Save Yourself: Overcoming Complex Trauma

By A. Makarenko

This book is for everyone who feels traumatized and lost in a maze of chaotic existence. It is for people who give their all but still feel like they aren't measuring up. For those who can't sleep at night and aren't able to face the demands of waking hours. For those whose minds that are under siege of the viscous inner critic that undermines their every step. For those who want to do their best for the world, but are too self-doubting to try. I have been where you are at this moment and I am very familiar with the way that it makes you feel. I also know at least one good way out. I have lived it, worked through the trauma, abuse and self-neglect and got to a much healthier and happier place. I now feel like I must let other people know there IS a solution! It may take a lot of courage, but it is also worth every step. Come on this journey with me! We can look at the scary places where our inner demons dwell and we can also find the way through to the light. If we were made to feel like no one else in the world cares to save us, maybe it is because we were meant to bring our own power out and save ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A. Makarenko
• Release date: Jan 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386778813

Book preview

1

Putting the Past in Its Place

My mother never missed an opportunity to relay to me all the gory details of her suffering at the hands of my father. I now believe she must have done it in order to give herself an excuse for the way she treated me. It was like she didn’t have what it took to take care of me, but she still wanted to feel like her actions were justified. One of the biggest manifestations of such a stance was her leaving me without most of my relatives - most importantly my dad. Badly flawed human being though he was, my dad may have been the only person who had ever actually cared about me. Of course, as a small child, I did not really question her motives in the same way as I do now. One can only imagine what the repeated accounts of her being attacked while pregnant with me had done to my seven-year-old mind.

In the end, by the age of ten, I simply decided that he was the devil that should be hated and banished. That is when my mother added the practice of directly insulting me to her usual repertoire, usually building on the face that I was the mirror image of my dad.

She gave regular performances, shouting that I was crazy, sick and worthless just like my father, and that she wished she had had an abortion and never had to bother with us (me and my half-brother) at all. Once in a while, she’d liven up her threats, saying she’d give us to the orphanage or hang herself. I remember vividly hanging onto her dress, crying my eyes out and begging her not to do anything bad.

As I look back many decades later, I know quite well that her hysterics had very little to do with me. I was just the most convenient, if not to the only, outlet she had for all of those pent-up frustrations. But at that time, the scathing, cutting force was taking root in my little heart - the one that would emerge like a horrible monster many years later, taking the place of anything good in my life, endlessly spreading chaos and spewing hatred until I and even my loved ones were all but consumed.Since my mother simply hated me as my father’s extension, she did not actually ever try to accept me. All she could manage was to begrudgingly tolerate my presence. And when she couldn’t do that (which was very often) she would shout and curse and throw things around.

Of course, as most children, I completely screened out the possibility of her being wrong or her not loving me from my consciousness, and I remained a slavishly devoted daughter and her biggest energetic and later financial donor.

Despite a few brief bouts of rebellion, I attempted through the years, the power dynamic hadn’t really changed right up until our last meeting, shortly after I turned thirty. This was when the proverbial sh**t hit the fan.

At the time, I was involved with a man who I later realized was a deeply disordered, dangerous person. I think that story should actually be told first to better explain the subsequent showdown with my mom. I do not have any official diagnosis to back me up, but I actually believe he was a genuine psychopath. In fact, he was the one who brought up the possibility in one of his less guarded moments.

Having lived in a completely different, and in some ways a lot more innocent place before coming to the US, I had never even heard of the term before. It was not long after our breakup and the terrible aftermath that it had left me with that I started to learn what it really meant, both for him and everyone around him.

Still, I was not completely without self-preservation instinct, so when he started displaying very strange and abrupt changes in behavior and gave thinly veiled warnings and threats, I was wise enough to pay attention. The problem was that I was isolated and depended exclusively on him for a sense of connection and support.

One day, I was passing through the hall of our tiny New York City apartment and caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. He did not see me looking, and the expression on his face as he stared into the mirror chilled me to the bone.

Those were his familiar features and the same face, but with such a mechanical, blank expression on it, paired with a completely flat, lifeless look in his eyes that it was hard to believe it was the same person, or even A person. He really looked like one of those robotic characters from a sci-fi movie, only this one was standing just a couple of feet away from me. Some things have the capacity to scare me more than a direct threat to my life. This sight of a supposed human being who was void of any emotion just froze my soul. At the same time it sent my mind into such panic that I hardly knew what I was doing.

Somehow, my body kept moving as on autopilot, and I found myself passing by the door as I alway would, even as my heart sunk and blood drained from my face.

A few moments later, when he came out of the bathroom, I managed to look like my usual self. We exchanged some lighthearted banter and then he left for work as usual. I sat down at the kitchen table and shook uncontrollably. The whole situation had come before my eyes in a totally new light: The fact that I was completely isolated with him in the part of town no one even talked to me, let alone really knew me - at least two hours away from the only friends who could have helped. Bits and pieces of conversations floated into my mind: that time that he mentioned being investigated for disappearing a foreign student (unfairly, I had assumed at the time, without even considering asking the obvious question), and how he sometimes mentioned I could never have loved him if I knew who he really was. Then there was his throw-away phone I recently found, his obvious dislike of being photographed. And how about his insistence on me severing my ties with not only my ex, whom I still cared for as a close friend, but with every other person who cared for me at all in this cold, foreign city? I remembered his working late every night, staring at his laptop with multiple chat windows, but never wanting me to look closely at the screen. I remembered his many passing references to the criminal practices as if he knew them through and through. Then there was his inability to trust and the need to verify every little detail. And what about his unfounded jealousy, his contemptuous or dismissive accounts of his exes? It dawned on me how cold and unfeeling he sounded while talking about the people whom he once supposedly loved, how cruel he really was in his dealings with them - that is, if I looked at it straight without bothering about the stories that veiled the