Quiet ones
While in respite, the respite house owner/carer turned to me and directly asked me how I was. It had been a hectic day with the other women in respite acting out in various ways, meanwhile we’d been quietly in our room doing art and drinking water. The question was asked directly, and we deflected it nicely by saying that we were fine. It was her follow up statement that threw me, and cut to the core of our issues while growing up – “It’s always the quiet ones who get overlooked”. I was that quiet one. I always have been. I actively become quiet when things are bad with my mental health or if people are hurting me. It’s one of the ways to become invisible, to become so quiet that no one sees you. If no one sees you, then no one can hurt you and no one can ask you difficult questions. So, we became very good at being quiet and flying under the radar. The respite carer knew this technique…
When we relayed this incident to the mother after we’d come out of respite, we couldn’t do it without tearing up… The carer “saw us” in that brief moment of asking the how we were. In contrast, when telling the mother, she looked away, uncomfortable with the situation and the tears in my eyes. I try not to blame my mother for her reactions, she had tough parenting and has never been in therapy long enough to change the habits of being an absentee parent herself. She does try to show she cares in various ways, they’re just not very productive or meaningful. Instead of apologising for the oversights in the past, she washes my windows…
We remain that quiet one. We do this in therapy as well. Liz has now realised the extent of our avoidance and quietness during therapy. Our resolve for the New Year is to try and tease out the anger that sits within the system. In many ways I don’t mind if this happens, I’m so out of touch with the anger that I don’t recognise it as existing. But, at times when I do get a sense of the anger being there, it terrifies me to think that we will be looking at it more closely. It’s something that has been tucked away and growing for the last 30 odd years, I’m not quite sure what it will look like when we do lift the lid. Liz assures me that we will lift the lid very slowly and with great care…
