-together's with her brother, I was not allowed to have a voice or an opinion or a childhood. He was sexually abusing my sister and my cousin too but I received the worst from him because I was the fighter. I would kick him and punch him when he touched me. He threatened to kill me several times if I told. He even went so far as to put dead animals in my lunch box to "show me" what he would do to me if I told. He would chase me with running chainsaws like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre character. To this day, hearing a chainsaw gives me anxiety. I finally got away from the sexual abuse when one of the twelve husbands my mother had was transferred out of the country for a government job when I was 13 years old. I had endured torturous abuse from the age of 4 to 13. I could not get over what happened to me and I could not forgive my mother for allowing it to go on as long as it did and doing nothing and not protecting me.

My mother was the person that physically and emotionally abused me. It's a strange phenomenon that I always wanted her love and approval and in return for that she controlled my life through beatings and fear. She would kick, punch, pull my hair out, claw me with her nails, bash my head into walls. I had so many bloody noses from her and still have scars from her nails digging into my wrists and arms. She called me stupid all of the time. She would tell me she should have never had children. All while she was always disappearing for days after hooking up with some guy she met at one of the several the bars she worked at. She got pregnant by a married drug dealer she was running drugs for in the seventies and when I was 10 she had my brother. I was his "mother" because she would make me care for him. I changed his diapers, fed him, bathed him and became his protector while she would disappear for days. If I called my grandparents for help because my brother didn't have diapers and formula, I would get beat by her for "telling on her". I would take the beatings so that my brother would receive what he needed and my grandparents would pick us up and bring us to their house. I began to hate the woman I called mother. I hated everything about who she was, what she was and I made a promise to myself that I would NEVER become like her. Children grow up idolizing their parents and wanting to be just like them. I used the person that my mother was as the example of what I would never be. I always wondered why she hated me so much. Why she would not love me as her daughter. That answer would not come to me until I was in my twenties.

My mother was always forcing my younger siblings and me to endure her lifestyle. The marriages to men she barely knew. The drugs she was taking. The mental breakdowns where she would have to be hospitalized for weeks. I never had a mother. We were just baggage to her. Lugging her "baggage" from relationship to relationship. She forced us to be exposed to her different religions. Tent revivals and speaking tongues was scary! I can remember staying at tent revivals all night. She never put her children before her own needs. We angered her because we existed. Once she told me she was destined to be a "soap opera star" in California but her decisions in her life ruined it for her but her "next life" she would never have children and she would become an actress and travel the world. As a child, being told you are not wanted can destroy a young soul. I never felt safe with her. She ruled by fear and physical abuse. She never showed love. She never hugged us. She never told us she was proud of us. She never told us we were loved. She never participated in our school activities or attended choral concerts or plays I was in or sports I played. She was a true narcissist to the core. No one else mattered but her. But little did I know how truly horrible she was.

To be continued...