Why Abandonment is an ACE

Robert and Cissy,

Trying to catch up and this school semester is winding down...Robert, thank you SO much for sharing your family history and personal story.  You are right: our circumstances do not have to match in order for us to understand each other's trauma and pain.  Your resilience is amazing and I agree: this is a wonderful place of connection, understanding, and compassion.  My doctor once told me that if we all threw our stories out on the street for everyone else to see and know, chances are, we'd pick up our OWN story and continue on with it because it's what we know and how we lived.  I tend to agree.  As horrific as your story sounds, you own it.  And in owning it, that empowers you to change your life now.  I feel the same way.  As a counselor-in-training, I believe that once we own our story, it empowers us to change.  Again thank you so much for the sharing.  Your struggles were mighty and yet here you are today doing wonderful work. Brenda

Cissy,

     I seem to recall some mention, somewhere, about the greater challenge, when children deal with the death of "the opposite sex parent". It may not be "greater challenge", but I think you've addressed some of the tasks you dealt with, in both your father's absence from your life during childhood, and with his passing under those circumstances.

Thank You, Christine Cissy White.

The night before my mother took her own life, she came out in the backyard to talk to my sister and I. I looked at the flowers in the garden she tended meticulously. My mother said she wanted to apologize for being such a lousy mother. I said: "It sounds like you're going away, and I don't believe you'd do that, so I refuse to forgive you." The following morning as my father was preparing to take me to summer school in the car, I looked in the back of the car, and saw his on-duty gun belt with his duty pistol in it. I asked him why his gun was in the car. We both knew he had two handguns: his duty gun, and his off-duty gun. His off-duty gun wasn't there. He never answered my question. Later, when I returned from summer school [morning session]...I found my mother, in bed, with my father's off-duty handgun in one hand, and the Bible in her other hand...I'll defer on describing the gory details. I went downstairs and stoically called the police to report what I'd seen, and I went outside to wait, and prevent my younger sister from seeing what I saw. I had already called my father's second job, trying to reach him, but couldn't. (In NY State, it was a felony then, to aid or abet a suicide attempt, but apparently nobody thought a [politically appointed] Deputy Sheriff would do such a thing. .... 

My father remarried one month and twenty days later, to a woman who introduced herself to me, at age 15, as having had an affair for three years with my father....(Should "Betrayal Trauma" be considered an ACE?).... Four and a half months later, I moved out of my father and stepmother's 'house' (as opposed to 'home')....to a very liberal state-run youth home, and transferred high schools....

     If I used the current World Health Organization ACE International Questionaire, I'd have an ACE score of at least 6, and that doesn't include the "betrayal trauma" issue, I don't believe. Nor would it include the toxic stress of being an "Emancipated Minor" working only part time to pay for my apartment, in the last half of my senior year in High School---as the State-run Youth Home asked me to leave after two years--four months before I graduated from high school. If we don't count "Medical Trauma" from an injury, and the "betrayal trauma" of discovering my father had taken me off his health insurance--thankfully, the youth home staff saw to it that he covered my medical bill.

I was fortunate to have a significant [functional] "Extended Family" to enhance my "Resilience Score". Although this is still a "rough draft" of just a part of a "cohesive narrative". 

Cissy, I am thankful for your inspiration to write, and share publicly. I am thankful for ACEsConnection being an appropriate forum for such sharing. I am thankful today is Thanksgiving Day, for without this forum, and inspiration, a suitable opportunity to express my gratitude, and release some of my guilt for not having prevented my mother's suicide (aha-was this a contributing factor to my "learned helplessness"?), and why I used to shut down emotionally every year just before Mother's Day, through to the anniversary date of her suicide....for twenty-eight years--until I did EMDR and the flashbacks of her suicide stopped, and I'm grateful to Francine Shapiro for "discovering and developing EMDR", and for Paulsen for further developing the EMDR protocols to address DT/ET (Developmental Trauma/Early Trauma), AND I'M GRATEFUL to all the members and staff of ACEsConnection for a multitude of reasons: A sense of community and connectedness to people with shared goals, a sense of connectedness to all of you....THANK YOU.