The ramblings of an abused kid (trigger warnings galore)

[GoSlash27]

Starting about age 6, the adults began referring to me as the "absent- minded professor". They thought it was "cute". I thought nothing of it at the time. Now it's infuriating. They did this to me! My "adorable" absent- mindedness is an affliction.This is not a "feature", it's a bug. A brain injury borne of child abuse. I will never form a "normal" memory as others do. It doesn't bother me that others joke about it, but it bothers me very much that they did. No "trigger warning" necessary, I'll just leave it there.
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My baby sister was never supposed to imprint upon me as fully as she did. She was supposed to have active and involved parents. Nobody actually took an interest in her except me, and as toddlers she was more of a "toy" to me than a "responsibility". "My Buddy". Wherever I go, she goes. Her first steps weren't toward a parent. They were toward me. Where was mom? Asleep on the couch after partying all night.
 Then came upheaval, abuse, years of separation, and dissociative amnesia. "Sister"?? What sister?
 When we were reunited, we fell into our old pattern. The dynamic bothered her later in life; like she was a pest, tagalong, etc. She confessed recently that she wanted to be me. Not just be near me, but to literally be who I was.
 I never felt that way. She was my "wonder twin". I would seek her out, wait at the bus stop for her, etc. because I never felt "whole" when she wasn't around.
 This was not a healthy sibling dynamic. We were seemingly telepathically linked for years. She saw me as "mom", I saw her as "twin". It really broke my heart in later years as she began to see me as a threat and turn hostile even though I had never done anything to her.
 Again, mom's fault. She was asleep on the couch after partying all night.
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 I got my fancy gold roller skates. I replaced the wheels with the light-up ones. Laced them properly, adjusted the trucks for "action". And now I'm sick.  I cannot take them on their maiden "fantastic voyage". Maybe next week.   

[HannahOne]

Go Slash, I am following the unfolding. Hooray for roller skates. I raised my sibling, too and you describe the complexity of the dynamic so well. Roll on, we're following along.

[GoSlash27]

My search for my benefactor "Mrs. Marilyn Davis, 1211 Wood Street, Wilkinsburg, PA" has officially hit a dead end.
 She was not the Apostle Marilynn Davis I had assumed she was. Despite the seemingly identical personalities, her associates assure me that she never lived in Wilkinsburg. The address, phone number, and name come up blank in the Carnegie archives. the phone number and address were unlisted. I will never know who she was.
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 My brother's widow told me last week that the childhood trauma he mainly told her about wasn't what happened to *us* collectively, but rather what happened to *him* individually.
 My baby sister and I went off to "special needs" shelters. Rehabilitation. Loving, caring, nurturing foster homes. Not him.
 *He* went into "the system", where bigger kids and adults abused him relentlessly. He was rejected by foster homes. Anger, behavioral, learning issues. *This* is the stuff he remembered.
 He was a 5 year old kid. I dissociated, he didn't. I went on to a positive environment, he didn't. I'm alive and have never been abusive. He assaulted his daughter and committed suicide.

 Everything I went through, it was bad. Don't get me wrong. But what *he* went through was worse. I can't even imagine it, let alone relate to it. He was beaten into pure meanness, like they do to pitbulls. 

[NarcKiddo]

The skates sound wonderful. I'm sorry you're unwell and hope you feel better soon so you can take them for a spin. I also raised my little sister but our dynamic was very different. However the chips land it's not a healthy way to be and I am sorry you and she had to deal with it. I'm also very sorry about what happened to your brother.

[GoSlash27]

it's not a healthy way to be and I am sorry you and she had to deal with it.

Thanks, but that's not quite what I meant. I don't regret that my baby sister and I had such a close "wonder twins" relationship. I enjoyed the heck out of it. But it was a bad dynamic for her. Baby duck is supposed to imprint on momma duck, not big brother duck.
 I would also add that I never felt like I was "raising" her. I never felt responsibility for her or exerted authority over her. I never fed her, clothed her, etc. I'd just steal her out of her playpen and play with her every chance I got. In later years, you rarely saw one of us without the other. We were attached at the hip. She was like my "invisible friend", but she was real. My "My Buddy" doll, but alive.
 I don't think the "parent/ child" relationship is quite what either of us felt.
Best,
-Slashy

[GoSlash27]

 I feel like there's some grand conclusion just out of reach; obvious yet seemingly unrealized. I just don't know how to state it properly.
 There is no such thing as "empathy". Not in the pure sense. Commiseration, solidarity, etc. yes. But not "empathy". I can "put myself in your shoes" if I try, but it's still just me in your shoes, not you. I can never actually *be* you. I have different thought patterns and different experiences. I can sorta relate, but only "sorta".
 The corollary is true as well. Nobody else can understand what it truly feels like to be me. I've had too many unique experiences.
 It's a brutal Boolean winnowing of compounding "ands". The number of people who can truly empathize with me is zero. The number of people I can truly empathize with is zero.

 I feel like this is a profound philosophical statement and somehow important.

[GoSlash27]

"Existential Isolation".
 That's the crux of it. Some things I've been through, there's simply nobody else who can relate to it. Heck, some of it is "impossible", and I don't blame you if you can't believe it. I probably wouldn't believe it myself.
 Nevertheless, this is where I live. You guys share *some* of my experiences and I lean on you for support in those areas, but there are others that simply nobody can relate to. I'm sure many of you also know what that's like in ways unimaginable to me.
-Slashy

[TheBigBlue]

Slashy,

I think I understand what you're pointing to.

If we define empathy strictly, then yes, it's always an approximation. It's me mapping your experience onto my own internal framework, not actually becoming you. In that sense, true one-to-one empathy is impossible. There is always a gap.

And yet, that gap can feel very different depending on what sits inside it.

Reading what you wrote, what I hear is not just a philosophical position, but the lived reality of experiences that were never fully met, never mirrored, and never shared. That kind of isolation is real.

I also have parts of my own experience that I've never shared with anyone except my therapist. I haven't seen them described anywhere either. And I've wondered whether others might have similar experiences but don't talk about them, or whether some simply couldn't live with them.

So even if my understanding of you can only ever be an approximation, it still matters to me that I read what you write, that I take it seriously, and that I try to meet you where I can. Not because I can fully know your experience, but because you're here, putting it into words, and that deserves to be seen. 

[GoSlash27]

I wish I could attach the image of me at the U2 Joshua Tree site. It would really drive the point home.
 All memories for me are music. Images. Tropes. "Triggers". I cannot access my memories any other way.
 So there I am, out in the California desert at an unmarked shrine, penning a personal note wearing my big goofy sun hat. The note *itself* isn't important. The photograph is.
 My son went with me on the pilgrimage. We found the site together and he took the picture.
 He doesn't know what the big deal is with "U2" or "Joshua Tree" or why it's so important to me. He just knows that it is.
 
 Sometimes that feels unsettling. Like he's on a "death watch", chronicling my final days. I'm not dying! I'm alive. Rebuilding, healing. Making peace with the past best I can. I just bought rollerskates! I'll die someday as we all do, but that day is not today.

[dollyvee]

Nobody else can understand what it truly feels like to be me. I've had too many unique experiences.

Slashy,

When I first started therapy, I was pretty defiant and untrusting about other people's (ie therapist) use of empathy with me because like you, I also felt that my story was unique, and no one had lived through the things I did. And to a certain extent, I would say that virtually no one in my current life (work/social) has --grandchild of refugees who carry generational trauma through NPD/scapegoating, into an abusive mother who did drugs and partied (also an 80s child) and that treated me horrendously, only to go live with a father who later committed suicide and then back to the family that told me all their behaviour was "normal" and I was the bad one if I didn't keep everything inside and excel (excel into what is the question).

What I'm trying to say is that I think this idea of uniqueness is a protection mechanism, one that helped you survive a lot of things at a very young age. To me, it's threatening to my sense of self when other people try to connect, which is what I think empathy is. Shutting out, or compartmentalizing, interactions helps stabilize my sense of self. Babies are wired to attach like you described with your sister. Humans are fundamentally wired for connection, and when we don't have this, we manifest it in some other way like repressing parts of ourselves so that we can attach to an unstable parent (me here), and looking for other people that we can attach to. So, perhaps your sister in this case. As I understand, I do it so that I can survive --to preserve that sense of self that couldn't be expressed growing up. So, when other people do not understand, or see me, on a fundamental level, it mirrors the same experiences (of unsafety/annhilation) I had as a young child. However, as I understand and begin to grieve, no one in the outside world can provide this. Our mother/FOO was supposed to, but failed, and now it's only me who can provide this for myself now.

This is very much something I have been working on in therapy for a while: how to stay in my self and regulated in the presence of other people. It took a long time to even realize this is what is/was happening as my own defence mechanisms (self-abandonemnt/fawning/projection) were so strong. NARM has helped with this, as well as learning about attachment theory in the way that I could begin to see the same patterns of interaction in other people that I saw in myself, which is important because it begins to shape the trauma in a different way --that it's not you.

Sending you support,
dolly

[GoSlash27]

DollyVee,
 No Ma'am. I mean it quite literally. Nobody else can relate to my unique experiences. What it's like to live with an eidetic yet inaccessible memory, or to be the one-in-a-million survivor of a one-in-a-million adverse reaction.
 These sorts of events have colored my perceptions in ways that nobody else shares.
 It's not a "protective" wall, it's an epistemic one. Errors in translation, false assumptions. Like what you're doing right now. You're trying to force my life experience into your mental framework but it doesn't fit.
 The corollary holds true as well. I can read everything you just said and come to false conclusions about *your* motivations because our experiences were similar but not identical. You didn't react the same way I did. We're not the same person.

 I'm not mad at you, I'm just recognizing the objective truth that we can't empathize 100%. Mistakes will be made.
 So I appreciate your offer of a shoe, but it doesn't fit me. I'll just have to kick it off and carry on.

Best,
-Slashy

[GoSlash27]

And expanding upon the point (again, carefully using the term "in my experience"), empathy has never felt threatening. What feels threatening is *failed* empathy. People misunderstanding me, misinterpreting what I've said, then trying to convince me that they know me better than *I* do.    It feels like gaslighting, erasure. An assault on my sense of self.
 I point out the wall to reinforce the point that it's *not* an assault, just a simple misunderstanding.

[dollyvee]

People misunderstanding me, misinterpreting what I've said, then trying to convince me that they know me better than *I* do.    It feels like gaslighting, erasure. An assault on my sense of self

Slashy,

Believe it or not, there are other people on the forum that experience this same feeling and I am one of them. I get what you're saying, but let me qualify what I was actually going for. I'm not trying to force anything on you. I'm speaking from my own experience about going through something where I also felt like I was unique and no one understood me. What I was trying to say that once I started learning about the mechanisms behind how our minds work, it's helpful to see that our thinking holds patterns that are similar to other people who have also gone through trauma. On the one hand, uniqueness is anti-connection, anti-people, mistrustful (fearful avoidant?) where there are very good reasons to mistrust people/things at a young age when no one was there to help you. On the other, we are all individuals. We are both things at once. At the heart of it is probably a disorganized sense of self. I get that you have had unqiue mental experiences, but does that mean that other trauma related patterns don't apply?

Of course, you could make a lot of guesses about me and what is going on with me and I'm sure my defence mechanisms would also pop into action I/We are humans with trauma after all, and all it's nooks and cranny hiding places. To me, the important part is learning about the what the subconscious defence mechanisms are, so that I can start uncovering when they pop up in my thinking/life. Of course and again, this is my experience, so take and leave what applies.

Sending you support,
dolly

[GoSlash27]

I get that you have had unqiue mental experiences, but does that mean that other trauma related patterns don't apply?

Dolly,
 No, those patterns are valid, which I specifically pointed out."You guys share *some* of my experiences and I lean on you for support in those areas, but there are others that simply nobody can relate to."

 What I am talking about is not a "defense mechanism", it's just a frank admission of truth. Sometimes you *think* you know where I'm coming from, but you don't. Sometimes I think I know where you're coming from, but I don't.
 I pointed it out because I don't want to misinterpret your well- meaning failed attempt at empathy as hostility, nor do I want you to misinterpret my rejection of it as "defensive".
 It's simply miscommunication, nothing more. We've survived similar hardships, but we're not identical. 

 I have disorganized, haphazard access to a complete library of every memory I've ever formed all the way back to age 1. It's a perfect, raw, low loss encoding of everything I sensed, felt, and thought in the moment. If you ever need to know how I felt in a moment, I can elaborate. That is, assuming I have built an organizational system to find it, can trigger it, or happen to stumble upon it at random. It may take some time 
 That fact, in and of itself, marks me as a fringe outlier, possibly the sole living example. But if you ask me to elaborate about my thoughts or feelings in a moment, I can... Given enough time. There's never any need to speculate about it.
Best,
-Slashy   

[dollyvee]

I pointed it out because I don't want to misinterpret your well- meaning failed attempt at empathy as hostility, nor do I want you to misinterpret my rejection of it as "defensive".

Slashy, and I say this with empathy (and not any sarcasm) that when you are describing your thoughts and feelings about being unique and how no one can really understand you, yet you are also on a forum to connect with other people who have gone through traumatic experiences, my first thought was how isolating and alone that idea is (and backed by some of your other entries) and yet also how similar it perhaps was to what the 3 year old you would have experienced going through all the things you did at that time, and how that little boy would have felt isolated and alone, looking for someone to connect to, but feeling like they can't and no one is there for them. And how, as adults, we still carry the parts of those experiences within us unless we have worked through them and integrated them.

I am also coming to it from a place of personal experience, which is only my own, but also a place of reading and learning over a good six years about working with these parts, patterns and defence mechanisms and, not an expert, but just looking at things from an outside perspective and trying to offer tools of what I picked up and integrated over that time for others to use as they see fit and unpack their own experiences, just as I have done from others on the forum here.

If you ever need to know how I felt in a moment, I can elaborate. That is, assuming I have built an organizational system to find it, can trigger it, or happen to stumble upon it at random. It may take some time 
 That fact, in and of itself, marks me as a fringe outlier, possibly the sole living example. But if you ask me to elaborate about my thoughts or feelings in a moment, I can... Given enough time. There's never any need to speculate about it.

Again, I get what you're trying to say. What I am saying is that to me, I understand that this is how Little Slashy felt in child consciousness at those times, and what "I" have learned is that what is important is that there is also adult consciousness that then integrates these things and looks at them from present time. So, I could be projecting and that that little boy never felt, alone or scared, but it's also possible that those feelings were repressed, compartmentalized, dissociated etc because you needed to survive, and were never allowed to come into consciousness because they would have been too destablizing? Again, to me there is no need for the latter to be true, just pointing out things that trauma brains can overlook, deny etc as when still living from child consciousness, they believe the world to still be a dangerous place.

dolly