Do you ever leave therapy and have to immediately record a voice note while it’s fresh?
We were talking about my latest read, Scream with Me, and how I’ve loved connecting with scary movies through a feminist lens.
It brought me back to something I say pretty often when people ask why I like horror movies so much:
Other people can see the monster.
I find that soothing because typically, that hasn’t been my experience.
Even when it was blatantly obvious that there was a monster right in front of us, people would either protect him or deny my experience.
At the time, it was none of any of our business.
Yes, I’m heavily including myself in that denial.
It was as much an emotional coping mechanism as it was a physical survival strategy.
I still struggle with the guilt of my own complicity in my abuser’s treatment of me, and his ability to go on hurting others.
But I also know this particular monster is a bigger beast than one man, and that one man is dangerous enough on his own.
As you’d imagine, this has all led to underlying beliefs that I can’t trust my own experience; that I’m a bad, broken person with a twisted reality. I was gaslit into some core beliefs I still a struggle to deal with.
For example, my nervous system likes to tell me that if I show anger, even in reaction to someone else’s anger, it will harm me or someone else. It also means that I’m a bad person.
What can’t you do, trauma?!
In the recurring nightmare I’ve had for years, I always assumed my narcissist was obviously the monster I couldn’t see, but was always running from. It felt a bit on the nose, actually.
But what if I zoomed out and looked at it more broadly, like [the author]?
Is it that I’m scared of wrath itself, twisted with violence as it is for me? Or is it that I’m afraid of my own anger, believing it will turn me into a monster like him?
This has actually sat in my drafts folder for awhile. In sharing the thought at my next visit, I told my therapist I’d always been afraid that because I can’t trust my reality. I shared my core belief that I’m really the problem, the narcissist, and the monster.
She went from smiling to laughing when I, distressed, yelled, “But what if I’m just fooling you?!”
Unless I’m doing a really good job of fooling everyone, I think that’s a good sign. It’s also a good sign that I should continue to keep up with exploring these connections.
The anger he inflicted on me felt like the zombie bite.
I’d done the research, knew what happens to a person who experiences long-term abuse. The likelihood of future physical and mental health symptoms. The chances of them either going on to experience future abuse, or to go on to abuse others themselves in their denial.
But it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.