I don’t like to write unless I am feeling stable. There’s a unique embarrassment that exists when looking over one’s past writings and seeing them as skewed and paranoid. I try to avoid it, because it is a sad jolt of reality that my higher functions of processing are fallible; that I can’t trust what I believe. But that’s why there are these silent stretches on the blog between posts. And in a way, these unexplained absences that appear in my blogging history are less helpful than embarrassing rants, because I look back and I don’t know what to fill the spaces with, in my memory. I don’t remember what was wrong, why I went so quiet, and thus I have minimal information with which to try and learn from the experience.
So here I am, writing.
I’m depressed. I am so very sick of being depressed that I assume everyone else is sick of it too. I assume there is nothing more to be said on the subject, and so why bother repeating it? There isn’t really any such thing as talking through a depression to overcome it. A lot of little pieces have to click together to allow for healing. Depression takes a while to set in, so it takes a while to crawl out of.
I find myself with a long list of things that don’t matter and a very short list of things that do. Some of this seems darkly ironic to me because a lot of the switch-over of items from the list of things that matter to the other column has happened because of healing. For example, I now feel that my abusive past does not matter as much as it once did — I have been able to put it in some perspective and stop living completely in the past. But because the past was primarily what I held onto that *mattered*, now that I think it doesn’t matter, I have one less thing in the column of things that matter to me. I realize this sounds like I’m wallowing a bit, and I won’t deny that I am, it’s sort of par for the course with depression.
The emotion and triggered programming about my father that has been surfacing the past few weeks frustrates me so much. I am annoyed with myself because I can’t simply think my way through this, I have to instead feel it. Logic is not hugely helpful, no matter how much I understand of the mechanics behind *why* I am so triggered, I can’t seem to neutralize the threat. My therapist hasn’t been able to help either, it is as though I cannot hear her words, as though I am deep underwater and all I hear is unintelligible sound.
I don’t understand why mentally putting my father in the “doesn’t matter” column hasn’t fixed the problem. Consciously I understand that he is not a part of my life, that he has *chosen* not to be a part of my life. I understand he is twisted and manipulative and that he has chosen to live in denial. I understand his contact with me is all games, none of it is real, he doesn’t want to be my family he simply wants to remind me that he is a good person (for his own peace of mind he needs me to believe it).
No matter what I have said to him, how much I have explained, how much I have divulged and opened up about my life, he refuses to acknowledge he has ever heard any of it. He continues to maintain the lie that my therapist has hypnotized me into having DID and turned me against my parents. He continues to lie by saying he is the one who wants contact and we are the ones who do not. He twists everything, turns it all around and states it as *fact* in the hopes of rewriting our reality to match up with the one he has created. And he does all of it under the guise of being loving, as though he is being victimized. It makes me feel so defeated I want to cry. Nothing I have ever said has been heard, except when it can be twisted around to be used against me. This is not love.
The thing that sparked all of this spiraling was a text conversation with my father. Actually it was not a conversation I had with him, but a conversation my sister tried to have. He texted both of us saying more-or-less the same thing (though he was much more loving in his text to my sister than in his text to me — she and I are always amused at the different way he addresses us). I did not respond to him, but she did. I learned about it afterwards, when she shared the texts with me.
I’m even afraid to post them here, because I worry he will sound so reasonable, so kind, that perhaps it will seem he is in the right. I am so afraid, as I have always been, of being disbelieved and discounted. I am afraid as any person who has grown up with parents who abuse and play power games but present as *perfect* to the rest of the world — that maybe what my parents have always told me is the truth, and maybe I am too crazy to know my own reality. Gaslighting is such a terrifying tool of psychological abuse. When someone has you conditioned so well that they can insult you using phrases that sound perfectly normal to anyone who might be listening — when they can trigger you while maintaining plausible deniability so that no one would ever believe you, there’s no “proof.”
But here is the conversation he had with my sister. I changed the names, obviously. I am not a huge fan of her divulging my personal information to him without asking me first (he didn’t know about me being on disability), but I understand she was trying to help so I am not upset.
I think my favorite bit of manipulation is the end, when he promptly stops the conversation with the whole “please keep in touch,” clear goodbye language, while somehow daring to suggest that he is open to communication and not ignoring. It hurts my head just being aware of what contradictory messages he sends, and how it has been like this my whole life. It hurts my head for a lot of reasons, actually. And even though consciously I can see what he is doing, it really does a number on my psyche (for some reason, it didn’t affect my sister nearly as much as it has affected me). I feel muddled and lost and I question myself, my perception, my reality. Which is exactly what he was hoping for.
(Also I am so amazed by my sister, who stood up for me in ways I never, ever expected.)
