TRANSCRIPT
I’m gonna tell a story about some traumas that I went through as a very little boy under the age of two and a half. I learned about this when I was in my 30s. At this point, I had already figured out a lot of really bad things that I’ve gone through as a kid, a lot of traumas that I’d suffered, and primarily I’d suffered these traumas at the hands of my parents, and a lot of them at the hands of my mom.
I’d been confronting my mom quite a bit about the different things she’d done, and she was taking basically no responsibility for anything that she’d done to me, denying it, putting blame on other people, even blaming me sometimes. But this story that I’m going to tell happens in light of all this.
So around this time in my 30s, my mom told me a story that happened when I was two and a half. It was then, when I was two-and-a-half, that my family, who up till that time had been living in New York City, moved upstate. We were driving upstate, and part of the story was that I was a very verbal child. My mom always said I was super verbal. I could talk, I could express myself well from a very young age.
What she said was that as we were driving, out of the blue, I said to her, “Are we really leaving New York City?” Because I guess we took a lot of trips, day trips or weekend trips, and this time she had told me that we were leaving New York City for good. We were never coming back.
So I asked her, I confirmed it, “Are we really leaving New York City? We’re really not coming back?” And she said, “No, we’re leaving. We’ve moved away. We’ve packed up our apartment, we gave it up, and we’re moving upstate.” So I listened to it according to her, and I said, “Really? So we’re never going back to New York?” She said, “No, we’re not going back to New York.” And I said, “Really? We’re never going back?” And she said, “No, what are you asking me for? We’re definitely not going back.”
I said, “Well, the reason is that my nanny used to lock me in the apartment during the day when you guys were gone, and she would go out and get pizza and leave me inside alone for a while sometimes. I hadn’t had that nanny for something like six months already.” Interestingly, my mom told me they had fired the nanny because they had caught her somehow stealing silverware.
So I had waited six months before I told my mom. Now, why did my mom tell me this? Remember, my mom wasn’t taking responsibility for all the things that I actually knew that she did to me, but here she was telling me a story about the nanny abusing me. So I thought about it more, and what I realized over time was that there was a lot more going on to this.
The first thing was, what was it like for me to get locked in the apartment alone? I think I must have been terrified. I think I must have been upset, and I must have been scared. I mean, I was ever left alone in an apartment, and who knows how long she actually went out for? This is before there were cell phones, before nanny cams. This is in the early 70s.
So she left me inside alone, and my guess is I started putting the pieces together. What happened when she came back? I probably naturally and spontaneously confronted the nanny about it. I probably told her, “You’re not allowed to leave me. You’re supposed to bring me. Why don’t you bring me? I’m gonna tell my mom.” Probably a natural thing to say, at which point trauma number two started.
Trauma number two was the nanny almost certainly threatened me. She almost certainly threatened me, and who knows what she threatened me with? But all I know is that the threat was enough to stop me from telling my parents what she had done to me. Four months, six months, and even when my parents told me that we were leaving New York City and that we were not coming back, and the nanny had already been gone for six months, I was still scared of her. So that’s how much she terrified me, terrorized me even, so that I couldn’t even be honest. She scared the honesty right out of me.
But I was saving it. I was saving it until I was confident, intellectually confident, that it wasn’t gonna come back and hurt me. Now, what did she do to me? What was I so scared of? Did she physically hurt me? Did she pinch me? Did she pinch my nose? Did she slap me? Did she spank me? I really don’t know, but somehow she threatened me in a way that it worked.
But then I started thinking more about it, and then it was like, oh, all these other things started coming in line. One, I started realizing I’ve got a lot of time around little kids, and I’ve done enough analysis of my childhood to realize that if a child really feels safe with their parents, really has a safe, strong bond with their parents, they tell them what’s going on. They have confidence that their parents are going to protect them.
So the fact that I didn’t tell my mom or my dad for, let’s say, six months that this nanny had abused me and threatened me shows me that I actually didn’t really believe that my parents could protect me. So that’s a third trauma. Somewhere along the line, they had proven to me that they weren’t trustworthy.
I had other good reasons for that. They once sent me to a school where I got attacked by other kids, and when I told them about it, they didn’t listen, and they sent me back again. So I really didn’t have faith in them. Then they fought, they screamed, they did all sorts of other crazy things when I was a kid that I know about because they told me, and I must have just realized these people are not trustworthy.
Now, a fourth trauma, or at least a fourth thing that really shows something very screwed up was going on, was when my parents came home and got me from her at the end of their days of work, they didn’t realize that something was wrong with me. They didn’t pick up that I was stressed out, that I was frightened, that I’d been threatened, that I’d been traumatized, that I’d been perhaps physically abused. They just didn’t pick it up. They weren’t on my wavelength, and that’s another thing. They really were clueless. They were out of touch.
And who do I hold responsible for that? Them. It’s like, you can’t pick up when kids are upset, when kids are traumatized, when kids are scared, when kids have been abused. That’s a very natural thing that a parent who’s really in tune with their child, in sync with their child’s personality, picks up. They can get that.
So my parents didn’t get that. Then there was another thing. They fired the nanny for stealing silverware, but they didn’t fire the nanny for what she’d done to me because they didn’t pick it up. So really, really what I figured out also was they actually valued the silverware more than they valued me. They noticed the silverware was missing, but they didn’t notice that my passion was missing. They didn’t notice that my fearlessness was missing. They didn’t notice that my lack of being traumatized was missing. They didn’t pick that up.
They noticed that the silverware was gone, and they fired her immediately, but they didn’t get it that this woman was harming me. Very interesting to me, it’s like, which brings up another thing. This is where I start getting into interpretation now. I mean, all this is sort of interpretation, but this is where I get into what might be considered more speculative interpretation. But I really don’t think it is, because in the greater context of what I learned about my mom particularly, it’s not really speculation.
What I realized is part of why she hired this nanny was to traumatize me, was to harm me, was to keep me frightened. Yet why would you do that? Why would she want to harm her kid? And I think strangely, it’s a weird dynamic, but I’ve seen this with other parents, and I’ve definitely seen it with my own, particularly my mom, is that she was by hiring and putting me in the…
Hands of a really abusive nanny. A sick woman. My mom was buying insurance for the day that I might ever confront her for traumatizing me and what she was giving herself, and which she later used in my 30s, was she could have somebody to scapegoat if I ever turned my focus onto her for having abused me. And basically, that’s what she was doing. She was scapegoating the nanny.
Now, it’s a little strange to say she was scapegoating someone who actually harmed me, actually traumatized me. But you can do that. She was saying to me, the message she was giving me is, “You can’t blame me. You need to put those angry feelings, that upsetness, that hurt that you’ve gone through on this other random person who you really don’t even remember.”
Now, what have I done to heal from this? The basic way is that I’ve written it all down. I’ve talked about it with people. It didn’t get much benefit for me to talk about it with my mom because she denied everything. She just, again, put it all out there. I don’t understand what happened. Just complete denial of my perspective. Couldn’t even understand the intellectual logic of my arguments or just blocked it out entirely. So that was useless.
But I talked about it. I found people who could actually listen to me, people who could actually understand. And the primary person who could really understand what I went through, what I suffered, what I felt, and the logic of my argument was me. And that’s who I really needed for my primary ally is me to make sense of it, to feel it.
Now, part of this healing process has been an acknowledgement of how much betrayal I suffered at so many levels from basically all the adults in my early life. They were basically none that really did a good job of protecting me, taking care of me, building strong bonds of me. And I suffered a lot from that. I still do.
But I’ve made a lot of progress in really making sense of what I went through and becoming now almost a better parent for myself. Not putting myself in position with horrible people who are untrustworthy and would harm me. Instead, being much more loving with myself, much more caring with myself, and treating my little wounded self with a lot more of the love that I deserved back then and basically that I still deserve now. Because basically, if I don’t do it for myself, nobody else is.
[Music]