Anger before grief?

[flamingsword]

I keep having to tell myself that grieving the things that happened to kid!Heidi is not “me being a sad-sack” or “dramatic” or any of the other things I was conditioned to think about myself. So this is me, reminding myself that if I were anyone else I would be extending generosity of interpretation and concern for what was going on instead of criticizing myself and extending judgment the way I internalized.

I love my mom, she legit did what she knew how to, and she broke a lot of generational curses just by mostly refusing to hit my brother and I after I turned 2. But I am going to have to basically trash talk my mom to write about my experiences.

I’m okay with being angry at my dad; he’s kind of a jerk. I’m somewhat okay with being angry at Aunt Rhoda, who has been dead for a decade and can’t really care if I’m upset with her. But I have been trained since I was very small that being angry at my mom was ingratitude, was talking back, was “giving her a look”, was all sorts of unacceptable things that I could be punished for. Weirdly, in hindsight, I’ve realized that the more Mom knew she was in the wrong, the more guilty she felt, and thus the worse Larry or I would get punished for being upset with her. (Make it make sense, y’all.)

I’m going to have to learn how to feel my anger at my mom, how to let myself disregard all the negative things projected on me, before I can even grieve for the things that I am upset over. I have to dredge up a whole bunch of stuff I mostly don’t even remember anymore, in order to feel all the feelings that my delayed processing and compartmentalization have let me bypass acknowledging for 30-40 years.

I’ll be 44 this year, you know? It’s time. I’m in a stable place, and it’s time. I’m ready to cry for the awesome kid that I never got to be because I was too busy trying to manage neurotypical adults’ feelings for them, despite my being a little autistic child whose emotional needs people were uninterested in meeting. I’m ready to be angry that children are an oppressed class in almost every country, and that we’re taught that it has to be that way for the convenience of adults, despite the adults all needing therapy now because of how they were treated as kids.

So I’m going to go read up on how to let yourself feel anger and own your feelings. And maybe start writing letters to Mom and different family members and authority figures who should have known better than to treat anyone like their feelings didn’t matter and were expendable.

Long post got a bit long.

Comments

[tuzemi]

I feel this a lot too. The complicated facts around generational trauma mixed in with NT-vs-ND and the whole "respect my authority / don't be ungrateful" nonsense.

Wishing you strength and resilience to feel All Your Feelings, and find more peace and grace for yourself. 💗💗

(The first (and only) time I seriously laid my feelings on the table as an adult, I was shaking very hard, having trouble breathing and talking, and I realized that I was having the physical reaction of a child abuse survivor. That was...very eye opening.)

[flamingsword]

I wasn’t physically abused by my mom, mostly, but there was a bunch of neglect. (The jury is still out on whether the stuff she would say to me /yell at me when she was upset rises to the level of abuse. I don’t know that the language matters at this point so much as that I was hurt by it, am angry about it, will grieve the damage it did to me and to our relationship.)

I’m sorry that we have any of this bullshit in common. No child deserves this kind of stuff.