Confronting the Fear of Becoming My Abuser: A Journey Through Trauma and Healing

a poem

Tw: trauma.

What scares me the most about getting older is usually related to trauma.

I’m scared that I’ll look like the mother who so created fear in my every day, creating such self-loathing. I fear looking into the mirror and seeing likeness of her, despite not being her. That’s the thing about genes, you cannot avoid having an aspect of an abuser as part of you; it cannot truly be cut out of your life.

My dad justified a lot of the abuse by saying: “you’ll understand when you’re older”, or “you’re just tantrumming about this because you’re young and you don’t understand how wrong you are”. In some ways, these words were worse than the abuse itself, because it kept me there, thinking I deserved it. It made me doubt and internalize my mom’s physical abuse as something I deserved, because I got one question wrong despite getting an A+. It made me doubt and internalize my mom’s emotional abuse if my bus was 2 minutes late due to a snowstorm, “because she was worried about my safety”. It forms the foundation of being half a decade out of that abusive situation and thinking — did I make the wrong choice?

Luckily, on most days I can step back and think through these emotions. I think there’s still a knee jerk part of me that will always be there, where I fear that looking like someone means I am as terrible as that someone; where I fear that my choice to leave an…