In the Box

No, I’m not in the penalty box in a hockey game.  It’s where I feel I am in regards to several issues that I’m dealing with right now.

First, the medication I am on now does actually seem to be working.  However, switching from being a graveyard shift to a dayshift is causing havoc on my body.  It’ll be several months before everything settles down. With the new schedule, I have managed to get away from one of the biggest work problems and that’s a good thing for me.  My body and mind still haven’t realized it yet but they will and things will be much better.  Another good thing about being on dayshift is that I am doing a lot more so my energy level goes up.  It also means I’m more tired at the end of the day but I also feel like I accomplished things and actually did something.

Second, I am and am not sure I can handle going back to Mass.  I was able to finally attend an All Saints day vigil Mass Monday night.  Yet, I am having problems with the thoughts in my head.  Reading the stupid crap traditionalists have written on CAF and whatnot have really screwed me up.  I still have thoughts about how to bash on women (they worthless, useless, always causing men to sin, should be stay at home mothers and wives, women are property, never to be educated, etc) which is really bad since I’m a woman.  I hate that I’ve learned to hate myself because of my sex.  My own family didn’t acknowledge the fact that I was a woman.  I had to figure that out on my own.  I was made to hate and ignore my own body because I was a woman and because I wasn’t what my parents wanted.  Now in my attempts to get away from that I’m running right back into it from so called traditionalists and faithful Catholics.  I won’t even get into the whole Quiverfull/Patriarchy/Vision Forum fringe garbage.  It’s like any advancements women have made are forgotten or ignored or labeled satanic and that if women just went back to being their husbands’ slaves then everything would be perfect.  No it wouldn’t.  Denying who you are and what you like and squashing all that down and stuffing it into a box is bad but that’s what many want.  They think of women as children and property not as people.  And many of the people with this attitude are WOMEN.  Why do women fear other women so much that they have to strike out and hurt them?

Third, I’m still stuck on the idea that other people get to do things that I am not allowed to do.  Like, they get to be happy and I have to be miserable.  They get to have dreams and lives they want and all I get is a dead end job with no possibility of advancement and stuck for the next thirty years.  Or they get to live their faith however they want (with in reason) and I have to follow a strict regime of rules and prayers and still not be a good Catholic.  Or that they get to spank and I don’t.  Now, I don’t advocate spanking but this is where this all stems from.  I got spanked, largely for anything and everything, especially for stuff my sisters did, while my sisters got rarely spanked if at all.  At least, growing up, I figured on some level that eventually I would be able to spank someone smaller and weaker than me and my rage and anger would be satisfied.  I feel like this got taken away from me, that my ability to spank and punish and hurt and let out the rage and anger were taken away from me and all I’m left with is this feeling of being told to suck it up this is the way things are going to be from now.  That’s it.  But wait, nobody else had these things taken from them because they never had them in the first place.  My sisters never had the rage or the anger or the pointless blaming for other people’s wrongs.  I got all that but they got away with murder and it hurts.  It hurts that they had my mother’s love and all I had was my mother’s anger and rage.  That’s the legacy she left me.  She never showed me love.  It was either rage, anger, neglect, or indifference.  Very little praise and never any love.

I think this is why I have a hard time making women friends (plus, I’ve been “betrayed” by several girl friends in the past) and look for someone to take her place.  I never had a mother in the emotional sense.  I physically have a mother but we have no emotional connection.   She doesn’t love me and I don’t love her.  What little love she did have she gave to my sisters.  Now I’m not saying my mother is evil or bad.  I realize, after reading several psychology books, that she was raised this way and didn’t make the choices to break free of this parenting.  It wasn’t largely her fault, it’s just the failings of past generations that have continued on down to mine.  My dad’s family wasn’t much better but his was also much larger and much different.  There was affection but my dad didn’t really know how to relate to having all girls.  They still are guilty of some things but not everything.

So I have a hard time with the concept of a loving God.  Distant, sure.  Occasionally there for a special moment, definitely.  But unconditional love is not something I’ve ever know or experienced so it’s not something I can fathom.  It’s too difficult.  It’s not real.  It can’t be real.  Someone love me for me?  You have to be kidding me.  I’m used to conditional love.  Being loved only for what I can do and not being loved when I can’t.  Only being “loved” when I make someone else look good.  I understand unconditional love in an intellectual sense but not in a heart/emotional sense because like I’ve said, I’ve never experienced it.  Yet I am asked to believe something I cannot wrap my mind around, that I am loved.  Actually, it’s more like I don’t want to believe.  When you’ve been unlovable as long as I have, being loved really screws things up.

I have no emotional attachment to the Catholic faith, at least it doesn’t engender an emotional response in me.  I almost feel burned out, numb even.  I don’t want to go to Mass. Confession, sure.  It’s the first step in going back but yet, it’s easier and harder as well.  I believe everything the Church teaches but the people make it hard.  The people and Jesus.  I don’t connect with any of them.  Being emotionally damaged, it is hard.  Right now, I’m not sure I can handle Mass.  I need to go but my body and my emotions can’t handle it.  Not right now.

 

Abuse is Okay Because We’re Catholic

Actually, it’s not but since there is a whole thread at CAF on how spanking is sexual abuse (which is an argument I’m not going to get into though I do believe it does have merit) and so many are advocating spanking and corporal punishment because it means their children won’t go to hell.  Then you get those that say spanking didn’t hurt them in any way.  And that lack of spanking leads to all the problems we have in the world.  OR that spanking is in the Bible.  It isn’t.

Dulce de Leche has two great posts about spanking: one how it’s not just about spanking and I spanked my dog and he turned out fine which deal with the reality that spanking is abuse and there are great effects on the one spanked.

While Michael Pearls teaching hasn’t made inroads into Catholic circles (yet!), the mentality of the parent winning at all costs has in parenting.  It’s sad and disheartening that this garbage is making it’s way into any Christian believer’s life especially the Catholic believer who has access to the fullness of truth in the Catholic Church.  Yet, between the advocating for spanking (excuse me, corporal punishment. bite me.) and seeing another thread about why aren’t there more big Catholic families (can anyone say Quiverfull?)  the dangerous fringe elements of Protestantism are making their way into  Catholic families.  I have a problem with that.

Abuse is abuse no matter how you dress it up in pretty packaging and call it good parenting.  These kids who have to live with these parents are going to have to deal with consequences of their parents’ actions as adults and they may have no idea that what was done to them was abuse.  They may even spank their children because they say that they were spanked and it didn’t hurt them one bit.  They believe gentle parenting is bad because it doesn’t teach proper boundaries.  If the parent can’t teach boundaries, that’s the parent’s problem, not the child’s.

The fundamental problem with most parenting books is that it sees children as mini adults that just need to be trained right and then everything will be fine.  That’s so wrong.  Children are unique individuals that will eventually grow up to be adults but are currently people who are worthy of respect and love.  They are not rebellious demons that need to have their will broken.

Young Mom has a good post on why she no longer spanks along with other posts she has made about gentle parenting.

 

EDIT: Apparently, Pearl has made into Catholic circles.  I found this thread on CAF from 2006.  And this one mentions him as well.  And apparently, there is a “catholic” version of Pearl as well.  There is also this, this, and this.

Out with the Old Medication, In With the New; Women are Evil; and Abuse is Here to Stay

These are not all that I want to write about.  I’ve been trying to get away from really long titles.

These week in my depression: new medication.  The first one didn’t work at all.  It kept me wired instead of helping me sleep which not good for my mental health.  I need sleep to even remotely be on an even emotional keel.  So the one medication is out and a new one is in.  Hopefully, this one will work much better.

The last month has been difficult with all the changes at work. Dealing with the good supervisor leaving, being targeted by the bad supervisor, and having to deal with a misogynist jerk who refuses to work unless he is being watched by the supervisor.  Add another jerk who refuses to work and you have a disaster just waiting to explode.  The only consolation (and I know I’m bad for feeling this way) is that these idiots are on the bad supervisors shift.  They can deal with them.  There are some other issues at work that I can’t get into here but one that I can get into is the poor pay scale.  I top out at my next eval which is in December.  I will make the maximum amount for my position unless they give me a cost of living increase or I make supervisor which doesn’t seem likely since they keep hiring men.  At least I have the opportunity to switch to a day shift with the two individuals who got promoted to supervisor leaving their shifts.

Apparently, tonight is going to be one of my bad nights.  I think some of it is lack of sleep (doctor’s appointment yesterday morning threw off my sleep schedule), hormones (I should be getting my period in about the next 24 hours) and the depression.  I am in tears right now and I don’t know why.  But if I don’t continue writing, even in tears, I won’t get this post finished.

 

This post from And Sometime Tea (another Catholic blog) has a post on Blaming Women.  Some highlights:

A third thing also needs to be said: the reason for including the story out of Phoenix with the second piece is not because of the story itself, but because of the jubilant reaction to the story which I’ve seen in some corners of the internet. I don’t want to cite any specific comments because I’m not out to start a blog/FB/etc. war, but there have been more than a few of which the tone has been something like “It’s about time they kicked those blankety-blank girls off of the altar–they’ve ruined everything.” 

And that brings me to my point.

When Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, the first thing he did was run off and leave Eve alone to deal with the serpent (which, according to Dr. Scott Hahn, was a fearsome dragon-like beast, not merely a little garter snake). The second thing he did was let Eve convince him to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit. And the third thing he did, when God asked him about it, was to point the finger of blame at the woman who was of his own flesh and say, “Hey, it was her fault! She made me do it.”

Given how longstanding a tradition it is, then, for men to tend to blame women for things that go wrong, it shouldn’t be surprising to encounter that attitude in regard to such things as female altar servers, immodestly dressed churchgoers, and (if we may be honest) tons of other church-related issues, from issues dealing with women who have the audacity to show up with the noisy, wiggly products of their fertility in tow (and who, gasp, sometimes even nurse them while still on church property!) to women who sing at you to women who get up and do some of the readings to women who respond when Father asks people to help out as Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion. All of this, if you have a certain male mindset, is the fault of the women. It is not the fault of men who gave permission (however it was granted) for female altar servers; it is not the fault of men who let their daughters out their front doors dressed for Mass as if they hoped to solicit in the parking lot afterward (if, indeed, things are really that bad; I’ve never encountered anything quite so horrible as the writer of the second piece describes, but then, I’m female, and tend to see in unfortunately-revealing clothing nothing but a fashion mistake that the woman will hopefully correct when she becomes aware of the problem); it is the fault of women for having children and expecting those children to attend Mass–or for not arranging for babysitting etc. so the children don’t have to bother anyone until they’re old enough to be altar servers; it is the fault of women that women tend to outnumber male singers in the average parish choir by a ratio of at least three or four to one; it is the fault of women that women also outnumber the men who are willing to lector at Mass; and it is clearly the fault of women that male priests ask for Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion and that, once again, far more women than men show up in response.

I’ve seen and read comments made by men and women who say much worse than what the blogger posts.  I mean much worse, to the point that it is advocated that women be locked up and they are going straight to hell.  Because of these things I think these kinds of horrible thoughts, that I am evil, that I am at fault for men’s sins, that I am not loved by God and that God doesn’t even concern Himself with me.  Traddies are the worst because they use “tradition” as defined by them to execute this kind of oppression of women and no, I’m not talking about altar servers or readers.  They want women to be stay at home daughters who become stay at home mothers who have twenty children, who wait on their husband hand and foot, and are so useless and sinful that they will never get to heaven.  Actually, they are not unlike the Quiverfull/patriarchy movement in fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism.  They just dress it up with things like “tradition” and pull quotes out of context from papal documents saying, “See, even previous popes said women are evil and need to stay at home.”  Which is entirely untrue when you read the WHOLE document in context.

I hate that people still hate women and make women hate themselves while convincing themselves that this is a “holy, Catholic” thing to do.  It’s not.

 

Michael Pearl’s work is back in the news again due to a third child death.  Hana Williams is the third reported victim of Pearl’s “child training” ideology.  Why Not Train a Child? has several good posts about this latest little victim.  I suggest reading all the links in the posts.

Reactions to Hana Williams Story

 

A Closer Look at Pearl’s Teachings and their Relations to three deaths

The Parents of Hana Williams plead not guilty (several news accounts are listed)

The Pearls’ Official Response (I suggest having a bucket near by when reading this spew of lies)

A Closer Look at the Pearls’ Teaching and Adoption  (Hana was a child that had been adopted from Ethiopia by the Williams and had several medical and mental health issues)

A link from Why Not about older adoption which I link here just because it needed to stand on it’s own

This post about children and the myth of my happiness is a good example of the culture of death/culture of me first, always first

 

Mental Consequences of Spanking

After my post last week on anger and rage, I thought about how I think about what I wrote about how I couldn’t have to do something but others could.  I mentioned, I believe, that I believed that I had to be a stay-at-home mother and never work outside the home while other women who could be mothers and work.  I have always believed that there were special rules just for me and that I was always in danger of breaking them.  This dichotomy of one set of rules for me and a different set of rules for everyone else plus the spanking and the heavy handed punishment towards me and the lighter to non-existent punishments my sisters received shaped my thinking processes.  I’m not sure if I’m going to explain this very well so please bear with me.

In anthropology and in sociology there is the concept of us-vs.-them.  Us-vs.-them is the idea that one group is pitted against another for survival or in anthropology/sociology, one group holds another group’s differences to be so anathema to the first group’s beliefs that the second group has to be discriminated against or even eliminated.  This us-vs.-them mentality is also apparent in Michael Pearl’s child rearing manuals such as To Train Up a Child and his and his wife’s website No Greater Joy.  He argues that a parent is in a battle against the child’s will hence the us-vs.-them where the child is the “them” while the parent is the “us.”  This mentality is dangerous and damaging to not only the child but to the parent as well.  While I mention Pearl and his work, this isn’t a post about his work and my mother, to my knowledge, has never heard or read anything by Michael Pearl.  However, this mentality of us-vs.-them still exists in spanking and other means of corporal punishment.

When a child learns that it is okay to hit as long as you are an adult i.e. spanking, it sets up the foundation for this us.-vs.-them thinking.  A child learns that as long as he/she is bigger and stronger that it is okay to hit/punish while it is wrong (read “bad”) for a child to do any of these things.  A child become angry but has to hide that anger because a child isn’t allowed to feel or show his/her anger while it is okay for a parent to show anger and to even use that anger as a means of expression.  Beyond the us-vs.-them mentality, the child learns to split his/her thinking especially if that child is the main object of punishment, that is, the parents punish one child more or blame one child more than the others.  The child learns that she must be bad and unlovable and to live by a special set of rules just for her.  Add in a heavy dose of religion especially saying things like, “Bad girls like you go to Hell,” or “Godly girls know how to be good girls,” or “I have to beat the sin out of you,” then it gets really bad.  The child learns that not only does mom and dad not love them very much but that God is out to get them as well.  There is nowhere safe for them.  They are afraid almost all the time.  They realize they have to live by one set of rules otherwise mom and dad and God will be upset.  They learn that other children are more special and more loved than they are.  They learn that they are at the bottom of the heap and that the good things that happen to other people will never happen to them.  They believe that they are so bad that nothing good can happen to them or will happen to them.  They learn that the only thing that will happen to them is being punished.  They come to believe that they deserve that punishment or the very least learn to accept that they can do nothing to stop the spanking.

Growing up like this and seeing no way to change things leads to what psychology calls learned helplessness.  Learned helpless is the condition of a human person or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected (Wikipedia).  When a child has learned to suppress their feelings and to suppress any hope of things changing though the situation (spanking) later changes they have learned to be helpless.  This learned helplessness also plays into the changed/split thinking.  A child learns that not only are there special rules that she has to follow she also learns that nothing she does will prevent her from being spanked and while she tried her hardest to follow the rules perfectly she realizes that nothing will change.  After a while, she won’t try to change and she definitely won’t try to leave because she believes (without evidence to the contrary especially if she is sheltered and/or has limited contact with the outside world) that it is the same everywhere.  When the situation does change, that is the parents stop spanking because they are tired of it or they realize that yelling and screaming and just threatening spanking works just as well, the child won’t resist because she doesn’t know how to any more.  Yet, this is what Michael Pearl and even parents who don’t follow his teachings want: submissive children who obey.  Except it really isn’t obedience, it’s fear.  Actually, more like terrified.

What am I getting at?  While I’m not sure I explained the split/double thinking very well, I believe I did show that thinking does change when one spanks. We know that a child that was spanked and had to repress their anger and rage at being spanked learned that hitting was okay as long as an adult does it.  So when that child grows up they take the anger and rage they couldn’t show and couldn’t feel as a child and possibly take it out on their children.  They may justify this spanking as necessary discipline or even as commanded by the Bible.

In my case, this split thinking let me to believe that others could have and do things I wasn’t allowed to.  That I was cut off because of my badness.  That others could have things but I couldn’t because they were good and lovable and liked by God.  I was just a bad girl and that I needed to keep up this kind of thinking otherwise I wasn’t being good and holy enough even though I was bad (how’s that for a contradiction?).  I had to keep thinking that I was a bad person, that I was totally unlovable, I was completely unworthy of help or respect or of anything, that nobody could want me around.  That this kinds of thinking was good.  That I had to keep punishing myself otherwise I really was so bad that I deserve to go to Hell this very minute.  And my mother loved to reinforce this kind of thinking, saying things like “bad girls like you go to hell;”  ”you’re too slow;” “why can’t you be more like your sisters?” “you’re too fat;”  ”you’ll never amount to anything.”  This kind of thinking and belief is very unhealthy.  And you wonder why I have depression.  I tried not to have dreams because I believed I couldn’t achieve them.  I repressed my feelings and hopes to make other people happy.  I did things I regret believing they would make things better not realizing that they wouldn’t even touch the symptoms let alone the problem.  I forgot my childhood so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the abuse and anger and the fact that my mother just couldn’t be the mother I needed.  I squashed “me” because I didn’t know the real me and thought that if I did everything others wanted then I would be a “good me” rather than a “bad me.”  I denied who I was because I believed that the me I was told I was wasn’t good enough or smart enough or strong enough or pretty enough or athletic enough or Catholic enough.

I had a hard time  now because now I know this kind of thinking is wrong.  Really wrong.  Some people might consider this negativity very holy, actually, I know there are people who think this kind of negative thinking is holy but it isn’t.  It’s a sin.  God doesn’t make junk and He is the only one that will love us.  People put conditions on love.  God doesn’t.  If God is love, and He is, then He can’t put conditions on himself.  He doesn’t expect us to be perfect before we come to him.  We are to come as we are: broken, afraid, unloved, worthless, useless, sinner.  He doesn’t place unrealistic expectations on us and then punish us for not meeting them.  He has no desire to crush us into little pieces.  Only people want to do that.

Now I have no idea if what I wrote is what I really meant to write (considering I wrote about a four page essay in about 45 minutes) but it is what it is.  I’m just trying to work on my own depression and this was something I believed effected it.

 

Anger, Rage, and Abuse

This post at Why Not Train a Child? really highlights some of the issues I have today.  The anger that I was not allowed to acknowledge or express when I was a child when my mother spanked me usually for something I didn’t do (my mother just preferred to spank me).

I was not allowed to be angry.  Anger was bad.  Only Mommy could be angry and when Mommy got angry I was in deep trouble.  When Mommy was angry, I was scared.  Even when Mommy wasn’t angry, I was scared because I didn’t know what would set her off.  It didn’t matter if I did or didn’t do something, if one of my sisters did something, I was the one that got in trouble, got screamed and yelled at, got spanked.  I was the Bad Girl.  I couldn’t do anything right and Mommy didn’t love me when I was bad.  I was almost always bad.  Bad Girls like me go to Hell.

Now I have a lot of anger and rage that boils under the surface and it wants out.  But I’m not allowed to be angry or have rage.  As a woman, we are taught that we are to be nice and happy and cheerful and never feel anything bad.  As a victim of abuse, I was taught that my anger was bad.  That my feelings were bad.  That I was bad.  When I was being abused, I didn’t know that I was being abused.  I thought everyone went through the same thing.  Everyone got yelled and screamed and spanked by their mother.

Now I know I have anger and rage and it sits there.  Sometimes it’s pretty quiet and I don’t have to worry about it coming out.  Then there are other times (like reading garbage by traddies) that it just wants to burst out and beat the crap out of somebody.  But I’m not allowed to have anger or emotions.  Feelings are bad.  Other people can have them.  I can’t.  I have to hide, squash the anger and the rage and deny it’s existence if I want to be even remotely acceptable as a person.  Other people are allowed to feel and express anger.  I am not.  I am expected to keep quite and be nice and happy.  But I can’t.  I just want to pound the stuffing out of something.  I feel like if I don’t get the anger and rage out then it will consume me, that I’ll end up in jail (not because of what I did but because of me) or locked up in a mental hospital because I am not socially acceptable to my family (which I already am not) or to society (which I pretty much am not anyways).  I feel like there are rules and expectations and freedoms for everyone and that those rules and expectations and freedoms are different or are not allowed for me at all.  Other people get to have fun and have friends and be loved.  I am not allowed to have fun or have friends or be loved.  I am not worthy of those things.  I am BAD.  Therefore, I must be so horrible that a whole set of rules apply just to me.  I am not allowed to have anger while everyone else is.  They are allowed to express their anger and there are not consequences while I am not allowed to have anger at all and if I showed that anger in anyway or even just felt it then I would need to be harshly punished.  Remember, I am BAD.  I deserve to be punished.

That mentality led me to doing some very harsh things to myself because I believed that if I was punished enough then everything would be alright, that I would be good enough, that I would be finally lovable, that I would be worthy, that I wouldn’t be arrested and thrown in jail for the rest of my life (still not sure where this came from but it was a major fear for many years; I still get anxious any time I see a police car even though I have never committed a crime and have had mostly positive interactions with the police).  I am not the only one.  I also call myself names, hit myself in the thighs ( I didn’t want anybody to see or know how bad I really was).  While I wasn’t raised in a patriarchal/quiverful/fundamentalist/traditionalist household I was raised in a household that had a mother that believed in corporal punishment and kept a paddle in the kitchen in open view and was very willing to use it. I felt by punishing myself I could stop my mother from punishing and abusing me.  Granted, a lot of what I did I didn’t do until I was in my teens.

I remember once (I don’t remember what I did) that I believed I had been so bad that I couldn’t sleep in my own bed but rather had to sleep on the floor in the downstairs bathroom (which had a shower stall, a toilet and sink so it was quite small and it was off the laundry room).  I remember being in tears not wanting to be sleeping in the bathroom but knowing that I had to sleep there because I was so bad.  I was in there for some time.  I even lay on the floor, so much in tears, thinking this was the only way to make things better.  Eventually, I left the bathroom and slept in my own bed.  The thing is, nobody knew what I had done.  It was the middle of the night and everyone but I was asleep.  I didn’t know that at the time I was depressed.  I just thought I was worthless and needed to be punished.

Even on my own as an adult I’ve felt that I needed to be punished.  I remember cooking one of those pasta dinners in a box.  I hadn’t been watching it and a lot of it stuck to the bottom of the pan and parts were burned.  I have to step back a moment and add that I struggle with my weight and how I view my body.  Even though I was never overweight till very recently, I was never a size 2 either.  I was healthy.  Yet my mother saw me as fat and called me fat and stupid to my face.  Even when I was a size 6 and had actually lost weight (when you live somewhere where you have to walk everywhere to do anything you lose weight) my mother still called me fat to my face.  She also didn’t like the fact that I was a vegetarian at that time (though it was fine when K decided to be a one) Well, I saw that burned food and while regular people would probably throw it out and/or salvaged the part that wasn’t burned, I decided that since I had screwed up so badly and that I couldn’t waste food because that would be a sin, that I had to eat the burned part and then starve myself to lose weight.  And yes, I am in tears at this point.  I was forced to eat a lot of food I didn’t like or couldn’t eat (there are foods due to texture or the digestive reaction that I have that I can’t eat certain food) growing up.  I think I ate three bites of it, in tears (which is what I am right now, in tears), and eventually threw it away even though I believed that I would be going to hell for wasting food like that.  As you can tell, I still have problems with food even as an adult who can cook and eat anything she wants.

At this point, I am going to have to stop.  I am getting too upset.  And I don’t want to make my depression worse.