The worst...

I grew up in Houston and lived through flooding, though I do not remember much of my past.  It is hard to follow the coverage of Harvey and not to think about my life there.

My sister set me this tonight.  It is our childhood home.  She, too, is wondering if it is underwater.  So much of our life there probably is.  I cannot exactly say why it is that I, too, do not want it to drown.  It is not as if life in this home was perfect.

It is strange to look at this photo.  Thanks to Google, I can see what I do not have any photos of myself.  My father's childhood photos went to my sister after his death ... eventually.  My mother has never shared any of the ones she has.  I have a few from my paternal grandmother (when my maternal grandmother died, all her photos went to my mother) and some that my aunt sent me years and years and years ago.  I was glad that my sister sent it.

Thanks Google.

I do know that I feel proud to be a Texan, watching the coverage.  You see folk helping each other over and over and over again.  That's because, in Texas, everyone is your neighbor.  Even strangers.  Texans?  We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.  [Do you know the meaning of bootstrap as a verb?] And when our neighbors cannot, we help them pull up their bootstraps.

I do miss Texas!

My sister remembers the flooding.  She remembers the trauma and the fear of it.  I don't.  I wanted to ask her if this was hard for her, but she was driving home from work and then fixing dinner for her boys.  She is so incredibly crazy busy that she hasn't really understood the scale of what was happening until today.

I wanted to talk with her about therapy, about some of the small remarks that my therapist has said.  But it wasn't the time.

In the sexual abuse support group, there was a heart-wrenching post by a woman who said that she had kept silent about the abuse she suffered for forty years, but is speaking up because her abuser is hurting her children.  He is her father.

I was DUMBFOUNDED that she would ever let her father around her children, much less alone with them.  When I mentioned it to my therapist, she said, before my words died away, "You cannot believe the role denial plays in abuse, chiefly as a coping mechanism.

I opened my mouth to protest "But" and the word (and all the words I planned after it) died.  For one, I learned from The Courage to Heal that any coping mechanism that helps you to survive, to come out alive, is a good coping mechanism.  It is good in that it helped you to survive.  Now that you are on the way to healing, the goal is to find coping mechanisms that serve you better.

So, I couldn't disagree with her denial.  Not at all.  And, whilst I started to say I would never live in such denial, I have.  I did.  I do.  There are somethings that, for me, are better not to have ever happened.

I ache for her children.  I want to think that it is not so much a failing on her part to protect them, because she is clearly still trying to protect herself.  And she needs to protect herself as she begins the very arduous journey to heal.  Yes, she also has to protect her children and part of her post was about that.  How brave of her to be so vulnerable to ask for help from a community that she could not yet know would understand.  And not judge.

I do like how, in there, there is this constant refrain of "find yourself a good therapist."  There is so much support and empathy and advice, but no one tries to take on the role of the expert.  In the medical support groups, often you find folk who are.  That is annoying and wrong.  Actually, it is most dangerous.

In the medical support groups, I often see the one-up-you behavior.  You know, my misery is worse than yours.  I am not interested in that.  But, in the sexual abuse support group, I have not really seen that.  Maybe it is because all the stories are horrible, no matter the scale.  No abuse is ever worse because it is always the worst it could be.

Always.