Scared Selfless

by Michelle Stevens, PhD

  While not every teenage rebellion can be blamed on a bad childhood, serious problems are often a delayed response to earlier trauma. The delay happens because as kids reach adolescence their brains undergo a big shift in cognitive development. Unlike children, teens are able to think and reason abstractly. This allows them to analyze situations in ways they weren’t able to before. Suddenly, they are able to reason, think hypothetically, and grasp cause and effect. They also gain the ability to reflect on their lives. Becoming introspective, adolescents are able to see for the first time how traumatic childhood experiences adversely affected them. And just like that, an angry teen emerges.

  I was an angry teenager. But like most troubled kids, I was unable to effectively express my ire to the people who had wronged me. Instead, I felt rage toward the whole world. I hated everyone—my parents, every adult who never helped me, every kid who didn’t recognize my pain. I especially hated people my own age who seemed to come from normal families. I resented how their parents gave them love and attention and support, how life was so fucking easy for them.

  In my experience, most kids who don’t feel enough love and nurturance carry around this kind of inner rage—a rage that often lasts throughout adulthood. The people who should have cared for them didn’t. The lesson to take away: All people are shit. This is why troubled youth walk around with chips on their shoulders and why they are so hard to help.

  Early on, they learned that people can’t be trusted. They often spend the rest of their lives embracing this damaging belief. Seeing the world through shit-colored glasses, they are hypersensitive to every possible slight or judgment, and they believe anyone friendly or kind must have an ulterior motive. How does one ever find help or love with this mind-set? Possible helpers are viewed with suspicion and ultimately pushed away. This reinforces the notion that no one will ever care enough. “People are shit” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Despite all this, wounded people desperately want and need love. But, terrified to trust, they constantly do things to test and sabotage their relationships. This push-pull dance is well-known to anyone who’s ever been close to a victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. In its most extreme form, it’s the hallmark feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD), a diagnosis that describes people who routinely have “intense, unstable, and conflicted close relationships, marked by mistrust, neediness, and anxious preoccupation with real or imagined abandonment.” Those who suffer from BPD are hypersensitive to perceived slights from others and can grow notoriously hostile when they feel dissed. Within the mental health field, borderline patients have a reputation for being particularly hard to treat because they come off as demanding, manipulative, and difficult. Underneath all the shenanigans, though, is primal pain. Like a wounded animal on the side of the road, the person with BPD lashes out self-protectively at anyone who tries to help.

  While I never suffered a full-blown case of BPD, I definitely had a hard time with relationships. I didn’t trust people. At all. But back then I didn’t know it. How can you know you’re missing something if you don’t know what that something is? Desperately wanting a normal life, I started out high school pursuing the usual goals of adolescence. I tried to make friends, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities.

  In the beginning, things seemed to work out. I got into honors classes, earned the leads in school plays, and gained acceptance to elite musical groups. As a result, I became well known and had my pick of friends.

  But every success in every arena always ended badly. Usually, this was because someone made me feel slighted or hurt, and I lashed out—often at my own expense. For instance, I befriended two girls, and the three of us had great fun. We went shopping together, hung out at one another’s houses, and sat together at lunch. These were kind and caring girls; neither ever acted maliciously toward me.

  One day, one of the girls referred to the other as her “best” friend. It was an offhand comment, certainly not meant to cause harm. But harm me it did. I felt degraded, jealous, and filled with rage. I never expressed any of these feelings to my friends, never gave them a chance to make amends. (At the time, it didn’t even occur to me that I could do such things.) Instead, in order to protect myself, I decided the girls couldn’t be trusted and never spoke to either of them again.

  In addition to ditching good friends, I also had a habit of giving up prime opportunities. For example, after three years of toiling away as a staff writer on the school weekly, I’d been awarded the job of features editor. This was a key position for my future, as I would soon be applying to college writing programs.

  During the first few weeks of the semester, I made friends with my new editor in chief and a romance started to develop. We went on a few dates, but Mr. Editor never let it get serious. In the kindest way possible, he broke it to me that he’d begun a relationship with the news editor instead. While they were both decent people who tried not to hurt me unnecessarily, I felt betrayed nonetheless. Unable to handle rejection, I quit the newspaper. College applications be damned.

  Little by little, I gave up all of my precious extracurricular activities because I couldn’t handle even the most minor slights. I’d competed in the New Jersey Teen Arts Festival for years and routinely placed as a top singer in the state. One year I decided to perform the song “Nothing” from A Chorus Line, not realizing that part of the R-rated lyric was unacceptable. After my performance, the music teacher reprimanded me harshly for “embarrassing” her. Mortified, I hid under a grand piano for a few hours. At the age of fifteen, I vowed never to compete as a singer again.

  As a junior, I was cast as the lead in The Bad Seed. This was a plum part in the main school play, so I was very, very proud. Determined to behave like a professional actress, I learned all my lines two days after getting the script and never missed a single rehearsal. Opening night was on a Friday. That morning I could feel a cold coming on. Not wanting to be sick for the weekend performances, I stayed home from school. In the evening, I went backstage as scheduled for costumes and makeup. When it came time for the director’s opening-night pep speech, I was blindsided by a public chastising. Apparently, my photo from the play had been on the front page of the school paper that day and some alert secretary had noticed. There was a rule at the school, meant for athletes, that barred students from playing on any day they were absent. Massive drama ensued while the entire administration tried to decide if I should be allowed to perform in the play. I was unaware of all of this. The director, an English teacher, didn’t call me to ask what was going on. He just laid into me that night in front of the whole cast. I was so shocked and shamed that I burst into tears and could barely catch my breath. I went on that night despite the fact that I wanted to crawl into a hole. I went on for the second performance too, and people said I was good. But I never acted again. Never. There was no way in hell I was going to let myself get hurt like that again.

  The thoughtless ways these teachers shamed me were reprehensible, and I hope to God none of my former students have any stories like that about me. Being publicly criticized at a proud moment when one is expecting praise is bound to mess with anyone’s head. The difference between a wounded person like me and a healthy person is that I could never let any slight go. The English teacher later apologized (kind of), and that music teacher was usually one of my biggest advocates. But none of that mattered. For survivors of abuse, who you trust is a matter of survival. It’s black-and-white. There can be no apologies. There can be no gray. There are no exceptions.

  Had I enjoyed a better home life, perhaps I could’ve talked out my feelings and weathered these episodes in less damaging and eduring ways. But my parents were MIA in the “Ozzie and Harriet Sage Advice” department—or any other department, for that matter. Kids who don’t have the support of a loving family are continually disadvantaged in innumerable ways. But I don’t think I truly realized I was disadvantaged until I took a cl
ass in stagecraft.

  It was junior year, and I was totally stoked. Stagecraft was an elective, one I’d been looking forward to for years. We were going to learn about lights and costumes and sets and direction. I loved the theater and was hoping to make a life in it. So this class was important for me. Our first assignment was to create a shadow box—a miniature wooden stage complete with backstage walls and a fly space. Terribly eager, I rushed home from the bus that first day and went straight to work. Following the directions, I measured and cut four squares of wood. After nailing them together, I used a knife to make notches in the top for dowels. I got no help from my parents on this project. It never occurred to me to ask, and they wouldn’t have helped anyway. I couldn’t drive and had no money to go to a hardware store. I used what I could find around the house. But I’d followed the instructions, and I thought it looked damned good.

  When I took it to school a few days later, it didn’t look anything like the other kids’. They’d all used thin, graceful balsa, while I’d used thick, clumsy plywood. The balsa stages were all perfectly cut and glued together by dads who clearly knew what they were doing while my ugly stage was misshapen—the result of a teenager using a hacksaw for the first time. When the grades were given out, all the balsas got As, while my monstrosity received a C. I was devastated and deeply enraged. All the other kids freely admitted that their dads had made their projects. For the first time in my life, I really understood that I was a victim of deprivation and injustice.

  On the next assignment, I vowed to level the playing field. We had to design a series of costumes and present them as painted sketches. Unfortunately, I can’t draw or paint although I’ve always had an eye for fashion. I asked the teacher if I could design the costumes and get an artist friend to render them. She said no. I tried to abide by this, but my attempts at drawing drew laughter from the class. Feeling the situation was unfair, I asked my artist friend to paint the rest of my designs.

  When I handed in the assignment, the teacher immediately knew the work wasn’t mine. She confronted me, but I denied it. Out for blood, she officially accused me of cheating and plagiarism, triggering a meeting with the principal and guidance counselor. Since I was in danger of suspension, my parents were notified. They didn’t seem to care, and they didn’t accompany me to the disciplinary shindig. I sat alone facing the firing squad and freely admitted to my sins. But I expressed no remorse. Why would I? I didn’t feel I’d done anything wrong. I couldn’t explain about the plywood or the C or the injustice. I didn’t have words for all that back then. When they tried to disgrace me, I refused to let them.

  “I don’t really care what you people think,” I told them.

  Despite my brazen defiance—or perhaps because of it—I was spared suspension and was simply kicked out of the class.

  That was little consolation as I’d once again lost something that mattered to me.

  The lesson I learned?

  People are shit indeed.

  —

  EVEN AFTER MANY YEARS and much therapy, remembering unkind teachers still stings. I think that’s why I became an educator and, later, a therapist—because I wanted to give teens and young adults the understanding I never received. Troubled kids need encouragement, support, and guidance. They need people to notice their strengths, teach them how to set goals, and believe in their futures. They need role models to entice them toward happy, healthy, productive lives.

  Teachers, coaches, and other youth mentors are the best hope for troubled teens. But in order to help, they have to see past the teenage shell of protective anger. Too often adults can’t see past it. They take the yelling, lying, stealing, cheating at face value and dub the kid a “sociopath” or some other hopeless label. I guess it’s easier to judge bad behavior than take the time to understand the pain causing it.

  Feeling judged and misunderstood was the story of my life in high school. To this day, I’m dumbfounded by the lengths to which teachers went to avoid making a personal connection and outraged by how quick they were to judge me. In my sophomore or junior year, I took a creative writing class, another highly anticipated elective. In it, we were told to write a fictional story. Mine was about a fifteen-year-old rebel girl fighting against a sadistic tyrant who rapes, beats, and kills a different woman every night. (My subconscious was already trying to put my story on the page.) When the tyrant captures the rebel, he has her brought to his bedroom dressed in a virginal white nightgown and handcuffed to the bed. The two engage in some verbal sparring before the tyrant loses his temper and beats her. Eventually, the girl begs for mercy. Her submission softens the tyrant, who begins to caress her in soft, sexual ways. The girl expresses gratitude to her abuser, and the two begin to make love.

  If a fifteen-year-old student handed me a story like that, I’d be concerned, to say the least. Graphic S/M novels are not a usual genre for adolescent girls. So I would wonder if something terrible was going on at home. Suspecting this, I’d take extra care with the student—engaging her in conversation, trying to get her to open up. Understanding that this girl probably shoulders a terrible burden, I’d try to be especially nice so as not to make her life any worse. I would also immediately notify her counselor and the school psychologist.

  My teacher never did any of that. Instead, she wrote a brief comment to express her disapproval.

  Michelle, this story is well written, but it is a bit frightening because it reads like a classic defense of a wife abuser. It almost defends the man who gets sexual pleasure out of beating a woman, and it portrays the woman as being the sick person who loves it.

  Personally, I think ignoring signs of the assault and rape of a young girl is what’s “sick.”

  —

  MY TEACHERS’ lack of compassion becomes far sicker when you realize that by the time I was a junior they all knew my father was a child molester! How did they know? Because in the spring of 1985 Gary Lundquist was charged with three counts of child molestation.

  The whole thing started quietly. After one little girl made an accusation, the prosecutor’s office in our small town conducted a discreet investigation. They found two other girls who were willing to come forward and testify. All three victims were former students at my father’s school.

  I vividly remember the day I learned Gary was in trouble. I got home from school to find my father and mother pacing the living room. I immediately knew something was wrong because they both should have been at work. The minute I walked in, my mother hysterically announced the news. My father had been indicted and needed to present himself at the police station immediately for formal arrest. They’d waited until I got home, so I could ride along.

  At the police station, I watched my father give fingerprints and get mug shots. Meanwhile, in the waiting room, my mother ranted about the financial ruin that was sure to befall us if he went to jail. We would lose the house, the cars, everything. We’d be out on the street.

  Once my father’s processing was complete and he’d posted bail, our family walked across the street to meet with a defense attorney. Because the victims were minors, only their birth dates were listed in the police report—no names. The lawyer feared this might hinder a defense, but Gary was able to provide a name for each victim based solely on the accusation and birth date. When the attorney asked my father about the validity of the charges, Gary denied everything. Instead, he portrayed the whole investigation as a witch hunt propagated by the school board to retaliate for his work on behalf of the teachers’ union.

  According to former FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, child molesters who are arrested typically attack “the reputation and personal life of the investigating officer; attack the motives of the prosecutor; claim the case is selective prosecution or a witch hunt.” Gary’s all-too-common defense became the official family line.

  The next day at school, I was summoned from class by a guidance counselor. She ushered me into a dark teache
rs’ lounge and instructed me to take a seat at the conference table. Already seated was a woman I didn’t know. She stood up and introduced herself as the investigator on my father’s case. She asked if I was aware of the charges pending against him.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was there when he got arrested yesterday.”

  “And is there anything you want to tell me?” she asked matter-of-factly.

  The question made me anxious. “I . . . I don’t know what you mean . . .”

  “Well”—she stared at me—“has he ever done anything to you?”

  The room seemed to grow dim.

  I started to feel fuzzy. I wanted out of there.

  “Michelle,” the woman pressed on. “Has your father ever done anything to you that you want to tell me about?”

  “N-n-no,” I stammered. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  This seemed to agitate the lady. “You know, Michelle, if there’s something you want to tell me, you really need to do it now.”

  “I don’t have anything to say.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  And the truth is: At this point in time, I didn’t. My dissociative amnesia was still in full force. All I knew at that moment was a palpitating heart, pressure in my head, the dim lights growing darker and about to go pitch-black. These are telltale signs of panic. It was a panic I felt any time my denial system was threatened and my good-girl identity was in danger of learning the truth about my life.

  “Can I go now?” I whispered, as my eyes scanned the floor, the walls—anything but the lady’s face.

  “Yes.” The woman sighed. “If you want to . . . But if you ever want to tell me anything, just call.”

  She handed me her card. I took it with a trembling hand and raced out of the room.

  I was terrified.

  —

  KNOWING WHAT I KNOW NOW, I’m perplexed by the way the investigator chose to question a teenage witness. On the day she came to talk to me, she already knew Gary was a child molester. (He also had a prior conviction in another state on a weapons charge.) Three girls had accused him; it wasn’t much of a stretch to presume he had molested me too. Yet to think I would simply disclose such information to a total stranger on our first meeting was ludicrous.