Recovering from Dysfunction (Pt. 3)…
Hapless, Helpless, Hopeless, Worthless – Battered Person Syndrome.
Battered Person Syndrome is, essentially, when an abused person believes that s/he deserves and/or is responsible for any abuse that happens to him/her. I have always believed that I am responsible for abuse I have endured, that it’s my fault because I am a piece of crap, that I am worthless and so do not deserve anything good from anyone else.
I do not believe in luck or coincidence or chance – all things that happened to me at the hands of others happened to me because they were supposed to and I deserved them. I would defend my abusers in my mind, believing that they were just in their actions, and that it was my place to be on the receiving end. I truly believed my only reason for existence was to do whatever I could do to appease other people. I did what I was told to do because I was supposed to do it – they wouldn’t have told me to do it unless I was supposed to do it.
This series of circular and illogical thought causes me great despair and anger and sadness. Even though I now realize the fault in this thinking, it is still my default thought set. To this day, my initial reaction at any given time is to do anything I’m asked to do because I am of no importance and my feelings are meaningless. I am finally aware that I have worth and that I am a good person at heart, but I still struggle daily with feelings of being inadequate and flawed and stupid because I shouldn’t be standing up for myself. I’m wrong because I no longer do everything people tell me I am “supposed to”.
My teenage years were strange. In my eighth grade year (ages 12 & 13), I began exhibiting minor acts of rebellion. A few of these:
- – I took pants in my backpack and put them on at school. The religion of my life dictated that women must always wear skirts, that wishing to wear “the clothes of a man” was evil.
- – I occasionally went to my friend’s house during school lunchtime without permission.
- – My father told me I was fat (size 7 when I started wearing women’s clothes because I have an hourglass figure), so I decided I shouldn’t eat very much. I would take my lunch to school but not eat it, just throwing it away instead.
- – My mother pointed out to me that since I has large breasts, boys would start to show interest in me. I interpreted this to mean that my body was on the only thing about me any guy would ever be interested in. My mother stated that I should strive to “be modest for the Lord” and to “stop showing off my body”. As a result, when I wore form-fitting clothes, I’d try to make them as revealing as possible. This actually just meant I unbuttoned the top two buttons on my shirt or when wearing a sleeveless dress would remove my required over-shirt to reveal my bare arms. Laughable, indeed, but I truly am a prude by nature.
- – Alternatively, I started wearing hooded sweatshirts and super long/baggy skirts, taking the “clothed female” routine to an extreme level while looking as much like a “Chola” (female gangster style popular in the heavily mexican-american population I grew up in) as I could.
- – I went to a couple of school dances that I said were “ceremonies” so that I could get permission to go, and actually danced. Dancing was, I’m sure you’ve guessed, evil.
On the night of my eighth grade graduation, I was allowed to go to the after party on the school grounds. I removed my over shirt, danced with my friends, and happened to be [very chastely] slow dancing with some older boy who was the dj for the dance when my father showed up to take me home. He was furious. In the car on the way home, he ranted about my being a slut and how I was heading to hell. When we reached the house, he accosted me in the bathroom (no privacy, remember) and gave me a beating, stating, “This hurts me more than it hurts you, but you don’t get to make your own decisions.” The thing I remember most about that beating was watching myself in the bathroom mirror – I watched my body being hit and jerked around, and I saw the tears on my face and the hands of my father rising and falling as they struck me. It was surreal, as if it was happening to somebody else.
As a direct result of my apparent spiral into whoredom, my parents decided that I could not go to normal high school. So, I went on home studies for my freshman year (ages 13 & 14). I enjoyed it immensely: I got to be outside all the time and I didn’t have to pretend to be anyone else when I was around my horse or my dog. I had a huge garden, I started repairing and cleaning up the outbuildings of the acreage and doing landscaping. I went to normal math class for a couple of hours M/W/F because I was at an advanced level, but otherwise I just went to take my independent studies tests every Friday afternoon and was done. I finished nearly three years of high school credits in that one year, learned to skateboard, learned to play the guitar, rediscovered my love of nature, realized my love of handcrafting, and was generally content.
For my sophomore year of school (ages 14 & 15), I had the opportunity to go to a brand new high school in the next town over. I saw this as a time to reinvent myself – to become an extrovert around these completely new people and to participate in the “normal” parts of being a teen. Most of my classes were electives, but I had a few advanced placement classes and got to know a few people. I participated in marching and studio bands, tennis, soccer, yearbook, video production, academic decathlon, french classes, multiple Christian clubs, a mediation team, a leadership team, an outdoors adventure club, Key Club, CSF, and probably a few more things I’m forgetting. I got a job a few days after I turned 15, so was finally able to afford to buy my own clothes and other things I wanted for myself but had never been allowed to have.
I was all over the place, gregarious and bubbly and well-known because I thought that if I pretended to be happy, I would eventually become happy. That year of school wasn’t so bad, because I was always busy and none of my “friends” knew anything more about me than what I told them. Often, what I told them about myself was a complete fabrication, thus my first complete alternate persona was formed.
The first half of my junior year of high school (ages 15 & 16) was pretty much the same as my sophomore year. When I got my car and driver’s license, I realized that I had some level of autonomy – nobody really cared where I was if I wasn’t reported absent and my sisters got home from school. I realized I could do whatever I wanted to do as long as I could avoid getting caught. At this time, I also began to take community college classes in the evening, so now had an excuse to be away from home for most of each school day.
In this phase, grown men started paying attention to me. They would make comments, stare at my body as I walked by, and ask me on dates. Generally speaking, I was uninterested in and truly dismayed by this attention. But, at some point, my first true bout with depression (I have always had a low mood, no hope, no joy, but this was a crash – wanting to die) came along and I started “looking for love in all the wrong places” and all that entails. This is still very painful to me to even think of, let alone speak of.
Suffice it to say, I looked for approval and acceptance and positive reinforcement from an abusive and coercive grown male because that was all I was good for. Eventually, I stumbled upon a good relationship that was based on friendship and respect that I was able to maintain to some degree because I realized I was actually happy. I learned to avoid the abusive male’s attentions by making myself unavailable, but would still allow him to hurt me when I believed I was supposed to be punished. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time sabotaging the good relationship with my insecurities and self-hate and fear and secrecy, because I knew I didn’t deserve to be treated well or liked as a person.
My senior year of high school is largely lost to memory. It was a wasted year – I don’t remember why I chose to stay in high school instead of just moving on to college. All but one of my classes were electives, and the only “required” class could have easily been taken at the college level. My heart started to harden during this year, through personal loss (my horse and dog were now both dead), the stress of maintaining the “dutiful daughter” and “social butterfly” personae, the drama of my parental situation, ongoing abuse of various types, and my belief in my true worthlessness. Friendships began to erode, I started speaking in blunt terms, I stopped pretending to like my “friends”, and I began to shut down.
I got accepted into several prestigious universities, but chose one simply because my mother had planned to go there but got married instead. I didn’t care either way; I didn’t think I had any choice but to go on to a university, so I went. I lived in dorms for that first year (ages 17 & 18), hating my life and the people around me. School was exceedingly boring, the people around me were only interested in drugs/sex/and alcohol, and I didn’t want to be there. I sunk into an even deeper level of depression. I began seeking physically and emotionally painful interactions because that was what I knew and deserved. I began to participate in risky behavior in the hopes that someone would murder me.
I believed that suicide was too good and clean for me; I only deserved to die in a terrible and cruel and extremely painful way. And so, I existed there – going to school, working, pretending to be normal. I did things “just to see what would happen” – walking around at night, meeting strangers from the internet, driving on the highway with my eyes closed, walking into oncoming traffic, going days without food or water, etc. I shut down completely at this point, stopped talking to my roommates, skipped classes, skipped homework, skipped meals, didn’t care about anything. My memories of this time are hazy and all negative.
Some guy I talked to on the internet showed up one day, calling me from the airport to tell me he’d flown in to live with me and that he needed to be picked up. And so, since I had a lack of concern for my personal well-being, no personal boundaries and the inability to say no, I went and picked him up. He lived in my dorm room for a couple of days until I had to vacate at the end of the school year. My apartment lease didn’t start for another week, so I drove around with him for a week and even took him to my mom’s house to stay for a couple of days. When I secured the apartment, he lived in the other bedroom until one day he cornered me while I was in a broom closet and tried to force me to kiss him.
Standing there, being manhandled by this person I found to be completely repulsive, I suddenly became angry. I realized the depths to which I had fallen. I felt so helpless, being crushed and forced and slobbered on. It scared me and disgusted me, and I became enraged. I pushed him away from me and yelled at him, so he left the apartment. When he came back, I bought him a train ticket to his cousin’s house and drove him to the train station.
At that point, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was alone, nobody knew that there was anything wrong with me or that I needed help. I basically just wandered around for awhile. I kept going to work and to my summer classes, but I can’t really remember much other than that about a month later, a male friend of mine asked me to go on a date.
I said yes because I figured I had to find some kind of normal life. On the second date, a week later, he asked me to marry him. I was very surprised, especially since he wasn’t asking me for sex or anything else. I figured he must have really liked me, to actually want to marry me without having bedded me. I figured that since we were already friends and I already loved him as a friend, it would be easy to fall in love with him and I’d finally get to have a happy life.
A couple of months later, he came to visit me at my apartment for a week. Simultaneously, a dramatic rent situation arose with my roommates. At some point late in the week, we decided we’d might as well go and get married, so we did. I was still only eighteen, but it didn’t matter to me – it was a chance to change my life. I withdrew from school and moved out of that apartment within a week, living with his mom or my mom for a few months until we could afford our own apartment.
At one point, staying in my old room at my mother’s house, I woke up to hear my father yelling for me from the front door. He had seen my car parked in the driveway so decided to intrude upon me. I stayed silent, hoping he’d leave. My youngest sister, who was sleeping in the room with me, piped up that I was in my old bedroom. He came barging in, rambling on about what a fool I was to run off and get married, and ordered me to give him a kiss on the lips.
I was still lying down in the bed, so covered my face with my arms and told him that I didn’t want to talk to him. He kept grabbing at my arms, so I stood up on the bed and told him to get away from me. He started yelling about me being evil and my mother being evil, and then stormed out. Shortly thereafter, several of my younger sisters reported that he had been talking about me to various relatives, slandering me and spreading rumors about pre-marital pregnancy and so on. I decided I didn’t want to deal with him anymore. So, I cut him out of my life.
Thus began my marriage.