As you read this story, I ask that you keep in mind that it is not meant to be a “poor me” story, but instead it is me being completely truthful for the first in my life about all the things that contributed to my depression. There will be some talk about physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse. Unless I feel that it is beneficial to the story and to people’s understanding, for the most part I will not be discussing in detail the actual acts of abuse that took place. There are enough blogs, books, movies and TV shows where people can go and get the details of an abuse act that I feel that it is not necessary for me to include them here.
My doctor, counselor, friends and family have all wanted to know “when did the depression start?” With friends and family it is easy to say that it started three years ago when I was diagnosed with Adult Onset Asthma. My doctor and counselor know that it is not the whole truth. The whole truth is that I have suffered from depression on and off probably most of my life. It is only that in the last three years that it became debilitating.
There is a link between childhood trauma/stressors and people who develop major depression. In fact, in the research I have done, I have discovered that many experts agree that in most cases of significant adult depression, that some form of abuse was experienced in childhood. That could be physical abuse, sexual abuse, or emotional abuse. Early traumatic experiences, that repeatedly trigger the body’s “fight or flight” stress response can lead to permanent changes in brain chemistry. Combine these brain chemistry changes to a genetic predisposition for depression and it is almost guaranteed that the person will end up experiencing major depression at least once in their lifetime.
Based on things I remember and my experiences now, I believe strongly that my mother suffers from her own mental health issue. I am certainly not a professional health care worker, but there are certain things I recognize in her behavior (past and present) that are similar to my own when my depression is out of control. I do know that my grandfather suffered severe anxieties when he was alive. Things that happened to him during World War II made them worse, but my personal belief is that the anxieties were probably there before the war. My grandmother has anxiety issues as well. My father has a tendency to avoid, at all costs, certain issues, because I believe for whatever reason he can deal with them better by avoiding them. Thinking about all that leads me to the conclusion that I most definitely was genetically pre-disposed to developing depression.
My childhood was stressful. I know that compared to many other children’s lives it was not the worst childhood I could have had, but it was stressful. I do not remember the place of my birth or the financial circumstances of my family at the time, but I have been told that we were very poor at the time. My mother was only 19 when I was born. I am sure combined with being a young mother in a place that was not close to her own family, and not being in the best financial situation, she was under her own mountain of stress. I believe that these circumstances set things up from the beginning of my life for my mother and I to have a difficult and at times abusive relationship.
I base that belief on a very short conversation I had with my mother about 13 years ago. My mother had been diagnosed with non-hodgkins lymphoma. She had to undergo the usually course of treatment, and she obviously did not feel well and I am sure was afraid she would not survive her cancer or even the treatments. I think that she felt that she needed to “clean the slate” between us and offer some sort of apology and explanation for things that happened when I was growing up. She shared that her pregnancy with me was not planned and when I was born, she and my father were living in a project (I think) and that they had almost no money. That due to the stress of having a child that had not been planned for and being broke as well as a few other things, she never developed the bond with me that she had with my brother. Furthermore, that is why she treated my brother better than she did me. I think in her way she was trying to do something good, but instead it resulted in me being very angry. For so many years, I had thought my brother was treated differently, slightly better than I was, but when I became an adult I decided that was just stupid childhood jealousy, and then to find out I was right all along brought up all sorts of old feelings and sadness.
Like many people who have suffered from some form of abuse, I have tried to “forget” the incidents as much as possible. In some cases I was successful, in some not so much. The first memory I have of the emotional abuse that I dealt with when I was a child is when we were living in Alabama. I want to say I was four or five years old. We had a play area, I think I back porch or something and there were toys strewn everywhere. I believe that I did not want to pick up all those toys, you know how kids that age are. I remember my mother getting very upset and calling me some very ugly names and if my memory is correct, she threw toys at me until I cleaned up.
Things like that happened often. I remember feeling very stressed at a very young age. I never knew what would set my mother off and exactly how she would react when she did go off. That stress stayed with me all the time. I never truly felt happy because of that constant feeling of stress.
I tried so hard when I was a kid to do things to make my mother happy. I knew that if she was happy the chances of her getting angry with me and saying cruel things to me would be lessened. I often felt that my overtures of affection were rebuffed and that she truly did not want me around her. I have continued to feel that rejection from her into my adult years.
I know it seems that my mother is taking the brunt of the blame for the things that happened in my childhood. I hold my father equally, if not more so, responsible for the things that happened. He was almost never home. He worked so much and it seemed that most of the time when I was growing up I only saw him on the weekends, and sometimes not even on every weekend. I believe that when he was home he put blinders on to what was going on in the house when he was not there so that he did not have to deal with the messiness of it all. If only he had ever truly taken the time to talk to her about the things that were going on, and not just one time, but as many times as needed to be done, I think he could have saved me from a lot of pain as a child and as an adult. I know the situation had to be stressful for my mother. I wonder if she ever felt like she was a single parent since she was the one left to do all the parenting most of the time.
There were other family members, extended family, that were aware that things were not quite right in my childhood home. I do not think they realized the extent of it until my family finally settled down in Georgia for several years after moving every year or two for most of my early childhood. I was unaware that anyone outside of my home had a clue to what was going on until, as an adult, I visited my Aunt and her mother. That is when they revealed to me that they had noticed when I was growing up that my mother was very hard on me and that even if I had done nothing wrong and my brother had done it, that I would get the blame for it. They also told me that during the times they would watch me and my brother, if my parents had gone out of town or something, that they would not tell my mother if had I not behaved exactly like I was sup
posed to, because they knew that the fall out I would experience would be awful. One thing I have always wondered since they told me that, is if they thought things were amiss in my home, why they never told anyone about what they saw going on and what they knew was going on?
There was one family member in my life who I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt loved me for exactly who I was. Around that person I could be who I wanted to be, and I felt happy. That was my grandfather. My grandfather was not perfect by any means. He was a bigot, he was an alcoholic, he was a grouch, he could be very mean, but he was always good to me, so I could overlook those not good things about him. There is a story, that when I was a baby, he and my grandmother came to visit us when we lived in Kentucky. I am told that I just wanted to be around my grandfather constantly. When it came time for my grandparents to head back to their home in Georgia, I did not want to have my grandfather stop holding me. I am told that when he was handing me back to my parents, I was crying like crazy and I grabbed onto his shirt pocket and would not let go. In fact, even though I was a baby, I almost ripped the pocket off of his shirt. From what my grandmother says, that is what created the bond between me and my grandfather. He is the only person I can remember who ever stood up to my mother about how she was treating me.
In addition to the stress of the abuse that was going on in my house, there was the instability of our family life. For most of my early to mid childhood we moved every year or two. We never really had roots anywhere. That instability led to its own type of stress, and in its own way probably contributed to some of the things I endured.
To be continued…..
Beginnings-Part II will come out tomorrow.
