Own The Suck: Consolidating My Gains During CPTSD Recovery, Part 1

I’m at the point in my recovery where it’s time to focus more closely on consolidating the intermittent gains I’ve made during the various phases of my recovery.  To that end I have been reading several books which are technically classified within the self-help genre but are nonetheless based upon the findings of scientific research studies.  Instead of writing what amounted to book reviews, however, I chose to wrap it all together.  This is the initial entry of a two-part post on integrating the insights of theses texts into what I’ve achieved through therapy.

My choices of readings were specific to ongoing challenges I have: overcoming my recent failures; handling the toxic relationships in my life; and how to overcome the pragmatic issues of “simple” daily living.  It was my hope to find a way beyond what were heretofore intractable hallmarks of my CPTSD and ADHD - socialization/relationship challenges, emotional regulation, behavioral adaptations, and development of healthy habits within a new life structure.   

The seemingly obvious starting point is the overall fiasco my life has become after the disintegration of my defensive repression of childhood traumas.  That’s what led me to first pick up Rebounders by Rick Newman.  It was written primarily to identify the attributes of "rebounders" - successful people who had been spectacular failures at previous junctures of their lives.  I wasn’t interested in reading about sappy success stories with trite maxims functioning as shortcuts to real change.  I wanted to know about why failure happens, how to overcome it, and most importantly avoid it in the future. 

The crucial feature of recovering from failure seems to be a person’s resilience.  The term “quality resilience” is a psychological term for people becoming more robust, skilled, and durable after setbacks.  In fact, I'm trying to internalize a reframing of the very occurrence of a setback as a weapon wielded to improve myself.  

Whether my setbacks are truly life-altering like divorce or fairly small in the grand scheme of things like an orthopedic injury, what matters is having the resilience to recover.  It does not matter if the setback is singular or one in a seemingly endless series thereof.    As the legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi said, “It does not matter how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get up.”

This quote seems to be clichéd, but it’s not one of those shortcuts I mentioned wanting to avoid.  It’s an enduring statement of resilience because life never stops throwing you curveballs.  I'm not getting caught up in the optimism of the saying, however, because the truth is that hard work within the construct of a well-constructed plan is how I can learn to adapt and get up off the mat.  (Yeah, I’m a weekend warrior athlete who just shamelessly dropped multiple sports metaphors in one paragraph!)

I have been completely ensnared in the blame game - complaining about what people do to me and generally feeling sorry for myself.  This was my default attitude after I finally accepted my childhood of abuse and the subsequent problems I’ve experienced.  It turns out that I was what Newman referred to as a “wallower.”  I got rattled about being emotionally overwhelmed due to having never been taught any emotional regulation.  I became angry and indignant about my circumstances.  "It's not fair, damnit!"  Just realizing this painful truth about myself did not get me past it, however.

This brings me to another book I read, Toxic Parents by Susan Forward and Craig Buck.  While the topic is self-explanatory, I was able to extrapolate the lessons to toxic relationships of any nature.  This book crystallized for me the idea that my behavior regarding my circumstances was partially due to my refusal to reclaim my own life from those who mistreated me.  I don’t have to forgive an unrepentant father or a vindictive ex-wife, and I don’t have to allow their actions to drive negative overwhelming emotional responses such as anger and indignation.

Don’t get it twisted, though.  I’ve learned through therapy and Toxic Parents that I don’t have to meekly forgive and forget.  Unearned absolution for what these people have done and continue to do to me is just another form denial.  Denial is a significant maladaptive behavior I used as a child to survive and brought forth into adulthood.  To just forgive and forget is to pretend none of it happened which is the clearest form of denial. 

It is important that I instead process what has already occurred and respond intelligently to what continues to happen instead of knee-jerk reacting.  Otherwise I just allow myself to devolve into emotional chaos.  Unilateral forgiveness is to deny my reality and feelings and possibly subconsciously ascribe responsibility to myself, which is flat out crazy-making.  I need to accept what has happened, not get overwhelmed or angry, and move forward for myself.  Interestingly enough, this approximates what rebounders do regarding their failures.

Rebounders get past the circumstances of their problems and get to the business of solving them.  One term that stuck with me was “own the suck.”  It referred to military helicopter pilot Tammy Duckworth who lost both legs after being shot down.  The “suck” is an oft-used term by service personnel to describe fighting in terrible environmental conditions in various Mideast conflicts.  Owning the suck in my context means accepting my situation for what it is and doing what I can about it instead of wasting personal resources bemoaning the situation itself.

Rebounders have the self-awareness that allows for an accurate appreciation of why things go right or wrong both in the external environment and also within themselves.  I can’t successfully solve a problem if I cannot diagnose all of its facets properly, so I had to get my arms around my internal issues irrespective of their potential external origin.  It’s okay to be wrong, but it’s not okay to be wrong-headed.  My emotional immaturity and lack of regulation is part of what drove my stubbornness.

My emotions came over me like a tsunami after a lifetime of suppression.  One maladaptive aspect of my personality that carried over from childhood was not feeling virtually any emotion at all.  Of course the emotions were always simmering underneath my veil of calm and being comported at virtually all times.  Rebounders actually are recognized for their ability to compartmentalize emotion without ignoring it altogether, which is what I had done.  They do not become dominated by emotion as I had been for the past six years after becoming a father. 

Developing resilience is not something to be done merely by force of temperament, however.  The important piece here is that self-awareness is paramount to bouncing back.  Wallowers rarely question their own judgment or conduct a truly introspective analysis even when giving the appearance of doing so.  They get hung up on external factors while also tending to overestimate their abilities and talent.  Former US President Calvin Coolidge once noted, “nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent… (and) the world is full of educated derelicts.”  I refuse to be categorized as such.

The upside is that the resilience of rebounders is neither developed nor maintained like inherent talent or intelligence.  Mother Nature doesn’t need to endow us with it because we can develop the attributes of resiliency incrementally.  Once we own the suck it becomes time to take action to adopt the other traits rebounders have which allow them to keep moving in spite of their negative situations.

One critical action is preparing for the things which will inevitably go wrong.  I need to prepare for how to be comfortable with setbacks, hardship, and inconvenience because that is what's required to move toward my goals.  My internal desire to do things as perfectly as possible engenders impatience both with respect to having failures at all as well as the length of time it takes to realize substantial gains.  This impatience, combined with my CPTSD-generated anxiety, tends to spiral me downward into self-loathing, frustration, and inability to act.  Therefore I need to remain cognitively vigilant about responding well.

I also continue working on internalizing the reality that I’ll never be completely free of the anxiety, guilt, fear, and confusion in my life because of what I’ve endured.  These things can simply no longer be allowed to define me or control my actions and responses to triggers.  I can plan to anticipate these issues as well.  This will allow me to develop the change in habits required to alter those maladaptive behaviors which linger and occasionally continue to control my life.  Now that I’m doing my best to own the suck, the process of changing daily habits to effect a consolidation of my gains made during recovery is what I focus on next... and the subject of Part 2.  

The Agony of Being Apart From My Daughters

Tonight is one of those nights in which the heart-rendering pain of not being with my daughters seems almost unbearable.  I’ve spent the better part of the past 2 weeks devouring books dedicated to my recovery so that I can more quickly get myself in a position to be an available father to them, but of course it’s not that simple.

I’m embroiled in a ridiculous custody fight with my ex-wife, their mother, because she’s taking advantage of my episode of distress that resulted in suicidal ideations.  I never had any intent, plan, or anything truly resembling a true thought of suicide, though.  My ex and I spent 16 years together, and she knows without question that I’m not a threat to those girls.

Yet that didn’t stop her from an emergency petition to the court… over a week after I had already stabilized and stupidly asked her for help.  Instead of help she took the opportunity to rip me from those girls’ lives for reasons I still struggle to grasp.

I’ve placed myself in her shoes, and I nevertheless cannot understand why she’s doing this.  I realize that she’s functioning off of the still-raw emotions of our relationship imploding.  It’s clear that reason and logic are not at the forefront of her thought processes.  Regardless of the actual reasons she’s doing this to her own daughters, concern for our daughters’ safety is not truly one of them.

If that were, in fact, the case then my ex would not allow her own mother near those girls.  Their maternal grandmother has recklessly neglected them such that my eldest ended up with searing burns across her forehead due to her hair catching fire from a scented candle her grandmother lit the child’s bedroom and then proceeded to egregiously leave the girls unattended.

This woman also violently shakes the girls by the shoulders such that their heads snap back and forth… all because they didn’t do their math worksheets properly. 

She browbeats them with religious zealotry such that my 4 year old has nightmares about satan waiting for her in the basement because she sinned earlier that day.

She has physically attacked me in front of each girl in public so bad that they hid from sight because they were so scared that she was going to hurt me… which is sort of comical in one respect considering I’m more than a foot taller and easily outweigh her by 80 lbs.  Yet 4-year olds don’t perceive things that way.

They are also regularly locked in their bedrooms at night with a plastic bucket of a toilet in the middle of their room because their mother and grandmother can’t be bothered with middle-of-the-night potty needs.  You should see the looks of terror on their faces when they had overnights with me and thought I would do the same thing.

If a babysitter had done any one of these things, much less all of them, no responsible parent would ever allow their children to be supervised by that sitter again.  I’ve never touched the girls with aggression, have never locked them up in anyway, have never neglected them or left them in danger’s way, or anything approaching what they’ve experienced with their mother or grandmother.

Yet I find myself being publicly accused as a potential danger to them.  This plays into my emotional wreckage because I’m so aggrieved at the plain inequity of the situation.  I can only imagine what my ex would have done if I had ever done anything like that which their grandmother has already done to them.  The fact is that it’s not remotely in my constitution to ever harm those girls in any fashion.

I’m not claiming to be the perfect father.  I have overzealously yelled at them when they hit each other or place themselves in danger.  I’m not excusing my yelling at them because I should have had more control than that.  I have said things that I wish I had not like seemingly every parent has done at some point or another.  However, I’ve always owned what I did wrong, explained to them that what I said or how I said it was wrong, and apologized for it.

My upbringing in a home of constant physical and psychological abuse did not prepare me for being a father, and it actually placed me at a significant disadvantage.  That’s also not an excuse and this knowledge is why I have consumed parenting books and studies to offset that disadvantage.  I’ve taken parenting classes of my own volition and continue to seek out parenting advice from professionals every chance I get.  I am committed to breaking the chain of abuse in my family in spite of what happens when they’re with their mother or grandmother.

All of these issues swirl around in my mind as I try to grasp how I allowed myself to be subject to the vindictive whims of my ex, but I need to constantly remind myself that this is not completely my fault.  I cannot control their mother’s actions against me and the collateral damage it causes my daughters.

I was a stay-at-home father with these girls for almost 2 years.  They are so accustomed to having me as a regular and integral part of their lives, so it’s not just how I feel because of how badly I pine to be with them.  It’s all so compounded by the realization of how this must be impacting them.   It has to be beyond confusing for them to suddenly not have contact with me beyond phone calls.

They are resilient and wonderfully adept for girls of their ages, 4 and 6, so I take comfort in that fact.  I’ve been reassured that there will not be any long-term damage to them or our bond primarily because of how close we’ve been given the extended time I spent raising them.  This entire period of time apart will likely amount to no more than a few months, but it already feels like multiple eternities. 

I try to cognitively reassure myself that many children spend extended periods of time away from their parents and are essentially none the worse for it.  My background as an “honorary” military brat (my father was medically retired from the army at 25 so I grew up around the base and with other brats) has shown me that kids can spend a year at a time without their father and get past it.

Yet that knowledge only helps so much with the emotional suffering I’ve occasionally experienced over the past month and a half.  I know that this is simply a temporary state of affairs until the judge has sufficient cover to re-instate my time with them.  A guardian ad litem has been appointed as essentially a lawyer for the girls to help the judge determine that I’m not any measure of a threat to them.

Simply typing those words, “threat to them,” strikes me in the heart like bolt of heat lightning.  It’s just so inconceivable that anyone who knows anything about me and my girls could ever legitimately connect the idea of a threat and me together in regards to them. 

This is a time for me to continue working on myself as a person and a father.  I need to focus on utilizing the time which otherwise would have been spent continuing to build upon our bond together so that when they’re back with me it will be an even better experience than it might have been.  I believe if I continue to focus on this aspect of the situation that I will continue to effectively handle this emotional agony.  

Adrian Peterson Case: No Good Men To Be Found

I originally wrote this piece about the Adrian Peterson child abuse scandal for the Good Men Project, but they felt it was too one-sided.  Guess I am a bit biased against child abusers because of my past, but I've littered this post with links demonstrating that what I've presented is factual and not simply subjective.  Maybe I should include the men at the Good Men Project as those who didn't show themselves to be good men?

The Good Men Project is a favorite of mine because it gets as close to defining what it means to be a good man in this age without all the sermonizing and emasculation.  I have wanted to write an article for them for quite some time, and I thought it was going to be something inspiring and wonderful to read.  Little did I realize it would end up being a tale of disappointment in so many men. 

The much-publicized saga of All-Pro NFL running back and confirmed child abuser Adrian Peterson has an obvious villain.  This 217-lb person - I doubt I’ll ever refer to him as a “man” again - beat his 4-year old son with both a belt and a tree branch so bad that it caused “bruising and visible cuts and slash marks” after he stuffed leaves from the branch into the boy’s mouth.  I attempted to look beyond the obvious storylines we’ve all been reading throughout this sad tale. 

My hope was to find men involved in this case who were lighthouses in this dark storm.  I wanted to pen the one feel-good piece that could be written about such a wretched situation.  Certainly there was at least one real man somewhere along this storyline who boldly stepped up at the risk of taking on an incredibly popular multi-millionaire star player in arguably America’s most popular sport. 

I was wrong.

When the news broke that Peterson had been charged with criminal levels of child abuse, Vikings general manager Rick Spielman initially suspended him for just one game and eagerly reinstated his lead back the following week saying, “we feel strongly as an organization that this is disciplining a child.”  Minnesota owner Zygi Wilf and Mr. Spielman view cuts, bruises, and slash marks sustained on a pre-school boy at the hands of a grown man much differently than I do.  These are not good men.

I understand their competitive desire and duty to field the best players for their team.  However, they also have a responsibility for setting the cultural tone for the organization and their community.  These two men each had an opportunity to demonstrate what that NFL franchise stands for, and one thing it shouldn’t stand for is the cold-hearted abuse of defenseless children.  I expect better than this from society’s leaders.

Surely the one man who would have all the cover and incentive required to fight for that child’s best interests would be the prosecuting District Attorney Brett Ligon.  He folded like a cheap card table at the prospect of losing a high-profile battle with Peterson’s lawyer, an admittedly effective attorney winning acquittals for professional athlete scumbags accused of spousal abuse and sexually attacking their own daughters.  Ligon allowed Peterson to plead out with virtually no punishment. 

As if that wasn’t cowardly enough, the district attorney promptly threw the boy's mother under the proverbial bus to cover his own professional backside.  Ligon blamed his decision to tuck tail and run  the mom because “… this is exactly what she wanted."  

I appreciate the difficult position the district attorney was in.  Yet a real man would not have conceded a battle to defend a child, and he absolutely shouldn’t have hidden behind a woman after having done so.  The mother being an apologist for the abuser is never reason to shirk the duty of a district attorney’s office.

I didn’t really expect to find much good in Peterson's lawyer, but it was how he defended his client that I found so offensive.  He stated that horse-whipping a four year-old was a family matter and not something in which the legal system should be involved, which is essentially saying that tiny boy doesn’t have a right to be protected from the trauma he suffered.  I know somebody has to defend these guys in our legal system, I just don’t know how they can claim children don’t deserve protection and then ever sleep again.

I also wrongly assumed that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would have learned from his complete tone-deafness during the Ray Rice domestic abuse debacle.  Instead of suspending Peterson outright, the NFL commish decided it was more appropriate to essentially give Peterson a paid $5 million vacation on the Exempt List instead of suspending him immediately without pay.  What exactly does one of the NFL’s domestic thugs need to do before he hands out real punishment?

     

Just when I thought my research couldn’t turn up anything more vile regarding this situation, I came across this little nugget:  Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer actually read a motivational text message from Peterson to his players to inspire them before the Atlanta game.

Motivational quotes should come from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi… not from a disgraced bully who attacks four-year olds.  I wonder if Zimmer also puts up posters of Pol Pot’s most inspirational quotes and hands out Mein Kampf on the team bus, too.

Now the question comes down to when Peterson will start carrying the rock again and what will happen after he returns to the team?  If Vikings fullback Jerome Felton is to be believed, Peterson will have 100% support in the locker room upon his return.  Assuming that’s true then there isn't a single decent (much less "good") man on that entire squad.  I understand the need to have locker room unity and all that but, seriously, there’s not one good man amongst 53 on the active roster with a conscience? 

Finally, there's Peterson himself who refused to step up like a good man to own his mistake.  Instead he tried to justify his actions by saying the way he harmed the child wasn't really his fault because he was just following the same discipline he received as a child.  I don't doubt he’s telling the truth, but he had a chance to become a symbol of breaking the generation-to-generation chain of abuse that is very common in these situations. 

He also miss an opportunity to set a wonderful example of being a good man who accepts responsibility, learns from his mistakes, and demonstrates to his son how a good man is willingly accountable for his actions.  Given the bully pulpit he has because of his fame, Peterson could have had a great impact towards better parenting and protection of defenseless children. 

The one thing I kept wondering while writing this was what kind of man this little boy is going to become.  All around him are men who have failed him.  From the father he likely idolizes to the public officials tasked with protecting him, he has learned that being traumatized is just part of childhood and there’s nobody around to protect him.

I sincerely hope I am mistaken and there is at least one good male role model in that child’s life I was unable to find.  If not, statistics show that 20 years from now he is likely to continue that cycle of violence to the detriment of another defenseless child.  I prefer to think that maybe this four-year old will end up being the one good man to come out of this situation.