Some Insight Into The Whys

This post isn’t part of the series I’ve been working on, but I found something recently that helped me to further understand an aspect of my experience.

A couple weekends ago, I was looking through an old journal from 1993, and I came across an entry that helps me to better understand a bit more of why I was willing to go along with Jane’s urging to separate from my family and friends , though at the time I evidently still thought it had been mostly my idea.  (This deliberate separation from family and friends will be covered in more detail in Part Six of the Cult Indoctrination Techniques series.)

When I wrote the journal entry, Jane and I had broken up and I was looking for an apartment so I could move, but was having trouble with money issues, among other things, and I was feeling trapped and pretty obviously depressed:

I have no one and no place to go to.   It’s beginning to be less and less worth it to bother trying to fight anymore.  I’ve systematically alienated everyone in my life.  I must have been subconsciously planning something.   If I make everyone hate me, then no one will care if I am gone.

Keeping in mind that I was suicidal when I first began to speak with Jane on the telephone, it follows that I may have seen a separation from those who loved me as a way to justify committing suicide, and to continue holding that out as an option.

Even to this day, the love of my family is the largest part of what keeps those darkest of moments-in-depression from taking over to that extent.

*   *   *

I was asked recently why an accuser refuses to discuss whether or not his or her memories can be real.  I tried to answer to the best of my ability, from my own experience.  I was recalling, among other conversations with family and friends who tried to make me see the lack of logic and verifiable evidence in what I was saying, the conversations my sister and I had about the truck stop story and its glaring inconsistencies.

During the time that I believed my own false memories to be true, I avoided any in-depth discussion about it because I believed that others were trying to talk me out of ‘my reality’ and that they were ‘in denial’ . . . It felt as if everyone I used to know and be close to was the enemy, trying to pick apart my ‘memories’.  I wasn’t able to realize that they were concerned for me and missed me and wanted to help me to be my old self again; I only felt that they were being defensive and trying to discredit me.  That was what I was told, over and over . . .

Once I began to realize that my memories weren’t real, I was so deeply ashamed and sad and lost inside, and I believed that I had inflicted too much pain on my family to ever hope to go back.  I believed they were happier and better off without me.  I believed that to even lay eyes on me would be too upsetting for them, and that it was too late even to apologize.  How could I possibly live with myself if I faced and accepted that I’d made such accusations and they turned out to not be true?

*   *   *

During the time that we were estranged, my mother had a breast cancer scare.

Jane was in the hospital at the time, due to some physical health problems, and her room was over the Emergency Room, the entrance to which was often used to enter the rest of the hospital due to its close proximity to the admitting office and one of the main elevators.  I glanced out her window and saw my father’s car in the parking lot below.  I immediately went down to the Emergency Room and asked a nurse if one of them was there.  Neither of them  was an ER patient, but I learned that my mother had been admitted.  The nurse I spoke with obviously didn’t know of our estrangement, and when I said the patient was my mother, she told me when the results of the needle biopsy were expected and that it might not be cancer.

Cancer. I know my face must have turned gray.

I returned to Jane’s room and debated with myself over whether to go and see my mother.  I know now, looking back, that there should never have been a question, but because I still believed the things that Jane said (that my family was angry and had been disappointed in me for years, and that they really didn’t like me too much, underneath it all), I feared that the sight of me walking into my mother’s room would have been detrimental to her health, not helpful.  All I could imagine, when trying to envision things the way I thought she would see them, was myself walking into the room and my mother seeing me as the enemy, the one who tore us all apart, the one who caused the whole family so much pain.  And I envisioned her asking someone to make me leave because she couldn’t bear to look at me.

My love for her was behind my decision to stay away.

I found out years later that she was very hurt when she found out I’d known she was there and hadn’t gone to see her.  I didn’t know, then, that seeing me would have made her feel better, more hopeful, and relieved.  I had no idea.  I apologized to her for this, again, just a few weeks ago, yet I cannot seem to let go of it in my mind.

Some former friends of mine were “spying” on me (a fact I didn’t know at the time) and going back to tell my parents everything I said to them.  Although I understand, now, why they did that and why my parents encouraged them to do so, I haven’t quite gotten over the feeling of having been betrayed by them.  I also firmly believe that they were less concerned about me and more attracted by the excitement of “spying” and gossip, but that is a topic for another blog and is not relevant here.

Those friends, however, came to the hospital to see Jane (whom they had never met at the time, other than one of them having worked for the same employer as Jane a few years earlier, before I’d met her) during the same period of time that my mother was in the hospital.  It may have been the same day, but my memory isn’t as clear on those specific details anymore.  I told them (not knowing they were in touch with my mother) that she was in the hospital and what I’d learned, and they asked me if I were going to go and see her.  I was later quoted as having said, “If she has cancer, I’ll go see her.”  I cannot find it within myself to believe that I worded it exactly that way, but what I remember having decided was that seeing me at that time would probably not be good for her, but that if the test came back positive, I would go anyway, but would call first or try to get a message to her beforehand, so that my suddenly walking into the room or showing up at her front door would not be a shock.

I will always, always wish that I would have just walked into her room the day I learned she was there.  We could have begun healing so much earlier.

Fortunately, the tests came back “benign” and there has been no cancer, though I can’t help but see the symbolic parallel between the physical disease, Cancer, and the cancerous effect on my family, due to the lies I was told and the falsities I believed.

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