Spanked as a child

I agonized back and forth a lot about whether to post this here. It's really not part of the psychedelic part of my psychedelic journey... but the realization and integration is one of the effects from it, and I feel like it belongs here. 

A friend posted this meme, and it hit a nerve for me... and I realized that his personal page was not my bully pulpit, so I waltzed back to my OWN personal space, and here's my thoughts on this one. 

Yeah - it gives you that, and post-traumatic stress disorder and sometimes crippling anxiety. My table manners are excellent. I find myself apologizing when other people accidentally step on me. I still sometimes flinch when people shout. I'm getting through it with therapy and psychedelics... but we weren't just spanked, my Dad got drunk and beat the crap out of our asses if we screwed something up and he lost his temper. 

I think that's the big issue... if every discipline spanking was pure-hearted and undertaken in a sober and upright mind... it would not be a terrible problem. But that's NOT the lived experience of a LOT of people I know who were spanked. And a lot of the people who are flag-waving for spanking as a right way to discipline your kids, can get pretty brutal about their child-rearing, and I think it shows in the idiots who are walking around spouting Nazi slogans and feeling like they're entitled to screw anybody's daughter they want to. Daddy Hitlers you because you cry. (ha, I joke!)

My Dad said on a recent road trip, "I spanked you boys, and you turned out OK." - and yeah, we're both doing OK, but it's IN SPITE OF, rather than because of, getting my thighs welted with wire insulation because I was clumsy and knocked a light bulb off the counter. My brother survived a suicide attempt because a gun got stuck and jammed IN HIS MOUTH, and they found him lying in bed shaking with the jammed gun. He still has the bullet that didn't fire - you can see where the trigger hammer struck the primer. It was one of Dad's guns, of course; there are literally dozens. But yeah, we're OK, for a given value of mental-illness OK. For what it's worth, my brother and I are both on the Asperger's end of the Autism Spectrum, and I'm pretty sure my Dad would be too, if he'd ever been tested. I finally got a diagnosis at fifty. I don't think that this issue was related to/caused by the brutal spankings AT ALL - I think that's just the way I'm made. However, it may have CONTRIBUTED to it - because it can be really tricky to know how to handle your drunk dad when he's yelling at you and you cry and you can't look him in the face, and it makes him hit you because you're not being a man about it and looking away, and sometimes the communications failures, were PROBABLY because of my autism. And/or his. He's an engineer; he can write a good letter, but he was often unable to make himself clear in real time. He's good if he can talk slow. 

Sorry you didn't ask for that... but that meme pushes a STRONG button for me, and it's a conversation we're not having enough of. My Dad will tell you he NEVER BEAT us kids, he only spanked us. He never felt like water-glasses of whiskey on ice incapacitated his judgement or called for an overnight wait while he simmered down and sobered up. Sober Daddy never believed he beat his kids, because Drunk Daddy and Sober Daddy were friends - they stick up for each other. The decisions that he made while can't-walk-ingly drunk, were totally binding in the morning -- like when he was ripped to the tits and pissed off at me and sent me home from Australia to Houston a week early, because I hadn't fulfilled his dream of how my visit would go. And my mom will probably agree that he never abused us. We were indeed awkward, enthusiastic imps of mischief - I am a clumsy bastard, and I break things left and right, for all my careful craftsmanship - and the thing is, she's afraid of him too. I don't know if he ever hit her, in private when they were shouting in their room, when she'd come out crying and he'd slam the door and drive off somewhere... but there's that thing where he raises his hand and doesn't have to connect the slap. That, I saw. 

This is behind a friends-except filter [that is, the original Facebook post]. I feel really torn about that - because if my parents read it, and we need to have a talk, it's a talk I can have now. I feel like my Dad needs to own some of his shit. I've pretty much come to peace with it, but I feel like NOT talking about it is kind of like the mental-illness version of generational wealth. You don't talk about it, so your kids know you're screwed up but they don't understand why, and then get bitter and you drink, and you take it out on them, and THEN they know why, but by that point they can't talk about it either. Screw that, talk about it. I was a damned difficult child, I'm entirely sure... smart-ass with a smart mouth to match, and clumsy as a bull in a China shop... but it fucked me up a lot, in long-lasting ways that we never talked about in the Christ-centered family therapy after my brother tried to blow his brains out. 

So, yeah. I'm working on OK. I feel like it sucked away decades of potential, because it fucked me up a LOT, and OK has been a struggle, with multiple psychiatric diagnoses, terrible side-effects that yielded a diagnosis of "Treatment Resistant Depression" - and I don't lay it ALL at the feet of those drunken beatings, but I definitely feel like that's at the core of a lot of it. 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. This got surprisingly deep and upsetting, but it's all VERY true, and I feel like we need to talk about this shit more.