Love The Way You Lie, Paint it Black, Hide and Seek
For me, belonging was giving you what you wanted in order to be loved. It was my only option to be in relationship with others. Some of that is because my dad was an addict and my mom was an alcoholic. Some of that is because I was excluded by ableist behavior and bullying because I have CP. And, some of that is because even my relationship to God was conditional. Success doesn't erase trauma. Even though all that stuff is in the past, it shows up every fucking day.
“Just gonna stand there and hear me cry, well, that's alright because I love the way you lie” (Eminem and Rihanna, Love The Way You Lie).
Some things that I share with you are hard to reconcile because I don't go too far beyond the surface in some places. I have always sought belonging, that was a big part of the appeal of church for me back in the day. But that wasn't just in external groups, communities, friendships, workplaces, and so on. That was in my own skin and in my own home.
I ingratiated the villain to escape as the hero. I “[chose] safety over self” (Fawning, Ingrid Clayton). I don't actually think I'm a hero of my story or any other for that matter. I think I survived. I think I came out wounded. I think I learned to thrive by sacrificing who I am not to piss you off. And, sometimes that means that I sacrificed others for my own self-preservation. That's the dark side of fawning In survival mode. It's also where one of my siblings gave me the nickname “lap dog” for always taking my father's side. Moments like that in my formative years shape everything in my world. My survival instincts influence how I show up at work, how I parent, how I function as a friend, pretty much how I show up everywhere.
The worst of it was born out of family dysfunction like what I just described. And usually, I would describe that as codependence. It is, and it's more than that. I learned to talk my way out of dangerous and difficult situations because they presented themselves to me with a degree of regularity that earned the badge of complex trauma. Childhood bullying for having a disability was no exception to that.
For those unfamiliar with fawning. “Fawners, or what Walker calls fawn types, are “seeking safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others.” Even more, he goes on to say, they learn that the “price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries.” (Fawning, Ingrid Clayton quoting Complex PTSD, Pete Walker).
I didn't used to talk about this stuff because I was in it. It also felt like a betrayal to shit on my father. In that moment, I treated my father as my hero, as the most important person in my life, sometimes to the dismay of others around me. Including other family members, which is something I intentionally talk around most of the time in these writings. That's another form of fawning. Sure, it can be seen as restraint and maybe even a boundary, and to some degree, there's truth to that too. But, I avoid that subject to avoid conflict that I don't want to have anymore. I also maintain a sense of protecting them still. My mom and dad are dead, so I don't have to protect them so much anymore. The rest of my family, they're hurting, grieving, and surviving, like me in their own way. We don't speak because I don't want to fawn anymore and there's a lot of pain there.
From my family of origin, I changed my politics, I changed my religion, fuck, I left it completely. I changed how I interact with the world. I took responsibility for myself and how I was reacting to their shit in every other environment that I show up in. And, I do mean every environment.
Every compliment I've ever received about the quality of my professionalism comes back to fawning. I was trained from a very young age to eat shit and like it. That makes work pretty easy when people do things I don't really like. Because at least at work, my safety isn't really on the line most of the time. For anyone bothered by the number of four-letter words I've used in this piece so far, if you didn't know me twenty years ago to learn this, I don't care if you don't like it. The only difference between then and now is that I'm not doing it to get a rise out of you. At this moment, I'm taking off the mask. I learned to say the word fuck when I was four years old. And, I'll give you one guess who I learned it from. The same person who also told me never to use that word at school and my peers never heard it until at least the seventh grade.
The point of that story is that I learned a hallmark of professionalism when I was a child. I learned how to put the spit and shine on the image and the story that people got from me. Nobody in my childhood, outside of my family, knew that my dad was an addict. My friends didn't know that. I didn't talk about that at school. I kept that to myself because I was expected to. In fairness to my father, and this is the only time I'll do that in this piece, during my childhood he was a recovering addict. He wasn't actively using while I was growing up, which is probably one of the reasons I was able to survive. He was in addiction treatment. However, his behavior as an addict never really changed and that's something that would take me decades and the death of a family member to come to terms with.
“I see a line of cars and they're all painted black” (The Rolling Stones, Paint It Black).
It took a lot of death in my family, my career, and my heart for me to get here. A place where I feel like I can choose self over safety for the first time in four decades. And, even still, I “choose safety over self” (Clayton). I've had to fight for my seat at every table. Let the weight of that sink in for you. I've even had to fight myself for those seats. I have been made to feel like I am too much and not enough at the exact same time. My instinct for survival has cost me my self-worth more times than I care to count.
“Mmm, whatcha say? That you only meant well? Well, of course you did? Mmm, whatcha say? That it's all for the best? Of course it is…you don't care a bit” (Imogen Heap, Hide and Seek).
I've been called a victim by people that just think I'm complaining about my life and honestly sometimes that bothers the shit out of me. I think I've done a pretty good job of thriving out of the ashes of the life I once lived. There's a lot of work left to do. It's still the people closest to me that need to hear my stories more than you do. But the problem with that is that they don't listen. They claim to hear me and then carry on as though they never did. My existence makes a lot of sense if you look at the context. I created a family of friends because my family was broken. I found community in the Church because there was no other place I belonged. I had to find belonging elsewhere when the Church decided I didn't belong there either. “Come as you are,” we'll tell you how wrong you are.
I spent most of my life telling you it was okay. Telling you it didn't hurt. Telling you I accepted your shame. Telling you that I agreed that I was less than. Telling you that I was a sinner. Telling you I would change if you would love me. Telling you I'm sorry when you owe me an apology. Don't worry, I don't expect to get one because I know if I publish this, people who think the way I described will want me to apologize for this. They'll want me to soften it, they'll want me to retract it, they'll want me to say I'm sorry for telling them they're full of shit. That's how fawning is born. When someone more powerful than somebody else puts them in a place where they have to choose their safety over themselves. I've done that everyday for four decades.
Who am I without the fawning? I don't know. But I know that I would probably be where my sister ended up if I hadn't learned to fawn. Where's that? I don't know. What I do know is this, I've taken every last bit personally. I've carried the weight of the wounds. I've sat amidst the “hungry ghosts” at night, haunted by a past I can't escape. You will likely tell me to get over it. This time, you won't convince me that everything is alright and that it's all my fault. This time you won't make my pain feel wrong. This time, I am enough.
“I'm not yours anymore” (Angus and Julia Stone, I'm Not Yours).
*Hungry ghosts is a term attributed to Gabor Mate.
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