As a child, I felt shame from being abused (sexual, verbal, physical, psychological) and bullied in school.
I also felt embarrassed for having acne at a young age (beginning at age 7) and starting my menses early (at age 9; 4th grade). I bled through my pants one day at school, and the kids picked on me. Other kids stole my lunch money, my jacket, and other things. Many kids called me "crater face" and "pizza face" in school. I still have physical scars from acne, but they aren't as deep as the emotional scars that words did to me inside.
I was also called names for being part-Japanese. I won't repeat them here because they are painful and potentially triggering to other Asians. I used to wish that I were more white-looking. I used to wish that my eyes were rounder, my hair was more straight, my skin was flawless, etc. But that wasn't me.
As an adult, I tried to prove myself. I was never good enough for my parents. Also, we kept moving and changing schools a lot, so I never got to keep friends. It was frustrating because I would get close to some friends right before we had to move. At some point I gave up making friends.
Then we were more stable in Junior High. But it was a bad neighborhood, and some female gang member tried to fight me. She only said, "What are you looking at?" before she starting punching me. I knew how to block her. While we were sitting in detention, she kept trying to threaten me. I told her, "No amount of what you do will compare to what my dad will do to me." And you know what, she never messed with me after that. It didn't take fighting her back. It just took blocking her punches and looking her dead in her eyes, because she really wasn't as much of a threat as my own dad.
I loved my dad, but he got out of control when he drank. He also had unresolved PTSD from WWII, so he used to beat up my mother in front of us kids and say al sorts of derogatory things about Japanese people, including my Japanese mother. My father was white/European American. It was painful to witness, until he started harming us sometimes when he was drunk - well, my mother and I at least, since my sister denies things (but is nonetheless dealing with her own forms of PTSD). My father's unpredictable behaviors made it harder for me to find any form of self-esteem. My entire life was based on my father's mistakes.
My best friend was murdered when I was around 13 or 14. I lost her. I never thought I could get close to another person again. I don't think I can. And we moved many times since then that it was hard to even process my grief. I had no one to speak with. I felt survivor's guilt, and my self-esteem plummeted. I thought I was cursed or something.
All my life I felt like this curse was on my shoulders. In fact, how my parents met was through my father's mother (whom I never met). My paternal grandmother changed her name, was a fortune teller, and was a member of some cult-like organization. From what I heard from my half-siblings, she and her children's stepfather abused their own children - my father included. I think that's also why my father was really messed up. I sympathized with my dad and forgave him, and he even apologized to me before he died. That meant the world to me, only, I wished he were alive longer so I could get to know that side of him. He had his good sides to him growing up, when he wasn't drunk and abusive. He was quite funny and encouraging. But things would change drastically, so my self-esteem plummeted each time.
I blamed myself a lot, and considered myself cursed from my paternal grandmother. I truly believed that she cursed me spiritually. I don't know where that belief came from, but I've had it since childhood.
My mother used to see my paternal grandmother for spiritual advice, since she offered her services as a fortune teller. Then my mother met my father, and soon thereafter, they were hitched. Both my parents believed in weird things, though my mother was kind of eclectic with her spiritual beliefs, whereas my father was raised with more Roman Catholic values.
The Catholic church was actually nice to me. Thankfully, I never experienced any abuse from them, which is unlike what other people have reported. I know abuse can happen anywhere, but I was fortunate to not have abuse from the church on top of all the abuses I received elsewhere. Still, abuse from my father felt really painful. It included spiritual abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, witnessing domestic violence/witnessing intimate partner violence abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, parentification, witnessing a substance-abusing father who had an alcohol problem, educational neglect (when he would ask me to stay home many times), and pitting my sister and I against one another through constant comparisons. I wondered where God was to rescue me. I wondered why God would allow the sinned-against be so tortured for so long? I wondered why there wasn't much justice for the sinned-against! There's even a pastor I used to know who used that term, "sinned-against." But in that kind of religion, we're also sinners. "There's not one without sin." So from those moments on, without much guidance and with much conflicting spiritual abuse, I felt I was both cursed and this horrible heathen - doomed and punished for the rest of my days, deserving of all evil, and destined for hell.
It's challenging to process all that and find self-esteem. How can I find any esteem through all that?!
And I only remember bits and pieces.
I have alternate personalities who hold the remainder of my memories and the feelings to go with. Their feelings are super powerful.
I suppose I have dissociative identity disorder because I have a shattered self-esteem (losing time, switching, having headaches, having flashbacks with shared alters at times, hearing internal voices in the form of alternate personalities, and finally learning to be coconscious/more integrated with my alternate personalities, even though I still dissociate and am not yet fully healed). Who can form any identity or whole personality when you've experienced such abuse - those you remember and those you don't because the trauma/torture was too much.
My father's brother (my uncle) was worse. He threatened my life. He made sure I felt bad about being me. He molested me. He did it for spiritual reasons. But I only know that from an alter inside named Mary. There's also a younger alter, Michelle, age 3, who said that she was also abused by our uncle, but at the time, he would give her gifts. There was the illuminati sign on a coin gift as well as on a paper. My alter, Mary, thought she could color on the paper, but then she got in trouble. Our uncle threatened our lives, and when I use the pronoun "our," I really mean "me." But I only remember bits and pieces. My alters remember the rest. And it still feels as though it's separate from me - that my alters are true and different entities to take care of that which my brain couldn't. I am smart enough and educated enough to know that now. But my existential reality tells me a different story. My broken self-esteem tells me that I'm worthless unless I do something good to make up for the bad person I am.
Perhaps that's why I'm verbose and try too hard at times to help. But my energy levels, given my chronic fatigue syndrome, can no longer perform away the bad in me, or so I secretly think. I fear that I'm cursed, even though I know those are childish thoughts, and some held thoughts from the younger alters. The older teen alters try to comfort the younger alters by telling them that the curse has been broken, that we are out of that abusive situation, and that the curse was never our fault.
We told most of this story to our T recently. She suggested we ask inside about how we can proactively work together to see that this curse is no longer there. She also said that we had "magical thinking," which is common for some abused children. We said that we liked "Harry Potter," so we tried to imagine curse-breaking spells or something. We know that those things don't truly exist, but at the same time, we are also trying to heal all of our selves, so if that's the way to reach the younger parts of myself, my alters, it's helping a little. It's also helping me to be more brave about facing my traumas through facing the parts of self that hold those traumas as well as those memories.
Currently, we ebb and flow with whether or not we're collectively triggered by religion. There's an alter named Ethyl inside, who is in her 60s, and she's a lover of theology and Christianity. But the rest of us are still skeptical, and some are downright atheist or agnostic. So go figure. Still, as a singleton looking on the outside at "me," a collective being of all these parts inside that only I can see, I'm a shattered mess. I can't even form an opinion because my brain is so fractured that even my own thoughts and beliefs are in opposition with each other, based on our worldviews, past experiences, and traumas. Some parts hold different traumas, whereas other parts just function in life without knowing any trauma. Collectively, my self-esteem has been shattered to the point of having these different parts because, perhaps, my once whole younger self - perhaps around the age of 3, when I had an imaginary friend named Michelle, who turned alter later on - felt like she alone couldn't handle all the torture herself, and that she was never good enough for life, for parents, for anyone. Her self-esteem was so low that she split off or imagined other people handling tasks for her. But that's just a theory. As far as we know from the three-year-old Michelle, she liked "me" - the "innocent one" much better than herself.
I still never considered any of this out of the ordinary, nor did I tell anyone about these thoughts or feelings. I went through life losing time, blacking out, having parts, and dealing with things I tried to shove away just to survive in life and save face. Underneath everything I did came this belief that if I wasn't good enough, I was a bad person. And even if I was good enough, I felt that it was never good enough to wipe away some curse or the parts I felt weren't ever good enough for life or anyone in life.
Over the course of my adulthood life, I've learned some coping skills to handle negative messages, internalized things I learned from abusive people in the past and present. I've used positive affirmations to help myself at least feel a sense of self-mastery and self-efficacy. I could be gritty, tenacious, and persevere, but I still have low self-esteem. Again, it was this need for performance that compensated for my low self-esteem.
But when I became disabled, I grew sorely depressed. I felt like this bad person again. My positive helping alters inside knew that I wasn't bad, just a person with limitations.
But I also knew how parentification could lead to wanting to help, as if helping others was my purpose and duty (it's really not; I actually suck at helping, though I'm better at perhaps analyzing and occasionally writing, when I'm able to be succinct). Parentification becomes a mask. There was even a chapter dedicated to writing about dissociative identity disorder in Chase's book on parentification. I think Chase was the main editor, but there were many authors penning each chapter. I forgot the name of the author who wrote the chapter on dissociative identity disorder and parentification, but it truly made sense. In there, it discusses identity and what I thought was self-esteem, but I can't remember fully. I read it for a small independent project I was working on at the time. I only checked it out of the library long enough to read that section, but not long enough to actually memorize it. The book itself is expensive. I might purchase it one day though.
Perhaps my self-esteem plummeted from cascading traumatic events, including the loss of my childhood. My drunken father left me to take care of my younger sister. My younger sister almost set the apartment on fire one day, and I had to put it out. She thought she could cook paper towels. She saw me cooking eggs for us one day, since we were hungry and our father was too drunk to make us something to eat. I tried out the orange juice in the fridge, but it tasted gross. I think it was our dad's mixed drink. Yuck!
So, I made sure to test things out before making my sister and I a meal after school.
But I wasn't the best role model for my sister, and I didn't treat my sister with kindness. I was verbally mean, and didn't want to hang out with her at school or elsewhere. She is 2 years younger than I am. Later on in life, I apologized to her. I never asked for forgiveness because I felt that only she could choose on her own whether or not to forgive me. I didn't want to pressure her for that. Still, I felt I deserved her punishment. She and I are estranged to this day. She doesn't understand my PTSD, and she still hates me. But I wasn't responsible for her; our parents were. She seems to have displaced anger from our parents onto me, so I took all of that all these years. Nevertheless, I was not a good sister.
I felt really bad when I couldn't protect my sister from these men who raped her. I was asked to watch my sister when I was around the age of 13. I think I have alters that handle the gross stuff, like Delilah and Fantasy, and even Princess. Delilah and Fantasy are 21 years old, much older than I was at 13. Princess is 16, but she feels trapped in the castle by the evil queen and king who abuse her and isolate her.
Others also experienced similar abuses as my sister from those very men, and they remember the pain. My father wasn't there, nor was my uncle. These were people they allowed us to go with though. I don't know why, and that time was a huge blur.
The alters that took similar sexual abuses from those men were Tabitha (age 8) and Echo (age 16). Those are also parts of self that took over when things got too painful. Little did I know that in today's world, that would be considered human trafficking and statutory rape. I honestly thought it was because I was a mixed-race Japanese person that I deserved this treatment, based on hearing my father's mean statements about Japanese people at times, as well as my neighbors and kids in school who picked on me for being Asian. Whenever I'd hear abusers say things like "she looks exotic," I equated that to being an Asian female. It made me feel ashamed of myself, and it lowered my self-esteem.
Throughout my adulthood life, I was triggered by many things that reminded me of the images I had seen and the memories my alters had recollected. Intrusive thoughts would become nightmares and flashbacks when I wasn't managing myself well enough.
I also have low self-esteem in therapeutic relationships. I feel like I'm too much for my therapist, and sometimes like I'm too much for any groups to handle. After all, anyone reading my story could easily get vicarious/secondary trauma from the details. This is why I put a trigger warning on this. I could go into more detail, but I won't. It would trigger me and others too much.
I even have parts helping me type this because I, myself, cannot handle my emotions.
I used to get in trouble for expressing emotion, so I learned to internalize it and see it and feel it within. The tears are invisible to others.
But on those off days when I do cry - mostly in the online presence of my T these days, my T validates it. It's much easier to do that online than it is in person in her office. Perhaps that's one positive of this pandemic, though I miss seeing my T in real life.
So, that's only 1/5 or so of my trauma story, as it relates to self-esteem.
I deal with self-esteem through positive affirmations. I deal with emotions through distracting, building mastery, and sometimes helping others/volunteering. I am cognizant about my own shortcomings, so I try to work on those, too, while I'm coping with low self-esteem. The best I can do is manage my self-esteem, since it doesn't seem to get higher. I can temporarily raise it, but its baseline is low. My alters represent the tragedy of having self-esteem shattered through multiple traumas throughout my lifespan.
Dec 26, 2021, 06:06 PM
This is an old thread. You probably should not post your reply to it, as the original poster is unlikely to see it.
Linear Mode
