Raising Myself
Page 26
Just as I had no fear when I jumped into the ocean for the first time, I had no fear of LA. I knew that, just as I’d had the will, strength, and the courage to fight my way to the surface of the water after a huge wave knocked me down and propelled me under the water, I could fight my way back whenever I got knocked down in the future.
Yeah, I was going to make it.
Epilogue
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I did make it. I survived my childhood with its many traumas. I escaped Bakersfield, with all its craziness, and found my way to a much better place. I managed to reach all the goals I set for myself—to finish college and to help other people in ways I wished I could have been helped as a child. I was able to take the one talent I had discovered—my ability to write—and make it the vehicle for both helping others and making something of my life.
I’m also happy to say that I was able to fulfill my dreams of living close to the ocean and to travel the world and be exposed to different cultures. Instead of just collecting artifacts like elephants and masks, as Ruby had done, I actually rode an elephant in India and visited a mask making shop in Bali. I visited Australia and observed the aboriginal people there, and I went to New Zealand and learned about the Maori culture.
In high school, the male psychiatrist I saw told me I was a well-adjusted girl in spite of what I’d been through. He told me I didn’t have to let my past ruin my future. But he was wrong. As smart as I was, as “well adjusted” as I seemed to be, the truth was, I was just pretending. The truth was, I was a scared, troubled young girl. Yes, I survived my childhood, and I survived starting over in LA. But, over the years, cracks started to appear in my façade. I wasn’t as strong as I appeared to be. No one gets away with pushing down all the pain I was carrying.
In spite of my escape and my success, I don’t—unlike some other “recovery” memoirists—want to give readers the message that I was able to just “get over it” the way so many people expect victims of child abuse to do. I think this is an unreasonable and cruel thing to expect of former victims. No one just “gets over” a childhood like mine, no matter how strong they are.
It was these kinds of messages that got in the way of my healing from the neglect and sexual and emotional abuse I sustained as a child. I prided myself on being a strong person. I convinced myself that I could move on from my childhood and not look back, and for many years, this is what I attempted to do. But as the years went by, all the pain and fear and anger that I had buried in order to move on began to seep out like waste from a capped sewer. All the debris of my painful childhood began to infiltrate my daily life—especially my relationships. And the family traits—the alcoholism and narcissism that I so despised in my mother, my uncle Kay, and my aunt Natalla— came seeping out as well.
All my childhood, I fantasized about escaping Bakersfield. When I finally did, I felt liberated and hopeful, certain that nothing was going to hold me back—that I was finally the master of my own destiny. But I soon found that it wasn’t going to be all that simple. I had taken Bakersfield with me. As much as I tried to leave the pain behind, the memories of the people and the events I’d experienced there haunted me like ghosts in a graveyard. I found that the people and events of Bakersfield had shaped my personality. They had created the template from which I would fashion my life, my future relationships, and patterns of behavior.
There would be other Rubys, Sunnys, and Yvonnes. There would be other Steves and Harveys, Richards and Johns. We may think we’ve moved on when, in reality, we’ve just substituted new faces onto the people who have influenced us the most. We may try to forget the traumas of our childhood, but they linger on, hovering just under the surface, waiting to reemerge. They haunt us, hiding in the shadows, until we unearth them and face them head on.
Finally, at age twenty-five, after two previous attempts to get good therapy, I found my way to a talented, compassionate therapist who was able to help me take down the wall of defiance and protection I had built up starting at four years old. This therapist helped me uncover the long-buried feelings of pain and sadness and anger and fear. And, unlike my mother, she validated those feelings, encouraged me to express them, and offered me compassion for my suffering. She gave me the love I hadn’t received from my mother and taught me how to take care of my inner child.
I was in therapy for five years, during which time I was able to re-parent myself, release the immense amount of anger I had stored up toward my abusers, including my mother, and begin to stop blaming myself for my own victimizations.
The sexual abuse and rape I suffered had become the pattern from which I formed my sexual identity and my choice of partners. Like many survivors of child sexual abuse, I often reenacted the abuse by choosing men who were much like my abuser. I was suffering from the “repetition compulsion,” unconsciously attempting to repeat the traumas of my past in order to create a different outcome. By focusing my anger outward and allowing myself to grieve the abuse I experienced, I was able to break this unhealthy pattern.
My relationship with my mother continued to be a difficult and complicated one, and it took many more years of therapy for me to be able to heal from her neglect, cruelty, and criticism. Over the years, I was able to learn more about her history, which not only helped me to understand her but to gain compassion for her.
For those of you who are interested, I will be publishing a second memoir that will detail my continued journey once I left Bakersfield and moved to LA. It will chronicle my unhealthy relationships with men and the steps I took to create a healthier sexual identity. It will include my struggle to complete college while working during the day, and my struggle to find my true calling. It will include my search for a competent therapist to help me, as well as descriptions of the techniques and modalities that were most healing for me. And finally, it will include the important secrets my mother eventually shared with me, secrets that not only explained why she treated me the way she did, but helped me to gain compassion for her—compassion that helped me to forgive and reconcile with her.
I want to encourage anyone who had a childhood such as mine, who suffered from neglect and/or abuse, to hold on to your dreams and to do everything you can to help yourself to heal. It may take several tries before you find the right therapist for you; it may even take several different therapists and different modalities before you can say you feel substantial healing. But keep trying; keep believing in yourself and believing that you deserve to live a life in which you are respected and treated well by others. I held on to that belief throughout my life, and it is one of the things that saved me.
Most important, work on healing your shame. Keep working until you know, deep in your heart, that you were not to blame for the neglect or abuse you suffered. You did not deserve to be treated as you were. You did not cause your abuser(s) to behave the way they did. You were an innocent child. The only person who is responsible for the abuse they perpetrate is the abuser themselves.
I welcome your feedback. You can contact me through my
websites: www.beverlyengel.com or www.healmyshame.com
or email me at: beverly@beverlyengel.com
Acknowledgments
Writing a memoir has proven to be more difficult for me than writing non-fiction. I had to learn a whole new genre, and because of this I wish to thank my memoir “coach” Brooke Warner. I appreciate your patience as I grappled to learn all the new information and worked to incorporate it into my memoir. Thank you also for the great title idea.
I wish to thank Laura Davis, for her thoughtful and inspiring workshop on how to write a memoir. I loved the passages you read from other memoirists and particularly appreciated the exercises you assigned us.
I’m grateful to everyone at She Writes Press, especially Brooke Warner, Lauren Wise, and Krissa Lagos, who were so helpful all along the way. The process has been wonderful.
&n
bsp; A special thank you to my friends for taking the time to read all or part of my memoir and to give me feedback. Thank you Patti, and a big thank you to Cherie Miller (a.k.a. Cherie Barnes) for reading both Book 1 and Book 2—a monumental task!
I also wish to thank you, dear reader, for coming on this very personal journey with me. I’m sharing this painful account of my childhood so that others who experienced a similar childhood don’t have to feel as alone. And more importantly, so that others can better understand themselves and forgive themselves for behaving badly because you’ve been treated badly.
About the Author
photo credit: Gina Cinardo
Beverly Engel has been a practicing psychotherapist for thirty-five years and is an internationally acclaimed advocate for victims of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. She is the author of twenty-two self-help books, including the best-selling Healing Your Emotional Self and The Right to Innocence. In addition to her professional work, Engel frequently lends her expertise to national television talk shows. She has appeared on Oprah, CNN, and Starting Over, and many other TV programs. She has a blog on the Psychology Today website, regularly contributes to Psychology Today magazine, and has been featured in a number of newspapers and magazines, including O, the Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, Marie Claire, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and The Denver Post. Beverly’s books have often been honored for various awards, including being a finalist in the Books for a Better Life award for The Power of Apology. Her books have been translated into many languages, including Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Greek, Turkish and Lithuanian.
SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press is an independent publishing
company founded to serve women writers everywhere.
Visit us at www.shewritespress.com.
Don’t Call Me Mother: A Daughter’s Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness by Linda Joy Myers. $16.95, 978-1-938314-02 -5. Linda Joy Myers’s story of how she transcended the prisons of her childhood by seeking—and offering—forgiveness for her family’s sins.
The S Word by Paolina Milana. $16.95, 978-1-63152-927-6. An insider’s account of growing up with a schizophrenic mother, and the disastrous toll the illness—and her Sicilian Catholic family’s code of secrecy— takes upon her young life.
Fourteen: A Daughter’s Memoir of Adventure, Sailing, and Survival by Leslie Johansen Nack. $16.95, 978-1-63152-941-2. A coming-of-age adventure story about a young girl who comes into her own power, fights back against abuse, becomes an accomplished sailor, and falls in love with the ocean and the natural world.
Secrets in Big Sky Country: A Memoir by Mandy Smith. $16.95, 978-1-63152-814-9. A bold and unvarnished memoir about the shattering consequences of familial sexual abuse—and the strength it takes to overcome them.
All the Ghosts Dance Free: A Memoir by Terry Cameron Baldwin. $16.95, 978-1-63152-822-4. A poetic memoir that explores the legacy of alcoholism and teen suicide in one woman’s life—and her efforts to create an authentic existence in the face of that legacy.
Say It Out Loud: Revealing and Healing the Scars of Sexual Abuse by Roberta Dolan. $16.95, 978-1-938314-99-5. An in-depth guide to healing the wounds caused by sexual abuse, written by a survivor who’s lived the process firsthand.