The Impact

Someone once asked what it felt like to lose yourself. This was my response.

“Can someone please elaborate on what they think that means and how it feels? Once you lose yourself/your spirit can you ever get it back?. Maybe after you leave you find yourself again? I think I’ve lost some of what I once was.”

You lose interest in doing what you once enjoyed, and then start to forget what that even was…
You feel you are possibly/probably unloveable, deficient and unworthy of being loved.
You experience painful things that you would have once tried to fight against, but no longer have the will or energy to do so, and instead you desensitize, disconnect and adapt to it.
You compartmentalize much of your life and start to hide many compartments, meaning that you must isolate yourself and limit even your friendships to keep it hidden.
You no longer go to sleep looking forward to the next day, and you wake up wanting to just ‘get through the day’.
You start to forget that you had dreams and goals because if you dare to remember, it will hurt.
Every time you start to feel ‘happy’, you immediately feel anxiety because you are wondering when the rug will be pulled out from underneath you.
You feel trapped and you don’t ‘see’ your choices.
You wonder what is wrong with you.
You wonder if you are capable of being in a happy and healthy relationship.
You feel you aren’t worth that kind of relationship, and you might as well make the best of it (often for the kids).
You feel unable to make it on your own and you doubt yourself where you once had confidence.
You don’t like looking in the mirror because you see a tired, depressed and defeated person that you don’t recognize looking back at you.
You think if you just try harder, love deeper and stronger and behave better that it will all get fixed and better.
It fails and you feel you are a failure.
Something has gone horribly wrong in your life and you keep trying and trying and trying to fix it.
Then you try to just cope with it.
Then you burn out, get angry, cry, grieve and look for real answers.

Note:  I wrote the above several years ago, and shared it with a few support groups.   One person responded by comparing aspects of the above to depression.   This bothered me.  Too many times I see the impact of abuse get shifted subtly to hold the person being abused as somehow responsible.:  She’s depressed. She needs to deal with her depression.  She needs to focus on getting better. 

There is some truth, but in fact, people need to put that focus on the one behaving wrongly, behaving abusively, and put the responsibility and accountability on him to stop the abuse!

I’m not saying that a person can’t be abused and depressed simultaneously, but I have to wonder how many depressed women would improve if they were free of being abused.  Below is my response regarding the subject of impact of abuse vs. depression:

It’s true that there can be a crossover, but I would differentiate to a great degree when abuse is involved. In that case, ‘situational depression’ is more applicable, but the following bear their own unique stamp that reflects the hallmark of abuse.

You lose interest in doing what you once enjoyed, and then start to forget what that even was…

When you are trying to make a vital relationship work with a partner whose mindset is one of entitlement, you end up giving an inordinate amount of energy to him and to the relationship. This can happen so subtly, that when the fog rolls in, it hides in plain sight. In a way, I consider this sort of partner to be a kind of vampire. This person does not care if your goals slip away, your health erodes, your dreams and hopes dissipate, and you become a faded version of yourself. Energy is finite, and when it’s sucked out of you, you don’t even have the emotional energy to figure out or remember what you enjoyed, much less why it’s not a part of your life anymore.

Thinking about what you enjoy becomes dangerous ground, because what you love has probably been used as a weapon of control against you. If this is depression, it’s more akin to situational depression.

You feel you are possibly/probably unlovable, deficient and unworthy of being loved.

How could this feel otherwise? You’re with someone who has vowed that he loves you, vowed to commit his life to that, and yet his behaviors consistently reflect something else? When you doubt, fight back, question or react, the right buttons are pushed to make you feel guilty, and to divert attention to the needs of your partner.

Family and friends see a different picture, and so often their perception is that of ‘the great guy’. So now your messages include the information that you’re with a great guy, and therefore somehow your pain is either exaggerated (i.e. you’re too sensitive, you’re too needy, you’re too purple etc.) or unwarranted. How do those message typically get processed? When the information you receive conflicts with painful reality, the question often becomes: What is wrong with me? The inner terrifying battle ensues to fight what seems obvious: this must be all I deserve…

Don’t forget the times you engage in reactive behaviors. That always works really well to dig in the message: See? Look at that. Look at me. What makes me think I can or should ‘judge’ him? (notice discernment gets lost here, and reality begins to lose clarity)

You no longer go to sleep looking forward to the next day, and you wake up wanting to just ‘get through the day’.

Again, I see this much as an energy issue. A toxic relationship just sucks your energy and you live mostly in survival mode, approaching each day with a triage mindset as to where you should allot your energy. At the end of the day, there’s nothing left to give to processing, and you sense it, and you also know that tomorrow appears to be a repetition. You try to fall asleep as you stare at the wheel you feel chained to that takes you round and round as you starve and follow the carrot that isn’t enough to sustain you anyway. You know you’ll wake up tired and sad, but that doesn’t mean the day won’t bring its own demands. Soon, the functional things you are able to do can feel like key elements to your right to live, lest you are discarded as being nothing more than a worthless eater. This is the tearing down of the human spirit.

You feel trapped and you don’t ‘see’ your choices.

Along with PTSD and traumatic bonding, there is an interesting and terrible thing called learned helplessness. Experiments observed the effects when the concept or perception of any ‘safe space free from pain and danger’ were systematically messed with and removed altogether, and then eventually offered again. The results showed that often the ‘learning path’ (literally in the brain) would not fire up and work, so that the animal would not be able to understand (learn) that ‘here is safety’. In other words, the lesson of ‘there is no safe space free from pain’ becomes stuck and stalled.

You wonder what is wrong with you.

I’m going to attempt to clarify what I meant here. Sometimes, you can wake up feeling crummy, slightly ‘off’, tired, achy, listless etc. and wonder if something is ‘wrong’. Sometimes, you can walk into a situation and pick up or sense that something is ‘off’, and it may steer a decision. Sometimes, you can get downright frustrated with yourself at doing or not doing something, behaving or not behaving in a certain way, want to kick yourself in the behind, and wonder what is wrong with me? Why did I do or not do that? None of these are what I meant by ‘wrong’ in the original list.

It’s referring to the deep (albeit false) core belief and buried fear of lacking worth. Those who share this will probably instantly know what I’m talking about. At a gathering before my father died, my siblings joked about all the apology notes I wrote as a child, and I replied that I was born with an apology in my mouth. Why this foundational piece is not solid in some of us, I have no stock one fits all answer. I know the ‘probable’ answers in my case, but no matter why, it can have a deep and massive impact on a life. You can grow old enough to question this buried belief as legitimate, but when in your daily life you are a recipient of messages that reinforce that you lack the same value as others somehow, when you are the recipient of behavior that treats you as ‘less’ and ‘tells’ you that there must be something lacking within your very being or something ‘wrong’ in your very being, it becomes nigh impossible to stop that lie from affecting you. Naturally, you apply your energies to rooting out all your faults and weaknesses and becoming a better person. One worthy of living and breathing, and maybe one day…. maybe maybe one day… being loved.

You don’t like looking in the mirror because you see a tired, depressed and defeated person that you don’t recognize looking back at you.

This is the occasional paralyzingly dismal brush with reality when you actually LOOK at yourself. You see the cumulative impact and the evidence of lost time. It can be frightening to the point that you can stand frozen, confused, and somewhat desperate. Then you search and grasp for the energy to figure it out, it isn’t there, so you breathe in the fumes to take care of a chore or give that precious bit of energy to a child that you love. In these moments, you may also be likely to struggle to not feel angry and resentful to your spouse. You might take a fleeting reality glimpse of ‘who’ he is, but will probably not have the energy to hold on to it for long.