Something began when I was four years old, and it was reinforced, repeated, normalized, and sustained over the course of decades.
The injury wasn’t only the abuse itself. It was also the fact that the person who harmed me was favored, protected, believed, accommodated, and repeatedly restored to a position of legitimacy while I was not.
Something bad happened, and the person who did it continued to occupy a protected position while my reality (moments of distress) was judged, minimized, and dismissed.
When that happens over and over again, year after year, it makes sense that I began to feel as though my validity, agency, credibility, and even my right to define my own experience had been stripped away.
For a very long time, I located the center of gravity in my mother. Now I am considering the possibility that my sister occupied a much more influential position than I had been able to discern.
Six and a half years older than me, she was the first grandchild, the first niece, and the favored child. Then came Magda, the last grandchild: highly sensitive, tightly wound, easily activated, and in need of inconvenient soothing.
My sensitivity was dismissed as performance.
“Quit performing. Stop being dramatic, hysterical, manipulative. Stop trying to get attention.”
Nobody taught me how to cope with difficulty, tolerate discomfort, or regulate my nervous system.
I think my sister learned that there was power in being able to suck it up and may even have come to feel martyred by it. By keeping me dysregulated through taunting, provocation, and unwanted touching, she gained traction through the contrast in presentation. She appeared composed while I appeared reactive, and ours was a family with very little capacity for visible, observable, unhidable struggle.
As I continue to heal, I find myself repeatedly encountering variations of this same pattern. There is a certain kind of personality that seems to require constant elevation, admiration, accommodation, and preferential treatment, and there is a predictable response to anyone whose presence threatens to divert attention from that arrangement.
The archetype itself is hardly new.
If only authority were evidence of integrity and virtue.
If only age, status, confidence, accomplishment, popularity, or proximity to power guaranteed goodness.
I was placed on this trajectory at the age of four, and now I am doing the work required to change direction. I am learning to recognize the pattern that I know so well and, without vigilance, continue to mistake for love, safety, familiarity, and home.
The familiarity calls to me.
Like an old glove, it simply fits.
I recognize now that familiarity and safety are not the same thing.
Whatever else may be true, this also happened.
