I have recently escaped from the
concentration camp, the tyranny of a warped world view from an abusive
childhood. It is amazing the unbelief that can keep you from receiving your
promises. I am learning the truth, and the truth is setting me free.
I was conditioned to believe
that my mother was always right, that I could trust her opinion on anything.
She was the worst of tyrants, conditioning me to run everything by her. She
infused in me her unending suspicion about everybody, deceiving me to believe
that everyone is bad, mad, or just plain out to get you. I endured her abusive
manipulations and verbal abuse, convinced it was normal. She contradicted my
intuition, ridiculed my insight. I was never good enough, convinced that I was
always wrong, unless she approved.
When I was fourteen, my mother
took my sister and me away from my father in a bitter separation. Forced from
stability to instability was too much for an adolescent who was still trying to
make sense of the world.
mother never hit me, but she stole my savings, accused me of things that I did
not do. She found fault with me in many ways. When she wasn’t bad-mouthing others
for every grievance in her life, she would rail against her own failing parents.
I lived in fear or depression
around her, although I never connected my discontent with her caustic comments.
Looking back, I recognize now that I was under intense pressure to try and be
good, an enslaving habit of mind which crippled me.
I felt so alone in the world.
One night, I got down on my knees and begged God for help. He answered my
prayer most unexpectedly. When I told my mother that I was still depressed, she
began screaming and yelling at me, simply unwilling to deal with me. Labeling
me “spiritually sick” and beyond help, she kicked me out, sent me back
home to my father, the man whom she
had denigrated for so long.
Back at home, I cried myself to
sleep. For the next two days, I just wandered the city to forget my shame.
Miraculously, my mood improved. For
the first time in months, I was happy. At the time I did not connect my
mother’s absence with my improved outlook.
After Mom and Dad got back
together, I still stung from her abuse, fearful that loneliness, inadequacy, or
fear would overtake me.
For a long time, my mother
believed that she did the right thing by sending me away. Because she was my
Mom and “could not be wrong”, I regularly descended into shame and condemnation
that rarely abated. I grew up believing that I was an incompetent who had to
look over his shoulder all the time. Every time something bad happened, or that
someone got mad at me, it was my fault.
told, never stand up for myself, all the while taking personally everything
that others said or did.
This past year, I define myself
by a Higher Authority – not Mom, not Dad, not even myself. “When my parents forsake me, then the Lord
will take me up,” (Psalm 27: 10) I have forgiven many because I have been
forgiven so much.
In a documentary following
Holocaust survivors, one Polish Jew thrived despite the stinging privations which
he had overcome. He laughed at the terrors which he had endured. “As long as I
am alive, I choose to laugh!”
I have escaped the concentration
camp of my childhood trauma. Why cry? I choose to laugh!