My Side of the Street

​I no longer have to own sh*t that is not mine in order to make peace.
 
I have spent the majority of my life walking on eggshells. That is what happens when your primary caretaker is inconsistent – frequently angry, often disapproving, more likely than not unable to meet the simplest of emotional needs. As a child, I did not have the skill of discernment, so I did not know that when someone was unhappy, it was not automatically my fault. I internalized the outward expressions of negativity and frustration, and eventually this developed into the deepest of my core beliefs: that there was something inherently wrong with me. That I was a “bad” person. That I was an expensive inconvenience, and that I alone was the source of misery for those around me, particularly my mother.
 
This was not true. It was not fair for her to unload her own unprocessed emotional trauma onto me in such a way that I felt like I was at fault for her constant negativity. I do not think this was intentional, at least not always. This is what is referred to as intergenerational trauma, which is trauma that is passed from a survivor to their descendants. My mother’s own horrifically painful childhood left unhealed wounds that she projected onto me, which she probably absorbed from her caregivers, and on and on. Nonetheless, this was the reality of my formative years.
 
One of the most prevalent consequences of this experience was that I blamed myself for everything. When I got sober and we were talking about “owning our part” in the resentments we had formed in our lives, that was absolutely no problem for me. I frequently had a much harder time seeing fault in anyone else, and instead I took it all on. The result was that I hated myself from a very young age. I believed that the reason my parents fought and were so mean to each other was because they were unhappy that I was around and they did not want me. This is another very common experience for children who grow up with caregivers who display emotional inconsistency and immaturity – they take on the responsibility for the happiness of others, and believe if they just behave better, then the chaos and turmoil they are experiencing in their lives will stop.
 
For me, this manifested in many ways, but one of the most damaging was that I became a total perfectionist. As an undiagnosed neurodiverse child, school was very difficult for me. Because I learned how to mask my deficiencies and was otherwise able to “keep up” with extraordinary effort, it was not until I was 19 and in college that I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which remains highly underdiagnosed in females, particularly of my generation and older. I did not know why my brain did not seem to work like my brilliant sister’s. All I knew was that I felt “slow,” which often led to one of my most dreaded experiences – the look of disappointment on my mother’s face when I did not perform to her expectations. I cannot tell you the amount of stress and anxiety I put myself through to try and avoid seeing that expression.

​Some of my worst childhood memories involved not just my caregivers, but being on the receiving end of the cruelty of other kids who enjoyed finding reasons to poke fun at others. One of my earliest memories (which is not very early since I do not remember a lot of my childhood, which I have since learned is very common for people who experienced trauma at a young age) is when I was participating in an elementary school spelling bee. Up until that time, spelling was my favorite subject. It was one of those innate talents I had, which is consistent with my ongoing love affair with language and written expression. In order to prepare for the championship round and find out who would be going on to the district competition, we were given a packet of words to memorize that were potentially going to be asked.
 
I memorized every word on that list, which was divided up into different categories. I breezed through the early rounds and made it through to the finals. Excitement coursing through my veins, I was asked to spell the word “teal.” I froze. I remembered that this word was listed under the category of “birds,” not colors. I knew how the color teal was spelled, but was that the same as the way the bird was? An overwhelming wave of nausea engulfed me. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I felt the eyes of my peers in the audience boring holes into my skin as the judges looked on. I knew I could not just keep sitting there, and it did not appear that the differentiation between the bird and the color, if there was any, was not going to make itself evident in that moment.
 
“T-E-A-L…” I paused. I later learned that as I stared at the ground, the judges started to lift up their green cards to indicate that I was correct, but I was so immersed in my own overthinking that I did not see them. I continued, “…E?”
 
The dreaded red cards flipped up in front of me. I recall hearing the faint voice of a judge saying “The correct spelling is T-E-A-L. You may step down and join the audience.”
 
My face and chest flushed an excruciating shade of blotchy red, as it always does when I feel any heightened emotions. I held my breath as I stood and walked down the five steps off of the stage. I could hear the snickering of my peers, and that short walk felt like a mile as I begged the tears stinging my lowered eyes to hold themselves in. I do not remember the rest of the spelling bee, who won, or how long it lasted. All I remember was the shame of failure that engulfed my entire body.
 
When it was over, we were sent out to recess. Kids, even the ones that are supposed to be your friends, can be cruel and I knew that I was going to be teased. Before I could get to the bathroom to hide, one of those “friends,” the ring leader of our group, approached me with a particularly satisfied look on her face. “So you didn’t know how to spell the color ‘teal,’ huh?” She snickered, as did her followers standing close behind.
 
“Well,” I stammered, “on the list we were given to study, ‘teal’ was listed under the category of birds, and I did not think that such a simple word would be on the list if it was not spelled differently than the color…”
 
Now, some of you are not going to be old enough for the upcoming reference, so I will explain. During the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championship, there was a scandal when it was discovered that Tonya Harding, an American figure skater, had hired someone to attack her rival Nancy Kerrigan during a training session. The assailant struck Nancy on the knee of her landing leg with a metal baton, in hopes of knocking her out of the competition so that Tonya could secure a spot on the Olympic team. The immediate aftermath of the attack was captured by the media and broadcast for months, with Nancy sobbing on the ground and yelling “Why me? Why me?” over and over. (Spoiler alert – Nancy was unable to complete the U.S. Championships, but she still secured a spot on the Olympic team and went on to win a silver medal, while Tonya finished eighth, later pleading guilty to hindering prosecution related to the attack and being forced to resign from the U.S. Figure Skating Association. Karma, people.)
 
I realize that the point of including this anecdote is not immediately apparent, so here it is. This scandal was going on at the same time of the spelling bee. My friends came up with the clever idea to turn Nancy’s “Why me?” cry into “Why ‘E’?” to taunt me for adding the extra letter onto the word that got me eliminated. They even came up with a hand signal to reinforce their self-satisfied hilarity. They were relentless for months. Eventually I realized that if I stopped allowing them to make me visibly upset, they would let up, so I became skilled at internalizing the shame and laughing alongside them about how dumb I was. When it was no longer causing me obvious pain, they eventually let it go and moved onto the next easy target.
 
I was ten years old when this happened. Nearly 31 years ago, and there is not a single detail that I made up to fill in the blanks in my memory, because there were none. The lessons gleaned from that experience were many – one, that making mistakes was unacceptable and perfection was the only option to avoid embarrassment and shame. Two, that I was, in fact, very dumb and I had better work harder than anyone else to make sure nobody knew. Three, people were not safe, because if this was the acceptable way to treat friends, I certainly did not want to know what happened with people who did not fit in that category.
 
This was not the only experience that assisted in the development of my incredibly warped sense of self, but it was very significant. If only I had studied harder… if only I was not so stupid… if only that forsaken word had not been in the “birds” category… if only, if only, if only. The common theme of those “if only’s” was that at least ninety percent of them could be considered my fault. It was not even that I was unable to grasp the idea that everybody makes mistakes; it was simply that I was not allowed to do so. If I did, everyone would know what a useless disappointment I was.
 
I do not remember what my mother said when I got eliminated from that spelling bee, but I can visualize the look on her face as clear as if it had happened yesterday.
 
Recounting this experience today makes me so incredibly sad for the little girl who was just trying to do something she enjoyed. She did not know that it was okay to not be the best at everything she did, so when she made a mistake, it felt catastrophic. She learned that anything less than perfection was unacceptable. I could describe countless other occasions that further enforced this belief system, but I think you get the point.
 
I have been in therapy on and off, but mostly on, since I was 19 years old and struggling with a life-threatening eating disorder. I have spent 16 years in recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. Even still, it was not until rather recently that I even became aware of the origins of the unyielding self-loathing that permeated every decision I would go on to make for decades, like a thread that wove itself through and connected my entire existence. When I was attacked by my first boyfriend in college and reported it to the police, it was my fault that the fraternity where the assault happened got into trouble with the dean. When there were difficulties in any relationships I had – professional, platonic, or romantic – it was my fault because I simply lacked the skills to properly relate to other human beings. It did not occur to me that when the fraternity blamed me for getting the guys in trouble, the fault actually laid squarely in the lap of the man who so brutally snapped my head backwards he gave me whiplash while trying to choke me. I did not understand that if someone treated me with egregious disrespect, that it might actually be about them, and have nothing to do with me. I read countless self-help books. I searched in every place I could think of to discover the fundamental flaw in my makeup that bled all over everyone and everything around me. If I could just figure out what it was, I could fix it. Right?
 
A few years ago, I remember telling my therapist that although my parents had given me everything I needed to succeed in life, I had screwed it all up and I was a failure. For all of the preceding years when working with other therapists and in recovery, when I was asked about my childhood, I described my family as loving and supportive and simply not a source of trauma. I had not been physically abused and my parents were still married. But then, my therapist asked something no one had ever asked me before – what exactly, in my view, had my parents given me that I needed to thrive? My response was that I had grown up in a nice home, that my parents paid for my education, they bought me a car when I was 16, et cetera.
 
What my therapist told me next absolutely blew my mind. She said that those things had nothing to do with developing into a well-adjusted, emotionally mature adult. Children need to be seen, soothed, and feel safe. She asked if my primary caregivers had made me feel those things. I paused and gave it some thought before answering. No. I had not felt any of those things. When she told me that I had not, in fact, been provided with everything I needed, it was like the entire world stopped moving. For another dated reference, do you remember the show “Out of This World” where the main character Evie – who was half-alien and had inherited special powers from her father – could touch the pointer fingers of both hands together and stop time? It felt like that.
 
You would think that something as mind-blowing as this would be a huge relief. In some ways, it was, but it shook the core of my entire foundational belief system. Was it possible that sometimes the bad things that happened in my life were not because I was a bad person, or because I did something wrong to cause them? I mean, that would be great news, but it was incredibly disorienting.
 
I will not get into the myriad of ways that this realization began to alter the course of my life, because they are too numerous to name in a single post. (I’ll save that for the book.) But one very significant piece, and the reason that I told you the story about the Nancy Kerrigan-esque bullying, was that I was no longer responsible for the entirety of every challenging or difficult situation or relationship in my life. This is not to say that I was absolved of my part in all of these conflicts either; quite the contrary, I almost always contribute in some way to the things that happen, whether it is by way of active participation in the inciting event or in my response to it. But I, Lisa O’Leary, was not just a bad person whose darkness infected everyone and everything around me. Sometimes other people, places or things were responsible, too.
 
Why does this matter? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but let me just give a few examples. I am not responsible for my mother’s childhood trauma. Yes, it was horrible, and it explains a lot of why she sees the world in such a cynical way; but it does not give her the right to make me feel like I am the cause of all of her discomfort. I do often play a significant role in the challenges in our relationship because of how I respond to her words and actions. The younger parts of me that try to protect me get easily activated when I feel like I am back in my childhood home, trying to do anything to feel loved and accepted in spite of my many imperfections. But that does not mean that I have to give her a pass when, during a recent and completely unnecessary conflict, she told me she wished she never had me. I do not care how old you are - that is just about the worst thing I can imagine hearing from a parent. I did not turn this into a yelling match, as is my default. (Anger is my go-to for everything to avoid feeling pain.) My response was to thank her for finally verbalizing the way she made me feel my entire life and to take the necessary steps to get myself out of the toxic living situation I was in.
 
One of the things I learned in early sobriety is that I cannot control how people act, react, respond, or do anything. All I can do is focus on keeping my side of the street clean. Today, because I have learned that I am not the detestable person I once believed I was, when conflict arises I have the ability to step back and try and look objectively at the situation. What was my part in this? Did I share some of the responsibility? Or is someone else truly projecting their own issues onto me? If it is the latter, then I no longer have to fall prey to my default settings and take on the blame for what is happening. I can allow it to hurt, and I can be sad. But I do not have to hate myself anymore. And, even if I did contribute to the situation in some way, I still do not have to hate myself because I am a human being who makes mistakes. What counts is that I own them, I make amends when necessary, and I do my best not to repeat them. Perfection is an impossible standard and one that no longer serves me, if it ever did.
 
I am not responsible for making sure that everyone around me is happy. I simply do not have that kind of power. I am responsible for my own actions, behaviors, and being open to communicating with the people I care about and allowing them space to share, even if – especially if - my intent does not align with how they feel. If I fail to meet someone’s expectations, particularly if they have not been communicated to me to begin with, that does not mean I did something wrong. I also do not have to hold anyone else’s toxicity in order to make peace or force relationships that are not meant to endure. I get to choose what I receive in my energy and allow in my life.
 
Today, I am pretty proud of my side of the street. Tomorrow, I might not be. But I am grateful that no one dictates what it looks like other than me.