Redemptive Trauma: Confession of a Defrocked Priest by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-25T18:56:57+00:00

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There were many nights in high school when I came home as a drunken emotional wreck at two in the morning. There was the night I came home with cuts all over my face from a faceplant into the sidewalk outside of Billy Cees. The night I came home almost unable to walk, because I’d had the shit kicked out of me. There was the night I came home and shattered the basement window trying to break in, and there was the night I came home utterly destroyed because the girl I was sleeping with had ended it with me.

I was seventeen years old and she was nineteen. She was beautiful and emotional and damaged just like I was. She stayed up all night on the phone with me –almost every night of the week–and kept me a secret from her older boyfriend. I never realized how wrong this situation was, because she said she was in love with us both. I look back now and can fully recognize how infatuated I was; I would have broken the law for her. She became my best friend, and then my lover, and then we practically set in as each other’s therapists. But when she had arrived at my family home a week earlier, in tears, my Mum said she needed help. She was cutting, and self-harming and she opened up about everything at our kitchen table. My Mum asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital and she said yes.

She broke it off with me when she got out. She needed to focus on her health and her actual boyfriend. I was more broken-hearted than I have ever been since, and I genuinely believed the world was coming to an end. My Dad tried to get me to suck it up and stop crying, telling me I was way better off without this headcase, while my Mum screamed from the other room that it was my fault for having sex with someone else’s girlfriend. I deserved the pain I felt.

I lived in shame, guilt, pain –so much the time– and I believed that I deeply deserved it too.

I understood that I was somehow defective or broken or just simply bad, and that’s why so much shit happened to me. It was the best explanation for why they thought I was so deviant and why I was always getting yelled at. It’s why I’d steal from their liquor cabinet or my Dad’s wallet and would always seem to attract a fist to punch in my face. I stopped caring about consequences, and started self-medicating at a very young age, because I didn’t think anything I could do, or not do, would actually change my fate. When you’re bad, you’re just bad. Not like a villain so much as a defective toy that wasn’t properly made.

Shame… guilt… pain. They formed me in deeper ways than faith or love at times. I believed, religiously, that I deserved what I got when I got it, regardless of whether I understood why or how.

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