I Wasn’t Crazy—How The Truth Set Me Free

I’m still less than halfway through my coursework with ARCS, and I have to admit, I am excited to see where the rest of this course will take me. 

I have already changed so much--both internally and through tangible, observable, external shifts--that I can only imagine how much more my life will change throughout the second half of the course.

Over the last year with ARCS, I have learned to reframe my understanding of fear. 

I see it now as a necessary part of growth. Fear is something most of us spend our lives denying and avoiding; we squash it down inside of ourselves in hopes no one else will know it’s there, and we run away from it without realizing that this often drives us toward directions that are even worse for us. 

ARCS has helped me to recognize and name my fears; to understand their root causes and overall impact; and to stand at least halfway outside of them so I can make rational decisions about how to confront them (or, in some cases, accept them and do nothing about it), instead of feeling paralyzed or triggered. 

I have not conquered all of my fears yet, but I have faced some major ones, and now that I know this is possible, my life will never be the same. 

I grew up in a highly dysfunctional and emotionally abusive household. 

My parents were kind and had made themselves pillars in their community (pillars built on a foundation of lies, but I wouldn’t understand that until adulthood)--but they both had unresolved childhood traumas of their own, and therefore made it more of a priority to show others that we were a good, happy family than to actually be one behind closed doors. 

My mother was negligent--she frequently seemed to forget about my existence and failed to teach me things like basic hygiene, how to clean up after myself, how to manage my time and school work, how to manage money, how to be a good friend, and how to nurture my self-esteem. 

I over-functioned as a child in order to compensate for this negligence, knowing that I would be punished if I allowed anyone outside the home to detect a problem. 

Essentially, I taught myself, fed myself, and provided for myself, all while my parents ignored me in the next room over. My father was an enabler who could not stand up against my mother’s narcissistic tendencies and eventually grew to be so self-destructive that all of the spare energy in our home was diverted to his care; he was in and out of the hospital for most of my life. 

The dysfunction in our home was all rooted in the protection of lies and secrets. 

I learned as an adolescent that my father’s career was actually an illegal operation. I also realized that my mother had built two careers in fields that she wasn’t qualified for--instead of going to school or getting training, she had used my childhood as a tool to get her foot in the door, first pushing me into various fields as a student and then using parental connections to finagle teaching jobs and other gigs for herself. 

This meant that I had no access to communities in my childhood without my mother’s involvement; she claimed more ownership of all those communities than I ever could. 

Finally, in late adolescence, I realized that both of my parents had been struggling with drug addiction for the entirety of my life. 

In their fear of being discovered, they typically just blamed and shamed me for letting any evidence of their internal problems trickle into the outside world. At the same time, they used guilt to shoulder me with the burden of lifting our entire family out of poverty before I even graduated from high school.

As awful as it sounds, I spent many years envying people who had suffered more explicit forms of abuse, like violence or sexual misconduct, simply because they had concrete proof of dysfunction and others would likely feel moved to help them escape their situation. 

I was routinely dismissed when I reached out for help outside of my home. When I developed autonomy as an adolescent, I frequently put myself in dangerous, risky situations. Subconsciously, there was a part of me that was hoping something extreme would happen to me so that I could justify seeking out the help that I had already needed for years. 

It wasn’t long before I got my wish, but by then I was an adult who had made a reputation for myself as a melodramatic thrill-seeker. The help I needed remained out of reach. I could not afford quality therapy--I tried to go anyway but became even more dejected when the cost of therapy became unmanageable debt, and I still didn’t feel any better. I had asked for help in vain so many times that I lost hope and stopped trying.

I spent the first 2.5 decades of my life halfway convinced that I was crazy. 

Every single authority figure in my life told me that I was exaggerating, that I was misunderstanding my parents’ motivations, that everyone has rough patches with their parents, that I shouldn’t complain because things could be a lot worse, and worst of all, that I should change myself to improve the relationship with my parents because “family is the most important thing.” 

These messages continued even after an event where my mother tried to strangle me, I threw a phone charger to keep her away from me, and she reacted by having me committed to a psych ward for two days. I was sixteen at the time. 

I didn’t even realize how much these learned lessons and attitudes had been degrading my sense of self-worth until I was almost 30. 

I looked around one day and realized I was working myself to death, bending over backwards to accommodate the relationships in my life and ensure everyone else’s comfort… and yet I didn’t feel appreciated, valued, heard or seen by anyone in my life except my partner, and I felt uncomfortable all of the time. 

I had built a life for myself that looked fine on paper--I was “popular,” and I looked good, and I had a decent job. But under the surface, everything was a mess. 

I had been working multiple jobs since before I graduated high school, and had nothing to show for it except debt. My friendships were unmanageable because each and every one of them was asking me to give more than I got out of the relationship. I was seesawing between depression, anxiety, distraction and self-medication. I had no center, no peace of mind, no hope for the future and no ability to accept the past.

My physical body was the first to cue me into the severity of the situation. 

I had painful symptoms that doctors couldn’t diagnose; turns out my body was trying to tell me “This isn’t sustainable. You have to change something. This pattern is going to kill you.”

The first reaction I had was to change careers. I started ghostwriting and took on a book project about chakra healing for a client. The subject had never particularly interested me before I started writing about it. That week, I remember I was shaken to the core, reading about the common symptoms of an imbalanced root chakra--I felt like I was researching myself. 

Book after book, website after website, they were all describing my experience, and saying two other things that terrified me. First--that the root chakra is the foundation, and no other chakra can be balanced until the root is taken care of. Second--that an imbalanced root chakra is often found in those who have suffered childhood abuse, because it is a manifestation of one’s inability to trust in anything--even the ground beneath one’s feet--after receiving inconsistent, unreliable, or transactional love from one’s mother. 

Earlier in that week, I’d had a minor spell of “depression” after hearing bad news about a friend’s cancer diagnosis. My mother had called me, detected the sadness in my voice, and invited me to share my feelings. I did. 

About fifteen minutes into this conversation, she flipped out and threatened to kill herself if I didn’t snap out of this depression already. 

When I read about the root chakra imbalance symptoms, this episode came back to me, and truly hit me like a lightning strike. It only took a few more days of angry crying for me to re-evaluate my life experiences and reach a new conclusion with absolute certainty:

that I had learned everything I knew about life from a woman that I didn’t respect or admire; that I was following in her footsteps even though I knew I didn’t want to end up in the same place she was heading; and that I was not crazy--I was reacting reasonably to constant emotional abuse. 

It struck me that I had spent my entire life taking care of others’ needs and ignoring my own because my parents had trained me to do this for them. It also struck me that if I wanted to change, I would have to go all the way back to my roots, to question and examine everything that I thought I knew about life. I would essentially have to start over. 

Knowing this and doing it are two very different things, though. 

I spent a couple of years in existential limbo, feeling like I was adrift at sea without an anchor, or compass, or even a north star to follow. I wanted to change; I wanted to learn a new way to live. I just didn’t have the foggiest notion of how to do it.

It wasn’t until I signed up for ARCS that this started to change. 

I was very skeptical of ARCS when I began the program. It brought a lot of issues to the surface that I did not want to look at--for example, the fact that I had learned to distrust women who were “too kind” and communities of women that were generally positive; the fact that I had been taught to distrust addiction recovery methods by two people who had struggled with addiction their whole lives and never recovered; the fact that I had been taught to look down on all forms of spirituality by a woman who needed to believe there was no power in the universe greater than her own; and most importantly, the fact that I had learned to fear happiness, success and peace from two people who were almost 70 and still didn’t know how to be happy or take care of themselves. 

The new path I found myself on with ARCS was unfamiliar and scary, because I didn’t know where it would lead me. 

But as the courses and classes went on, week after week, I became more certain that I did know where my former path led--straight to the misery that my parents were suffering, but too proud to turn away from. 

Gradually, I embraced the fear of the unknown, recognizing that even if spirituality felt awkward, and female positivity was hard for me to trust, this new path had to lead somewhere better than where I was headed before.  

I have to credit whoever designed the coursework, because it was an incredible experience for me to feel these fears, doubts, insecurities and cynical views melt away slowly at a natural pace. I never felt forced or strong armed or hoodwinked into changing my perspectives. I felt empowered to voice my doubts and never felt that I had to deny them in order to be a “good” student. I never felt rushed or stressed or pressured to do things in a particular way. 

The changes I experienced came slowly at first, but after about six months of coursework, I felt like I was in a state of internal revolution--a triumphant and righteous revolution in the name of long overdue justice and peace. 

• My relationship to my parents changed drastically, but not in a melodramatic way; there was no major fight, no grand gesture, no moment of reckoning. I just changed the way I reacted to them internally, and the other pieces of the puzzle started falling into place naturally. 

• My relationships with friends and colleagues changed, too, and became more reciprocal, more fulfilling, and more honest.

• ARCS helped me to look at time-management, self-care, and the work of striving towards personal goals in a totally new light; I used to be hopeless with these issues, but I now feel like an expert in all three areas! 

• I have become much better at both standing up for myself, and walking away from situations where I have to do so over and over again.

• I’ve become empowered to pursue goals that I previously felt unqualified for or unworthy of. 

Some of the other changes I experienced snuck up on me and took me by surprise. 

• I struggled with eating disorders throughout my adolescence and early adulthood; lately, my extreme cravings for sugar have mysteriously vanished, and my desire to take care of my body is consistently stronger than my impulsive desires. 

• My sleeping patterns have changed for the better, and I never even consciously tried to alter them. 

• Some of my chronic pain symptoms have improved. 

• My relationship to money is changing for the better. 

• I’m no longer afraid to admit that I want happiness and peace in my life, and I’m finding it easier to turn away from invitations towards stress, anxiety and frustration.
• And, perhaps most astonishing, I’ve fostered a spiritual relationship with a Higher Power that allows me to feel safe and trusting instead of scared and cynical. I truly never thought I would be able to make such a claim. 

I still have quite a ways to go. 

But the old me would have looked at what remains of this path and given up, convincing herself that it would be too hard, too long, and lead nowhere. 

The new me is okay with where I am and isn’t worried about how much longer this journey will take, because I know the journey is the destination. 

I’m enjoying the walk and don’t want to rush it.