Validation

A world gone crazy and being raised in it, the child believes that they caused the problem and they are the one that is crazy.  Children do not view the world from the outside.  The concentric circles around the child seems to the child that they were why these things happened.  (My opinion.)  I was over 45 years old before I finally sought counseling.  I didn't really go just for me.  I wanted to learn how to communicate better in my marriage.  I thought if I could just explain things then everything would be "all right."  I was shocked and bewildered to learn that my childhood had been so crazy I had adapted an elaborate form of survival called DID ~ Dissociative Identity Disorder, or sometimes labeled PTSD with Dissociation at a severe level.  I felt from the time I was 11 years old that something was odd about me.  Confirmed by my counselor I interpreted his diagnosis that I was indeed crazy.  KavinCoach reassured me that I wasn't crazy, I was a kid raised in insanity that learned a complex coping mechanism to survive.  I survived.  I didn't know how to live.  Years of counseling is teaching me to do that.  My most difficult hurdle ~ would anyone believe?  My fragmented memories were so weird, I didn't want to believe them myself.  So many told me how lucky I was to have such wonderful parents.  I would feel distressed and confused but my mind blocked 90% of my memories.  My mind refused to remember.  KavinCoach had to reassure me over and over again that he believed the wild tales I was remembering.  I would shake from the tremendous energy drain of telling a single memory.  I wouldn't eat before going to sessions for fear that I would throw up.  He watched as I finally opened the recess of my mind and told story after story that I felt no one would ever believe me.  He believed me.  

Years later, I started to blog.  I encountered others with blogs about childhoods warped by parents that to people on the outside could see nothing wrong.  How could any one complain about such wonderful parents?  Maybe, because those parents aren't so wonderful at home.  My life had an added twist of a sick pedophile neighbor that after he was arrested, tried, found guilty, and sent to jail, people bemoaned how awful it was that he was framed.  If people won't believe that he was a monster, how will they ever believe that this sweet lady called my mother would do things that were emotional abusive, neglectful, and left to me to go hungry.  In some ways the emotional abuse is worse to me.  Yet, now I read blogs that some one else has a mother like mine.  I want to tell them how real it is.  I want to validate that the craziness is what they were raised in; they did not cause it.  Just like I wrote a book for my children explaining to them that their mother was messed up to begin with.  Each one and their spouses are such a magnificent blessing to me.  I believe that my children and their families are part of my healing process and one huge motivation to keep learning to become the mother I wish I had, caring, loving, emotionally healthy.  So 8 years later I am still in counseling learning how to live and knowing someone believes me.