About 6 months ago, I left a toxic job situation and emotionally abusive family in my hometown. It was difficult. Our entire country was being gaslit by the current president. That was hard enough. Imagine for a moment that you are experiencing the same denial of what you see and experience from your family and your work colleagues. It doesn't scale linearly, but by power. So, it wasn't three times harder for me. Rather it was like going from one dimension of difficulty to three; think going from navigating a number line where you have two choices to 3-dimensional space, where you have infinite choices. Add in that my father was also employed at the same workplace, and you have an interaction effect between two dimensions of dysfunction on top of everything else.
Background
Caveat: I want to get one thing straight before I write about any more about any of this. I love my family. I love them so much. If I didn't love them, I would cut them out of my life permanently in a heartbeat. That's what you're supposed to do with abusers. You're supposed to get away from them and never let them in your life again, even if that means changing your name and location and starting over. I ought to know. We used to volunteer with domestic abuse survivors. I remember my mother telling me that, in one of the families she worked with, the woman had to start a whole new career because there was no way to fake her postgraduate degree so that her partner couldn't track her that way. However, I love them. I just cannot be around them right now without further damage, so I am not going to do so, any more than I'd run on a stress fracture.
Symptoms: Before I go into what caused all this, I want to give the symptoms present of what I experienced. The thing about emotional abuse is that all you can really measure without the cooperation and understanding of the survivor is the outside of that abused person, how they express emotionally or mentally or physically what their psyche has suffered. They may not even know that what they are suffering are effects of abuse. They may, like me, blame themselves. So, I want you to read the following things, and if you see them, do not blame the person who exhibits them, but look for the root cause of their struggle. Above all, do not get angry at them for letting you know how they feel or for not being their usual self.
1) Physical: fatigue or energy loss, immune suppression or consistent sickness, sleep disruption, muscle twitches, inflammation and pain,
2) Visible mental: expressions of worthlessness and hopelessness, doom-and-gloom,
3) Often invisible mental: anxiety, depression, loss of self-esteem, suicidal ideation
4) At work: perfectionism, loss of productivity, inability to focus, short-term memory loss, feelings of inadequacy
Invisible emotional abuse
Here's the thing about abuse. The more visible the abuse is, the easier it is to identify and consequently for the survivor to get help and leave (not that leaving is ever easy, nor should a survivor ever be blamed for staying "too long"), but the more subtle the abuse, the less likely it is for people to identify it as abuse and leave, even though that kind of emotional abuse can be the most damaging in the long-term. It is also not something outsiders easily identify as abuse. By the time you get close enough to see the abuse, you are often enmeshed into the dysfunctional system.
The other issue with subtle abuse is that the abusers do not see themselves as abusers. My parents nor my colleagues certainly don't think of themselves as abusers, even though that is exactly what they have been to me. However, in both gender bias and other forms of emotional abuse, the people who self-identify as allies and helpers can also be the worst abusers because they usually can and will not take in any information in that might run counter to their identity, no matter how different their actions may be from their identity. Their egos and images of being "allies" or "good people" keep them from identifying, accepting, and changing their abusive habits. It is also important to note that how these abusers treat one person has no bearing on how they treat another. The thousands of people a murderer did not kill can definitely testify that they are still alive, but this is cold comfort for the person he did kill or those who loved them.
Recognition
When I was in it, I didn't realize how bad it was, any of it. I blamed myself for everything wrong in my life. I blamed myself for not being strong enough, for not being perfect enough, for not being adaptive enough, for not always doing just the right thing at the right time, for not having enough energy to deal with all of the abuse and still outperform all the males at my workplace. In both my work situation and my family situation, it took seeing the abusive behavior negatively affecting someone else for me to see the effect it was having on me.
At work, the lightbulb went off when I saw another woman who was amazingly talented who did three times as much as any man in our job better than they did start to doubt herself after a series of biased judgments made by males in our workplace. It was like the curtain was pulled aside, and I saw the little man pulling the levers. I already knew I was leaving. I had decided to resign because I knew what I was going through would kill me eventually if I stayed, and my husband and sibling convinced me that my job was not worth giving my life for. However, until I saw what was happening to my colleague, I blamed myself, not the toxic culture at my workplace. When I saw what happened to her, I realized it was never just me. I got mad and turned into what she always had been for me: an avenging angel and a voice of truth.
The same thing happened in my family. I almost lost someone I was really close to, one of the people I love most in the world, because of how destructive our family dysfunction was to them. I had called out the family dysfunction for years, but nobody had done anything significant except myself and the person who I almost lost. When I almost lost them, though, that was it. I was done. I told my family it was time to face and fix their dynamics, that I had spent years facing and fixing mine, only to come home and regress just to survive. I did not at that time have it in mind as an ultimatum, but, when they did not change, that is what it ended up being.
My Family's Emotional Resources
To their credit, my parents tried. They tried by having us do family therapy, but they ultimately failed, partly because they chose a bad therapist, but mainly because they were unwilling to take back, in the case of one of their children, or admit to, nevermind take back, in the case of the other, the emotional burden they placed on them. The process split my family into those overly attached to image and those for whom it is impossible to ignore the truth. My parents and one sibling have settled back into a delusion of normalcy. Myself and the other sibling have chosen to continue to face the truth because it is the only way for us to survive. I have chosen to break with my image-addicted family until they are willing to change. My other family member keeps a very limited relationship with them. I respect their decision, but I will suffer through gaslighting by nobody ever again.
In some ways, the whole process was a very appropriate microcosm of what has always happened in my family. My parents had three children. They used the resources from two of their children to take care of themselves and the third. Truth be told, at least in the case of one of my siblings and I, the net emotional resources generally flowed from us to our parents. Rather than getting emotional resources from my parents or being taught to provide my own, I was instead expected to give what I had to my mother and, less visibly, my father, not that it was ever enough. My life was never about my being a child, but about validating my mom's role as a mother and acting in such a way as to keep her moods stable enough so that it was possible for me to emotionally and physically survive. However, I could never tell her this because that is what her mother did to her, and the ultimate taboo was to tell my mother that she was like her mother.
I think about emotional resources in my family a lot, and I have come up with an effective analogy for what happened. I work in Goat Microscopy, so I will use an analogy from my work there. They did a study on the separate effects of mass and weight on how much energy it took for goats to walk or run. They loaded goats up with mass, up to their body mass. They then provided support to the goats by pulling upwards on them. Then they measured how much energy the goats expended. Of course, any time the goats were loaded with more weight than that which was supported, they expended more energy. For one of my siblings and I, my parents loaded us up with emotional baggage. They then gave us support, not nearly enough to offset the added baggage, but support nonetheless. My other sibling got hardly any baggage in comparison, but also got very little support until recently. And, not having as much baggage, that sibling doesn't recognize it very well, at least not in their family members, but could see the support we got. So, they resent us for what they see us as getting, even though their net load was far smaller. It's unfair, if you know the whole story, but understandable if you only see what they could. My parents see themselves as providing support, but they do not, at least not more support than they give baggage.
Giving and Taking
One of the things I found out by going through these gaslighting recognition processes together is that many baby boomers, particularly male baby boomers, severely overestimate what they give to and severely underestimate what they take from those around them. I remember there was one day when I was in my administrative work office and three of my male baby boomer colleagues were talking about which house and country they were going to live in for retirement. I had just had an interaction with millennials who were struggling to pay for college and rent by working two or three jobs during the semester. Note: I'm too old to be a millennial, but my parents are on the tail end of the baby boom generation. These were the same baby boomers who consistently called millennials entitled. The juxtaposition of the utter entitlement of these baby boomers and the insane work-ridden balancing act of the millennials was stark and the lack of recognition of this disparity by the baby boomers flabbergasting, but neither was an isolated incident.
These were men who were supposed to be responsible for mentoring me but did little but tell me things I could find in the job description I applied for. One reason I took this job is because it specifically offered a mentoring program, but the only mentoring I received was from someone in a different area and the utterly overworked and underappreciated females in my area. My male baby boomer colleagues are dead weight in the ways that matter. With one exception, all of my male baby boomer colleagues combined have less self-awareness than a pile of rocks, which makes them completely unqualified to work with others to any degree. These men may have known something about Goat Microscopy at one point, but have not kept up with changes in the field and have no idea how to share ideas, how to recognize and listen to someone else's greater knowledge, how to see someone else's perspective, how to communicate effectively, or how to be decent, aware human beings who recognize and account for their intense bias. Most of all, they think they know more than they actually do, and are unwilling to accept when others know better.
Honestly, I feel similarly about my parents in terms of what they gave versus what they took. My parents genuinely wanted better for us than they had, but they failed utterly at giving us that because they were not willing or able to face their own biggest problems. Rather than work through them, they passed them on to us. Parents, your children are not your trauma donkeys or your expectation mules. Deal with that stuff yourself, preferably before your children's time of intense neural development. If you have not worked through your own trauma or dealt with your own unfulfilled aspirations, you have no business having children and absolutely none raising them. The dual covert but clear expectations of reaching the intellectual heights my mother could have had she not been stymied by sexism and not outperforming my father put me in a catch-22. My mother is far smarter than my father. My father is better at working within the system because he has pretty much every privilege possible, but my mom is a creative genius who could have changed the world if she could have had a wife rather than having to be one. It was literally impossible for me to fulfill both of my parents' expectations. Being expected to do that while also
1) validating my mother's choice to forgo her own education for ours by overachieving
2) fulfilling my mother's need for a close female familial relationship even though I am intensely introverted
3) providing for my dad's need to prove himself a capable male relative of a female after what happened to his sister and mother
4) carrying both my mother's trauma from feeling worthless growing up and her always intense but not often acknowledged feelings
5) carrying my father's trauma from losing his sister to suicide and the emotions he could not express
6) all while pushing through gender bias
and it was pretty much the emotional equivalent of being a 100 lb person carrying a 200 lb pack and trying to squeeze myself through a crack that was too small for my body, never mind my body with a pack.
Where I am Now
I am recovering now. I am not just surviving day to day like I was while being gaslit by everyone around me, but I am definitely not back to normal. It is rather like giving more than you thought you had to get through a particularly difficult race, and then having to spend time recovering afterwards. Physically, I keep getting and staying sick. I finally went to the doctor and told her a heavily censored version of what had happened to me. She estimates it will be at least a year before I am physically back to normal. Until then, fatigue and illness are going to be constant companions. The kind of complex emotional trauma I went through, of my parents and my colleagues saying they believed one thing and acting completely differently, of offloading the baggage they could not deal with on me, of expecting me to take care of their needs, that will take years. Fortunately, I am privileged. I have a good trauma-trained therapist and a great friend who happens to treat just this kind of trauma in kids who has been a lifesaver. It will take time, but I have come this far. I am not giving up now. In a just world, my biased colleagues would be tired and sick, not me, but the world is rarely just.
Conclusion
My parents may have provided me with an excellent intellectual education and given me wonderful, healthy food, but when it came to emotional resources, they took more than they gave. I would rather be a happy imbecile than the "brilliant but troubled" person I'm often labeled. Imagine for a moment if my parents had taken more than they gave physically, if they had given me food but then expected me to carry their heavy baggage for so long that I burned more calories than they gave me, what child services would be empowered to do. Now remember that emotional abuse is far more damaging than physical abuse. Think long and hard before you have kids about what resources you have because if you do not have sufficient resources, you should not have children.
As for male baby boomers, particularly those in Goat Microscopy, just because you have always received the most does not mean that you ever deserved it. With few exceptions, you generally have little to no capacity for emotional processing. You have little to no self-awareness. You have virtually no recognition of your privilege or bias and have done pretty much nothing to compensate for it. Your professional experience over the last 40 years means very little in a world in which technology changes on a double exponential so that only the last 5-10 really matter. You need to find some humility, take some responsibility for wrecking the environment, the country's economy, and the country's infrastructure for your children and grandchildren, and do some significant work to make up for the damage your bias, selfishness, arrogance, and greed have done. Nobody is unbiased, but everyone is responsible for identifying, admitting to, and counteracting their bias. Recognize who you actually are, not who you have always thought you were, and work to atone for it.
I may seem harsh, but I really only ask five things of people, myself most of all: listen, be honest with yourself and others, admit when you are wrong, learn from your mistakes, and work to improve. Neither the people I was raised by nor the men I worked with were capable of doing so.