My experience has been to live in chaos or be
abandoned. I’m trying so hard to learn
that I’m not in this place anymore, that this is no longer true. It’s a daily struggle, and sometimes I’m more
successful than others.
Growing up, if everything was fine and I didn’t have a
crisis, then I was left alone. Left
alone in the true sense. Not only was I
left alone, as in nobody bothered me; I was left alone, as in nobody was
there. It was only in emergencies that
people showed up. For an attention
starved child, it became the norm to manufacture emergencies. I had to be careful that it didn’t turn into
the little girl who cried wolf, so my emergencies had to be real. I told a lot of fabricated stories. When that became less effective, I became a
cutter. If I needed to go get stitches,
then I wasn’t alone. Not only did my
crisis bring someone around me that moment, the company usually lasted for a
day or two. If it was typical teenage trouble
at school, then suddenly my parents (whichever set I was living with at the
time) would want to become the model family in an effort to avoid further
trouble. We would have dinner together a
couple of nights. My step-mom would
actually be home to be the mother to her young daughter so I didn’t have
to. Life would feel like a family, even
if only for a short while. As long as I
lived at home, I played this out.
Sometimes it would be long stretches before manufactured trouble,
sometimes short. Sometimes the fix, the
high, the family experience, would last a day, sometimes longer. I carried this defense mechanism right up
into my marriage.
This actually served two needs that I had. This provided my husband with a chance to “rescue”
me from whatever the crisis was. It didn’t
matter that he had done it before, he could never rescue me enough times that I
felt like it made up for the past and I didn’t need it anymore. It also had a similar effect on our
relationship as it did on my family growing up.
We would suddenly hunker down together to weather the storm, and I was
not abandoned. When life slowly went
back to normal, I would find that he could go about his day working and going
to school as if nothing were wrong. This
didn’t feel right to me, so I’d create another crisis.
As I’ve gotten older, this has continued. I would say that the quiet stretches have
become longer and longer throughout the years, but it certainly hasn’t left my
mind. As with my parents, I found that I
needed the crisis to become more extreme each time in order to get the response
I wanted from B. I’m scared to even
think about how it could have continued to escalate if I hadn’t reined it in
when I did.
Bryan said that life isn’t supposed to be a sine wave. He said that “normal” looks a lot like a
linear line with a slope of zero. There
might be a few ups and downs, but for the most part, it’s just smooth
sailing. This is still so hard for me to
understand. Creating chaos was my drug
of choice for so long, and I feel like I’m going through withdraws. Things have been quiet for a while, and
intentionally so. I hope that someday
the desire to create chaos is completely gone, but right now it’s not. When I’m feeling stressed, or tired, or bored
the cravings hit again. So far I have
been able to avoid these triggers, but I think the next step is going to be
facing the triggers and winning anyway.
I miss the chaos. With a straight line you don’t get those highs. But you also don’t have to go through the
lows. Providing a stable home for my
boys is worth all the effort. I
continually remind myself that I’m not alone.
Even though it often feels like it to me, I’m not alone. I have so many people that I’ve connected
with in various ways that love me and care about me, even if I’m not in the
middle of a crisis. I’m not alone. I don’t need rescuing. And that’s ok.
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