That Little Girl Is Me.
I found a therapist in 2019 after several on-again, off-again bouts with my now ex-boyfriend. I really felt like my own childhood trauma was preventing me from having the relationship I very much wanted, and was willing to put in the work to figure that all out. I had not succeeded in my 53 years – so I felt it was long past time to have a very serious look in the mirror.
My therapist suggested we try EMDR Therapy (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), which led me to this memory. Me, as a little girl, standing in the doorway watching my father pull out of the driveway for the last time. I was 6 years old. I was a daddy’s girl. We, my brother and I, had been shuffled back and forth for every-other weekend visitation for quite a while already.
I remember crying, feeling devastated, and from that day forward, the way I processed every emotion was affected by this singular traumatic event.
The story I was told was that my father didn’t want us anymore. He didn’t want to pay increased child support, so he basically said “here, you take them” to our mother. She had remarried my stepfather, so when dad relinquished his parental rights to mom, our stepdad adopted us, giving us his name. At that point, dad could no longer legally contact us or have anything to do with us.
As a 6 year old little girl, my heart was crushed. There was no therapy, no crying about it, no comforting words to help me process this tragic event and the hole it ultimately left in me. Looking back at my childhood now, I can clearly see that hole and the trauma this caused for me in every friendship and relationship I had moving forward. I was the desperate one – I wanted friends and then pushed them away. I was mean to them in advance of their ultimate rejection. I existed in a headspace of unworthiness and abandoned myself to try to fit in somewhere, and always, always felt like the misfit.
I was emotionally and mentally broken. Add to that, I was sexually abused by my maternal grandfather – and to paint a clearer picture, I thought what he was doing to me was normal. It was just another day at grandma & grandpa’s house in my mind. The day my mom found out about that was a shock to her – but I remember being so nonchalant about it. She was talking to my aunt and called me downstairs to ask if grandpa ever touched me in those places. “Yes, he did do that. So?” I shrugged.
From my perspective, I was the unwanted one. That sounds so cliche doesn’t it? I lived in a state of unwantedness. Everything I did and said was sourced from that perception. I was the dishwasher, the babysitter, the cleaning lady. I was forced to do things as a child that, when coming from a place of rejection, felt like everyone was just placating me, that it wasn’t real or genuine – but that it was forced kindness and accommodations for “that girl whose daddy left her”.
I remember at least two Christmases that I rejected family and gifts. I didn’t want any of it. Just stop. Stop pretending to like me. Stop pretending to care. It’s not real. None of it is real.
I was looking for “real love” very early on. I never had a firm grip on it though, what it was, or what that meant, and maybe part of that had to do with believing that my dad loved me, but being told he really didn’t. I imagine any little daddy’s girl would be sent into a spiral being told something that brash.
I wonder why no one paid attention to that behavior, or thought hey, maybe there’s something going on here we need to address? I think back then, mental and emotional health care was summed up by parents saying “quit your crying, if you don’t, I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Painting that picture makes me tear up. It is so wholly dysfunctional. This makes me so sad for every child who is put into a position like this and whose hearts and emotions are not tended to in the most delicate, loving way possible.
That wasn’t how things went for me, and that wasn’t okay – but it is part of my story, and how it had to happen to get me to where I am today.
A Brief Connection
When I turned 18, I did what most adopted children do. I went looking for my father. And, to be honest, I expected to have this glorious reunion wherein he celebrated my return and stepped seamlessly into the hole he left in me as a child.
Imagine my disappointment when he tread so cautiously that I started to believe that he really did give us up because he didn’t want us anymore.
We had a few connections, and I remember he helped me keep my car from getting repossessed. I was a troubled and financially unstable teenager. I do not recall if I paid him back, or even attempted to. I only remember one last phone call and after feeling like I was doing all “the work”, I said “you know, the phone rings both ways”, and he replied, “yes, I know.”
That was the last time I ever spoke with my father.
I spotted him at a zoo once, when my two girls were little. He was with my former sister-in-law and niece. I felt this shock go through my body that he would choose literally anyone over me, and I went running in the opposite direction. I never reached out to him, and that just solidified my feeling that he really didn’t want to know me.
In recent years, during therapy, seeing that little girl – I knew I needed a father. Daddy issues, they say. That’s what I’ve got. Daddy issues. I reached out to both my dad’s – tried to, anyway, to connect. To figure it out. To acknowledge that I needed them in my life. I was unsuccessful.
The Undercurrent
The obvious groundwork of cyclical behaviors and trauma responses was well established in my childhood. Anxiety, low self worth, the feeling of abandonment and being truly unwanted was a trickle in my veins and would remain and present itself throughout all of my relationships and interactions.
I didn’t know how to view men. I saw them all as liars and manipulators, even sexual predators. Still, somehow I sought men who I could convince myself really loved me because they really didn’t want me and made that obvious in the way they continued to walk away, and I continued to fight for it. And they continued to come back. No, it didn’t make any sense to a healthy person – of which I was not one. And I could not be convinced otherwise.
I met my (former) husband when I was 18. He’s a great man with his own trauma, and between the two of us, we had a chaotic, fun, emotionally trying, surreal and also toxic relationship that continues to this day. We divorced in 2013 after 24 years of dating, marriage, divorce, marriage, and having two beautiful daughters. In recent years, our relationship has shifted – as both of us are finally getting the therapy we desperately need. I say it was toxic because neither of us really went very deep emotionally, to help each other heal and repair our own individual traumas. We just fed the crazy cycle, year after year. It became too much for either of us.
He carried the brunt of the demise of our relationship and it wasn’t until I started therapy that I saw how my own CPTSD contributed to it. I needed something from him he could never provide – to fill a hole the size of my birth father and have questions answered that no one had the answers to.
Since our divorce, I have dated a few men. A couple of really, really healthy men who had their proverbial shit together (and boy did I manage to sabotage those to death), and a few that were, and are, still so far from finding their true face in the mirror that I just hope and pray that for their sakes, their revelation day comes before it’s too late.
The one that threw me into the rabbit hole, however, he took my heart with him and would. not. give. it. back. I credit this relationship for the mess I became, for a level of anxiety that required medication, for a truly adverse reaction to our multiple endings and beginnings and final toxic crash – this relationship became the driving force behind me getting a therapist, which, ultimately, led to my final awakening and the healing of that broken little girl.