During a conversation about trauma with my oldest daughter, she challenged me to write a post that frankly addressed the difficult journey my four daughters and I had taken from years of abuse to a healthy, loving blended family unit. The original trauma link was for me and my ex-husband. For reference, the trauma bond is apparently an iron tie between the aggressor and his victim. As a result of abuse cycles of reward and punishment, the trauma bond has the same psychological impact as a snare on the leg of a wild animal. Tempted by the promise of something good, we risk more and more entering into a relationship that leads to a slow and painful emotional death.
The choice is to either stay or bite off a part of yourself in order to escape. Some damage will inevitably continue. After creating a strong trauma connection with my ex who has narcissistic personality disorder, I successfully navigated through the fear and unfounded hopes and accepted drama as normal for my daughters. I say he had borderline personality disorder, although in reality we were the ones who suffered. But with some direct revelation from God and some really good self-help books, I pulled myself out of the disaster of my marriage and took the girls with me.
If only I could see from a bird’s eye view, what is so clear to me now. Each of us expected life to give us fleeting rewards and then unexpectedly pull the rug out from us in retaliation. Our minds and bodies have become accustomed to moments of praise interspersed with weeks of anger. Evil, unjustified, and unexpected punishment instills in us the idea that we somehow deserve this treatment. It wasn’t just that we had done something wrong (and whatever that mistake was could never be expressed). We were fundamentally wrong. What the hell happened to you? That was the message broadcast over the loudspeaker all day.
When I took the girls and found a little brick house for $425 a month, and saved enough money to let them choose the couch, we thought we were in heaven. Little did we know that while we broke free from the trap, at least two of us were missing limbs like a fox that had bitten off its own leg in order to free the iron jaws. If everyday life is never safe, any disturbance becomes an earthquake. Ordinary events seem catastrophic to those who experience continental shifts on a daily basis. Thank God I had relatively normal parents. I, at least, had a plumb line to communicate with my daughters. They never lived a life where they weren’t in trouble until we ran away from my ex.
Related : How to Avoid Raising Narcissistic Kids
The truth is that my daughters and I still struggle with the idea that we will be caught doing something bad. What makes it worse is that we can never know what a terrible thing we did. John Berryman has a poem about this in which Henry, his alter ego, feels an enormous shame coursing through his being that he can’t connect to anything specific. I still cry when I read it because I know my daughters also have Henry just like me.
Dream Songs #29
Once upon a time, something sat in Henry’s heart
Very heavy if it were a hundred years old
And more, crying, restless all their time
Henry could do no good.
It starts again in Henry’s ears
A little cough somewhere, a smell, a ringing
There’s something else on his mind
Like a dangerous, thousand-year-old Sieni face
You will fail to obliterate the blame that is still assigned to. shocking
With open eyes, he comes while he is blind.
All the bells say: it’s too late. This is not for tears.
Thinking.
But Henry never did, as he thought,
Finishing anyone and penetrating her body
And hide the pieces where they can be found.
He knows: He has overcome all, and has not lost anyone.
He often counts them at dawn.
No one is missing at all.
One of my daughters cried to me, sad that the relationship had ended, but I was a good girl. This is life after narcissism, where everything bad is a vague but well-deserved punishment. Often, my daughters and I, at dawn, count our sins, our shortcomings, the shame we remember and which lurks as memories in the tissues of our bodies. But this is only part of our story. We were lucky. We are not finished with erasure.
We have become our own tribe. What was unfocused and frustrating with my ex became strong and dependable thanks to our girl power. Musk oxen form a protective circle that is almost impenetrable from the outside. This is how my daughters and I experienced trauma as a family unit. All against any hackers. We had a common enemy, and despite internal differences, a sense of security slowly began to settle in. The problem, of course, with this type of arrangement is that musk oxen form circles around their young. I was none other than Mama Muskox. The eldest tried to keep the circle with me and eventually the second eldest joined in until it was us against the world.
Related : Seven Signs of a Narcissistic Mother
And our little family, once I got custody, was a much safer place. Not entirely but mostly. Then I married my husband and re-established the full circle of protection. He and I have faced such challenges. His divorce was pretty typical. He and his ex-wife were good parents and found themselves unable to marry each other. I’m still amazed that each of my daughters loves my husband, given her basic experiences with her father. He had to woo them the way he would court a wild animal. Years of waiting and knowing that anything parental translates into something scary for them has finally paid off. Initially, his support was mostly based on stability and supply. Now my girls and their stepfather talk to each other and listen without fear and without drama. My husband is kind and they have benefited greatly from this.
Of course, the next part of the story is how we took six kids and helped them become a family. The second part of this saga is how to deal with so many different attachment styles in one poorly prepared but well-intentioned family.
