For anyone who has read any of my postings, or heck, had a real conversation with me, you know that I’m very candid about my past; my emotions and struggles and all sorts of that type of stuff. I’m pretty sure a majority of stuff I wrote on here for a 2 year period was related to things associated with a pretty severe bout with depression, development of a very inhibiting level of social anxiety disorder, my break-up, dropping out of school, and so on. Those were all challenging events, but I overlooked that I hadn’t talked about one thing that hadn’t properly talked about one thing; prolonged emotional abuse.
The depression, the anxiety, the extreme exile, all of these things were obstacles that required a sort of emotional-personal training and rehabilitation in order to overcome and grow beyond, but this one aspect is one that has represented more than an obstacle; it has reshaped me as a person, and even now, I am still suffering the effects from it.
A critical reason why I have always shied away from this subject is because it is hard to talk about it without feeling very incendiary. It is just hard to talk about it without it feeling like a smear campaign against another person, and it is far from that, and I’d also say that a lot of it was out of control of either person in my case, but there were so many factors that fell into place ‘just right’ that, for two people who were new to serious relationships, didn’t have the experience to see all the trouble on the horizon and take measures to make sure that the relationship can’t sustain these destructive qualities. I kind of look like it as sort of a relationship immune system. We were still babies. We didn’t really have much of one, and it only took a few bacteria to exponentially grow into a debilitating disease.
And much further than that, a lot of emotional abuse is self-derived. You might be able to trace the pattern of thought to a case in which the other person felt the need to control how you feel once or twice, but it only took those few times to develop it into a habit of the self. It is just a nasty, ugly mutant.
So with that said, I just reiterate, one more time, anything I say in what I am writing is in no way saying anything against a specific person. This is someone I still hold in the highest regard, and knowing her so well all those years, I know that we’ve each taken everything from what we had and grown more than the baby from Honey, I Blew Up the Kids after that shrink ray got set to reverse. Sorry if you can’t help but get the wrong impression about someone because of this, I can’t help you if you do, but I am finally going to say some things about it, because, as always, I write here mainly for myself, but I do recognize people read this, and I try to hide it, but I like that. That fact is always in the back of my head, and many times, I write this very personal stuff because I think there is always someone out there who stumbles in here, then ends up being able to relate in some way. Anytime someone tells me they read my blog, and that it reached them in some way, well, that really does mean a lot to me. Ignore me trying to hide it.
Close relationships are weird, because they are kind of like classified CIA files, how long is long enough before you can declassify certain information? There probably is no answer to that, and maybe I make too much public, but I’m going to take the easy way out and chalk it up to the writer’s curse.
Alas, onward!
PART I – EMOTIONAL ABUSE AND YOU (click title to read more)