The Story of My Life - Part 1

There is a type of therapy called Narrative Therapy where you rewrite portions or all of your life highlighting different aspects than the ones you currently highlight. For example, these days I describe my life mainly by highlighting all the things that have happened to me where I was powerless and bad things happened. Wonder why I'm depressed and anxious?

But talking with my therapist this week, we discovered that I have other aspects that I could use to describe my life. For example, remember when I talked about not being self-differentiated from my mother, aka still having the uncut umbilical cord between us? Well, in another conversation, we discovered other stories where I had differentiated and done things that carry you on into independent adulthood.

By talking about how differently I can describe aspects of my life by what I choose to highlight, we got on the subject of how I could write a different version of my life and remind myself of all the good and powerful aspects I've shown in my past. It hasn't all been bad choices and powerless tragedies. So I'm going to do that. But first, here is the way I currently tell the story of my life, to myself and to others (well, some of it I only tell to others I am close enough to trust).

This is the current story of my life:

I was molested by a cousin from the time I was 2 until I was 11, and once at age 11 by my grandfather. It didn't matter that I always told my parents I hated my cousin and didn't want to play with him or spend time with him: they told me from a very early age to do whatever he told me to do because he was older and knew better. By the time I knew better than that, it was too late; I was tied in the spider's web of the victim. I became afraid of the dark at age 3 and began sucking my thumb then, too, because this cousin also terrified me if he wasn't molesting me. He bullied me through and through.

From 4th grade through 8th grade, I was bullied by my peers, people I'd grown up with. I had the poor luck of being smarter than most of them and being awkward to boot (probably from having been molested for all those years).

Tenth grade was a good year for me at school. No one bullied me, I made some new friends and did new things. Just when things had gotten good for me, Dad had to retire from being a cop due to a heart problem (and triple bypass heart surgery) and we moved 1100 miles away for him to work for one of his brothers. This broke my heart as well as my younger brother's.

Some nine months later, my father died of a heart attack, sending my mother, my brother, and me into little separate orbits around each other, but never quite touching. None of us got the comfort or the talking we needed, nor did we give it. We all saw ourselves as having to take care of the other two; my brother and I especially thought we had to take care of Mom because of how much she shut down.

Going away to the college a year and a half later, the first time I'd ever gone away from home, was devastating and I pleaded with my mom to let me stay home and go to community college for most of my first two years of college; it must have been hard on her to make me go back every time. I started out living with my aunt and uncle so I could still be surrounded by family, but my uncle began making me feel uncomfortable, wanting to give me back massages that felt too intimate. Then my cousin (THAT cousin) moved back in with his folks, so I moved into the dorms and got an insane and angry roommate.

School got better. My senior year, I had good friends, I had a terrific boyfriend, I had big plans for my 22nd birthday party in just a few days, then my cousin (THAT cousin) and my aunt came to tell me my brother had killed himself and I was going home. At the memorial services and the days surrounding it, I was the youngest person in the family. He was my little brother, yet I had to comfort everyone else (my mother had more need of comfort than me, I saw that, but even my older half-brother should have been giving me comfort). My mom had the man she had been going with and was going to marry to comfort her. No one comforted me.

A week after my brother's memorial service, my mother remarried because everyone told her it would help her to get over the pain. (It didn't and she wished she'd waited.) She pushed me outside of the little circle that was she and her new husband. I began to go a little bit crazy after that and ruined my relationship with my great boyfriend. I contemplated suicide quite seriously for years afterward. 

I eventually got into therapy, which helped, but which stalled on helping after a few years. The group of friends I had took enjoyment out of diminishing me and preying on my sensitive nature. 

For awhile things got better: I went back to school and had little or no time for that group any longer. I made some new friends. I graduated and moved in with a girlfriend and things were going the best they'd gone in I couldn't remember how long. 

Then I met a guy and moved in with him and spent 3 years in hell, all that confidence and things going so well disappearing like it had never been there. I finally came out of the relationship, emotionally battered but able to start my life over. However, between working with my ex and working for a boss who hated me, I became squashed and diminished. So I quit my job.

Working freelance and contract for awhile boosted my self-confidence back up. I had a little house I loved, good friends to do things with, and enough money. After a couple of years working like this and for dot-coms that didn't last long, the tech market crashed and I could no longer afford my life in Seattle and my wonderful little house, so I moved to the Oregon Coast to live near my mom, her husband, and my grandmother. My mother's husband died the following year, and it was good I was unemployed at the time because my mother needed me for a great deal of things. 

Living at the Coast went well at first; I went thru a large chunk of the money I got for my house being unemployed for 2 1/2 years, but then I found a great job. But eventually, with not making any friends outside of work and having only my family to spend time with, I needed to move on. 

Then the economy tanked and I couldn't find work. So I got up and moved and even though I ended up in a place with better employment numbers, I still haven't been able to find work much. 

Well into my first year here, my grandmother died. My mother was alone for the first time ever. But she was free to finally travel and do what SHE wanted to do. My second year here, while Mom was busy making plans for our first big trip together (either Italy or France), I found work and was making friends. Then my mother was diagnosed with cancer and I went back to Oregon to help her and take care of her. She died and I've been a mess since. I found work for awhile but they haven't had work for me in a few months now and I've found no other work and I've no friends here to play with.

I've been fairly solitary for most of my life; even the boys on the block I lived on didn't always want to play with me. And the girls were all too young or too old for me.

As an adult, when I would become interested in a guy, when I was out of college and working, and he seemed interested in me or at least we seemed to be good friends, if he didn't make a move, I did: I'd say "let's go out to lunch." Suddenly it's like all the lights went out and whoever the guy was would stop being my friend. Seldom did men ask me out.

I've had problems making friends since a group of girls were very cruel to me in fourth grade. Probably a trust issue.

And I do have trust issues. I struggle with depression and anxiety. I developed an "eating for comfort and to relieve pain" issue when my ex-boyfriend (the one I lived with) got married to his next girlfriend. Turns out he just didn't want to marry and have children with me. I put on weight I haven't been able to fully take off since then. I binge on sweets if I have them. I seem to have no control over my eating. And now I don't exercise, either. I'm afraid of becoming old and immobile before my time, just like my grandmother.

That's the story I live with, minus a few details here and there. But my therapist said I could tell a different story. I'll begin working on that one tomorrow.