A Desperate State of Mind

By Janet Myers

Childhood abuse has consequences. Abuse perpetrators might escape punishment, but damage to victims can go undetected for years. This is the true story of what happened to one child who grew up in a highly dysfunctional, abusive family and what it took to put her broken mind back together decades later. There is nothing explicit in this account, but it can trigger people who are abuse victims.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janet Myers
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005706920

Book preview

A Desperate State of Mind

Janet Myers

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

(NIV quotations used in this publication are from the 1978 copyright.)

© 2022 Janet Myers

All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form without written permission from the author. (Please contact the author at [e-mail] for permissions. This email address may also be used to originate other communication with the author.)

Cover design: Janet Myers

Cover background photograph: iStockphoto.com photo by Sam Eder, 2020

Contents

WARNING!

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

FALLING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

Last thoughts

_____________________________

WARNING!

Before reading this…

If you are a victim of abuse and have never dealt with it, I would ask that you have a strong base of supportive friends to surround yourself with. (A counselor you can talk to would be a very good idea.) There is nothing explicit in this account, but reading it has been known to bring a lot of pain to the surface in a few people.

I used to be severely mentally ill, but I am completely well now and this is my story. The healing I experienced is so complete that I feel no pain or discomfort upon recalling my past and that’s a miracle.

If you are one of the many in our world who have been gravely damaged by devastatingly injurious experiences, my heart’s desire and prayer for you is that complete restoration be yours, just as it is mine.

_____________________________

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

A place where nothing is quite what it seems

I grew up in Arizona. That’s the place where people always say about it well, at least it’s a dry heat and cartoons are always drawn of desiccated skeletons crawling across the desert floor. Life in my family was about that dry.

Father was a narcissistic atheist which meant he lived as though the only reality was that all of life and it’s pleasures were to center on his needs. He did not hesitate to indulge himself in any comfort, especially when the indulgence was something he could keep to himself and not share with anyone. Air conditioning would have been a shared comfort (and expensive to run), so we only ever got a swamp cooler installed on the house. I’m sure his distorted mind-set is why he set us all to suffer year after year in the intense Arizona heat.

Father made mom’s life a difficult one. He gave her as little of his earnings as possible to feed and cloth herself and their children. Everything else he spent on himself. More and more money was forced out of his hands as his children got older, but that didn’t stop him from trying to keep everything possible for himself. If mom made him mad, Father would withhold household expense money from her but still expect her to prepare all the meals he liked. He made her endure mistreatment by demeaning, humiliating and intimidating her. When Father was in an especially nasty mood, he would make himself as unapproachable as possible by glaring at anyone who would come near with an expression of seething anger and hostility. There was nothing healthy about our family life.

Father’s parents lived nearby in a house that sat in the middle of the trailer park they owned. Our house was a short drive from them. Mom kept chickens or mean turkeys in our back yard and every now and then she would butcher one for the table. I was always glad to see the turkeys go because they would chase us around the yard. My little brother, David, would grab a broom and smack the turkeys with it when they chased me. We also had a dog in the back yard, but it disappeared one day never to be seen again. So, we got another dog which eventually disappeared as well. We were told they ran away. There was a small sandbox in the yard that my sister and I would sometimes play in, but not together — just in. Being complete opposites, our style of playing together was to sit back to back in the middle of the box and each play on our own side.

Stranger danger in the 1950’s must have been nearly unheard of in our area because Mom would occasionally send the three of us off together to a small local market to pick something up for her. We certainly weren’t little angels. On one of our trips, my five year old brother decided to steal a toy cap gun. The noise the package made when he tore it open was so loud that I surely thought we were going to get caught, but we got away with it. We told mom a neighbor boy gave the cap gun to us. She believed us — or maybe she just wanted to believe us.

EARLY CHURCH EXPERIENCES

The only two things I remember about going with mom to a nearby Presbyterian church are that they gave me graham crackers for a snack and Father didn’t go to church with us. I’m guessing that he enjoyed the peace and quiet of having the house all to himself Sunday mornings.

When we moved to the north side of Phoenix a few years later, Father’s insecurities made it unbearable for him to let mom out of his sight. His only option to protect his property was to go to church with her. Once again, she chose a Presbyterian church only a couple of miles away. At church, Father pretended to be a warm, friendly, outgoing person, though he was actually a sullen, uncouth, angry introvert. He didn’t seem to realize how despicable his behavior was, especially when he would put his arm around mom and grab one of her breasts — right in public, right at church — to her shame and embarrassment. The church people just tried to ignore this complete breach of propriety. I can only think that enduring this was when mom began to emotionally withdraw and hide her feelings. How else could a person possibly deal with being humiliated like that?

Church was like a funeral and I couldn’t understand why adults would go somewhere they obviously didn’t want to be. They greeted each other with smiles that looked like their teeth hurt and talked in hushed voices. When they went into the chapel, they sat in dead silence on folding hard-as-rocks metal chairs. Worse yet, they didn’t keep their misery to themselves. All the kids had to sit still and be completely quiet through the service — except when we had to stand and try to sing some lame hymn that we had never heard before and would likely never hear again. Then, it was right back to trying not to fidget on those chairs. Whispering or touching anyone was forbidden and even drawing on the bulletin was barely tolerated. Life was strict at home and even worse at church. When the service ended the church people suddenly changed. They became cheerful and happy and they all had big, genuine smiles. It was obvious to me that they were just as unhappy as I was to be there and just as glad to leave. I thought they were all pathetic and I didn’t want anything to do with them, their God, or their church. I could see nothing of value in inflicting that kind of misery on myself every Sunday. Daily life in my family was miserable enough.

WORLD BEST NARCISSIST

Father’s idea of generosity with his family was to literally give us leftover crumbs. That level of selfishness was a slap in the face. On rare occasions, he would get home from work