My Healing From A Dysfunctional Family: Curbing The Fear
Over the years, I have noticed that I have a particular persona that is, most of the time, hypervigilant. Whether I was walking down a street or driving my car, I would imagine what I called the “what ifs.” I would see some guy and imagine what I would do if I were attacked by him. I would be reviewing my moves from martial arts or boxing and planning my counter. While driving, this would happen if someone was tailgating me, cutting me off, or alongside me. What was worse was my imagining an attack for no reason at all.
I now understand that this hypervigilance is part of the damage from a dysfunctional family. For most of my life, I never connected the man looking for danger with the child who had lived with it.
Healing From A Dysfunctional Family Means Seeing The Pattern
Today, while driving, it happened again. Today, I took a long, hard look at the reason for my negative thoughts. While it was not the first time I thought similarly, this time was the clearest and most concise: Today, my first thoughts were about my heart valve implant as I was leaving a doctor’s appointment. While I was in perfect health and with nothing to worry about, I thought that this was the most consequential medical event in my entire life, as who lives without a working heart? Right after that thought, the very next one was my old self-defense moves, starting to imagine the what-ifs.
That was when the connection became clearer. A frightening thought about my heart had turned almost instantly into thoughts about fighting and defending myself. There was no threat, yet my mind had gone back to the same old place. For me, healing from a dysfunctional family means recognizing that the old alarm can also go off when there is no fire.
As a result of this not being a threat from another person, but of something that caused me to experience fear, I went into my what-if mode. The next thing I knew, I was daydreaming about physical defenses against imaginary foes.
I have read enough dysfunctional family stories to know that people carry childhood in different ways. Mine seems to have carried itself into a constant readiness to defend myself. Understanding that has become a major part of my healing from a dysfunctional family.
The Fear Behind My Dysfunctional Family Story
This is not normal behavior. It is the behavior of a child who would never know when the next whack was coming from Daddy, or when, at six years old, I was sent to Kings County Mental Ward, and did not know when, where, or who the next kid was who would pick on him with the cruelty of a mentally ill child.
I was sent there by parents who did not know what to do with a child that, in fact, was the cause of his strange behavior, and it surely was not my fault that they abused me. I know this now, but I did not know it then. Life can be cruel. Mine was during my earliest years.
There is no mystery about where some of this came from. A child who never knows when the next blow is coming learns to stay ready. A child sent away at six years old learns that safety can disappear without warning. My healing from a dysfunctional family has meant asking whether those old lessons still belong in my life today.
This is why a memoir about family can be more than a collection of memories. Writing about what happened can show you the connection between the child you were and the adult you became. My true life story has forced me to ask whether some things I called personality were really survival habits.
Healing From A Dysfunctional Family Is Not Forgetting
What can I do about this now? Just recognize it, know what it is, and remind myself that my fear in this day and age is unnecessary, and that I do not need to defend myself against imaginary dragons, or anyone else for that matter.
For me, healing from a dysfunctional family does not mean pretending the past never happened. It means noticing when the past is trying to run the present. It means stopping long enough to ask whether I am actually in danger or only remembering what danger once felt like.
I doubt that healing from a dysfunctional family happens all at once. My dysfunctional family story has been with me for a lifetime, and I do not expect every old reflex to disappear overnight. But when I catch the fear and understand where it came from, it loses some of its power.
That is what healing from a dysfunctional family means to me today. It is one more chapter in the kind of dysfunctional family stories that do not end when childhood ends: not fighting imaginary dragons, but finally understanding why I kept expecting them.
