I was brought up in absolute chaos.

My mom suffered from severe Borderline Personality Disorder.

She was also a narcissist, addicted to alcohol, and very often she was extremely depressed and very anxious.

She absolutely hated life.

My dad was an alcoholic too, and he also was a raving narcissist.

I never felt safe and had no clue what the meaning of love was, because everything in our household was conditional.

The rules of life changed constantly, which was extremely confusing and scary, and the way my parents treated me created a vast sense of worthlessness in me that is still there.

Like my parents, I became an addict.

Like my parents, I can be viciously envious.

Like my parents, I have crazy mood swings (although not nearly as many as I used to have).

Like my parents, I tend to feel weirdly superior as a coping mechanism.

Like my parents, I’ve been disappointed in almost everything, including myself.

Like my parents, I can be incredibly black-and-white, judgmental, critical, and harsh.

And there’s so much more shit that happens inside of me, and so much that I never really acknowledged.

When the many therapists I encountered in my life heard the stories about my childhood, they were absolutely stunned by the severity of the madness, but I always responded in a very nonchalant way.

‘Yeah my mom and dad were pretty fucked up, but that was just the way it was, and I’m fine, haha!’

Only I’m not.

It’s not that I believe I’m fully broken and fucked up beyond repair, but I can be very dark and wildly disturbed.

As long as I can remember I’ve had periods of deep sorrow and anxiety, loneliness, and depression, topped off with a sense of crippling uselessness, and I still have them.

Especially after a period of raving enthusiasm I can seriously collapse and get lost in exhaustion, victimhood, and the idea that I am not good at anything, or even an intrinsically bad person.

I never really talked about it a lot because it felt like a weakness, something I shouldn’t be having as a ‘very spiritual person’ or a ‘successful transformational coach’.

But I realize now that I don’t need to hide that side of me.

My childhood was an absolute fucking mess, every day I’m reminded of that fact because of the gazillion habits and traits I developed, and sometimes it’s all still quite overwhelming.

That’s a part of me as a human, something I have to live with, something I need to accept.

I’ve survived my parents, and I survived hundreds of long periods where I felt absolutely horrible and hopeless.

Now and again it still happens, sometimes I still fall into that dreadful no man’s land, that painful fog, and I’m owning that.

I don’t see it as something being wrong with me.

I’m not running away from it.

It’s how my life has unfolded, it’s the result of how I learned to look at the world and my place in it, and it’s simply there.

I’m a good person, but I just never really believed that.

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(Photo by @callumskelton, for Unsplash)