Of course, just like in most every family, there is always some sort of fighting that goes on between the siblings, this was also the case with mine. My oldest sister is mentally handicapped, she is pretty normal for the most part, she just has the mindset of a child because of the handicap. I've always had the personality from a young age where I try to be the Peace Maker, I hated when anyone in my family would fight, I absolutely hated it and it terrified me. When I was young my oldest sister, and the sister right above me in age would always get into fights. The fights would always turn out to be a little more intense or get more out of hand because of the fact that my oldest sister was handicapped, so she lost control of her emotions easier. These fights would always take place when my parents would be gone, my sister LaKan would always try to instigate Annie to the point where she would get so frustrated and they'd start physically fighting. This always scared me, and especially since I was younger then them I was so terrified that they would hurt each other, and there was nothing I could do about it. One of them is 3 years older than me, and the other is 10 years older than me; but despite the age difference I would always try so hard to stop them, beg them not to hurt each other. It didn't make a difference, it was as if I was nonexistent, and it hurt me knowing that I could not control it, that I could not make them stop hurting each other. I would beg and scream and cry my eyes out, and it wouldn't make a difference.
It got to the point where I was terrified of having to be in the house without my parents at home, my parents would always go on a weekly date night on Friday nights and us kids would stay at the house. Everyone acted under control when they were there, so they saw no concern with leaving us there without them since some of my siblings were old enough to take care of the others. But they didn't know that these fights would happen every time they left, and I was too scared to tell them, out of fear of what my siblings might think or do. I would beg and beg my parent's not to go out, but of course they would still end up going, because they didn't know the real reason behind it. So instead I learned to run and hide from my fears. As soon as my parent's left for the night I would go directly outside as far as I could get away from the house and hide, hide, cry and wait as long as I could until it was safe to go back inside. Even though it was coming from a naive child's perspective, to me at that time these events were terrifying, and I was honestly scared that someone would end up getting killed because of it. The thought of that sent me into sheer fear and trauma. These events were also something that I did not realize affected me so much until it came up in a counseling visit only a year or so ago, and my psychologist finally explained how events like these in our childhood shape how we act and feel as adults. It made so much more sense after she pointed that out; I have always struggled so much with anxiety problems, I always feel terrified, many times there's not even anything I can tie the feelings back to, except for they are there, and I feel like the world is probably out to get me in some form, or some type of danger or stress is always lurking. This is also where I believe I developed the response of running away from my problems, anything that I was scared or unsure of, I ran from. I avoided all forms of uncomfortable conversations (or almost all conversations in general) I avoided any type of contention between people, if I even heard or felt the least amount of contention in the air, I would try my best to escape, I did not want to be anywhere near it because it sent me into trauma mode; when I felt like my depression was too much to bear I wanted to run from it by ending my life. I literally trained myself to RUN from my problems, there were a couple instances when I was a teenager that I ran away from home, because I felt like I just couldn't deal with the messes that were going on at the time, and my childlike mindset still told me that running was how to fix that.
I also feel like this is where I developed a lot of my feelings of feeling as though I am completely worthless and useless; no matter how hard I would try to help out and stop the fighting I could not do ANYTHING, and if anything I would end up making it worse. I felt like I had zero purpose, like I was one big problem. Especially because a lot of the times the fights would get started over me, like who "got to play with me" etc. so that made me feel like even more of a problem. I also felt like I had no voice, my siblings would not hear a word I said, and did not care that emotionally I was torn apart with their fighting, and I felt I had no voice to tell my parents the truth.
So by this point, my negative feelings towards myself were at an all time high, between the sexual abuse that went on from my brother, and the helplessness I felt towards my siblings always fighting. All ranging from the ages when I was between 6-10.
As silly as I'm sure this all sounds to an outsider, it effected my emotions greatly because of my personality. I felt like who I was, and what I was did not matter. In all honesty, I felt like a complete ghost, the only thing I felt I was good for was causing problems. The fact that I had the personality of a "peace maker" also hurt because that would cause my other siblings to get so upset with me, I always felt like I was the hated child, like I was the one getting people in trouble (even though I didn't mean to) The only person I felt like appreciated who I was, was my mom, but I felt like I was mute to her because I did not feel like I had the ability to talk because of all of the emotional chaos and confusion going on inside of my young brain. I hated the fact that everyone acted like I was the "perfect" child, like I was the "goody-good" because deep inside I felt like a complete mess, and I hated myself, I didn't feel perfect; I felt like I shouldn't even exist. I felt like a mess, one big useless mess.
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