Break the Cycle

Factor: Past Abuses

A comment made about a film in my history class sparked some old memories of times when I was angry. In particular, I remember the latter half of 2002, the year I turned 18. 18 had to be one of the most agonizing years of my life, and these two incidents lead to my near in ability to function in early 2003. Both of these incidents could be considered abuse in some form or another, and if reading about incest and/or teacher misconduct upsets you, I highly recommend scanning past this (even though I will leave out some details).

The first is the incest, or near incest in this case. In 2002, my mom's cousin (N) was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Besides being physically debilitating, MS can also drastically alter a person's behavior. In N's case, he developed an unhealthy obsession with my mom, trying to split up her and my dad. He stalked her, took things from the house and left many disruptive messages at the house. Needless to say, my entire family was on edge when it came to N. Even the police became involved after he violated numerous restraining orders. My dad was livid, but his words could not match what I wanted to do. I wanted to kill N with my bare hands. I even told my mother this, but she told me to shut my trap for fear it'd be interpreted as a threat and therefore land me in a spot of legal trouble. Still, his behavior caused at first tension in my close-knit family, but eventually most of my relatives sided with my mother, and we cut ourselves off from N. Even so, nearly a year passed before he finally left us alone. This incident was never really mentioned during the time I was in therapy during my senior year, but at the time, it was to stunning to even consider. In fact, only in the past few months have I thought about how damaging this incident was for me. For me, though, the big thing is knowing what happened to N, mainly is he even still alive. His twin brother also had MS that severely disabled him in a few years after his diagnosis. I wonder what kind of shape N is in if he's still living. Though I was angry as a youth, I now feel a sense of guilt and lingering angst. I want to shut the door on this, but the only way my mind is willing to let go is to find out if threat is still in this world with us. I need to know if he'd be able to sneak up on my unsuspecting family, thus triggering long dormant rage.

The second one has to do with inappropriate conduct from one of my teachers. This incident preceeded the one with N by a couple months. As opposed to what happened with N, I have discussed this incident several times before. To summarize, my band director lightly rubbed my foot as I lay on the band office couch crying. What I have not discussed, though, is the role of anger in this incident. Prior to this, marching rehearsal had been extremely frustrating, especially for a soul who had next to no patience as a teenager. The rehearsal the day before had been exceptionally challenging to endure, as the director himself kept losing his patience with the band. After that rehearsal, I was ready to quit band, and during my last class of the day (being watched by a substitute) I went to talk to him. It started out a normal enough conversation in which I stated I was too frustrated to go on even though I enjoyed playing saxophone (and wasn't too bad at it, either). Soon, though, I lost control of my voice and anger. My arguments started running in circles, and I was getting so ticked I was in tears. Back then, I only cried when I was angry. I didn't cry when I was sad and have only recently begun to cry for reasons other than anger. Still, by losing control of my anger, I was the recipient of an unwelcome action that to this day makes me bitter towards the (unfortunately attractive) former teacher. I think what did it for me was that prior to this we didn't always speak but had a relatively stable working relationship, and I felt I could trust him. Because I lost control, he put himself in the position to violate that trust. This event changed our working relationship in negative ways, something I have also discussed in the past. Am I still upset about this? Well, I'm not as angry as I was before. However, I'm still miffed that his treatnent of me after the advance caused serious rifts in the relationship I had with my boyfriend at the time, a rift that drove my boyfriend and I apart. Interestingly, when my boyfriend and I finally broke up, he was grieving his deceased grandmother, and my family was having problems with N. I suppose that had either the family woes or the rift been removed from the equation we may have had a better (and maybe longer) relationship. So maybe I'm just bitter these days, as licking the wounds has left a putrid taste in my mouth that Listerine is only working on eliminating.

These incidents were fairly long ago, but as you can tell still weigh a it on my mind. I don't devote a little time to them everyday, but the memories are still there, and unfortunately you just don't forget shit like that. I suppose I should be thankful that they haven't debilitated me emotionally to the point I can barely claim sanity. However, those memories do sometimes fuel my fury.