Black, White, and a crap-load of Grey

"Things are not just black and white". I have heard this from counselors, psychologists and spiritual teachers over my extensive career in being a mental health patient. I still struggle with this analogy and have to remind myself frequently that nothing is all bad or all good.

Your brain doesn't naturally think like that though. I really have to work hard to retrain in my case, decades of thinking this way. Those brain wave ruts are so deep you need a lift and PPE to get those ruts moved to a healthier path of thinking.

I am a master at black and white thinking. Pertaining to myself, others, and life situations. Perception is reality is how I have lived 99% of my life, and that things have have happened in my life, and to me, are either black (one way, usually negative), or white (usually a positive thing). I want to just say this has nothing to do with race- it's just how my mind has processed good and bad for the last 48 years. It could be pink and green, or blue and orange. But when in therapy, the professionals call it back and white thinking.

I have had many an argument, even with my spiritual counselors over events in my life proving that I am not good, or good enough. For the looooooooooongest time I could not wrap my head around how I wasn't bad or good enough when all of the situations or events in my life clearly prove that I am the common denominator.

• My mother leaves when I am two and leaves me to be raised by my father who was/is a very angry and scary man. = I am not good enough for my mother to want me, and punishment for not being good enough is to live the next 17 years with your drill sargent father.

• At age 3, dad and I move across the county (dad won custody) so dad has better paying work to put both of us in a better place financially. = I must be really bad to be taken away from my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins whom I loved dearly.

  
  

• Age 3 to 8, living with a loving but strict and scary/angry father. (Is the loving part some "grey" maybe? Got spanked everytime I did something bad, I am sure just like many of my fellow Gen X 'ers. But also forced to stand in the corner of my room for entire weekends, only allowed to pee and eat some bread and a glass of milk. The silent treatment was almost worse. Most times I didnt know what I had done so I woukd apologize just to keep the peace.

  
  

• My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 8. I loved him sooooooooo much. My Poppy. I didn't really understand death then, but I knew he wasn't coming back. But he was someone else I loved that left my life and for a while didn't understand why.

• The summer I turned 12, the elderly man who lived 3 houses down from the acreage where I lived, sexually molested me. It went to court (along with my friend who was assaulted too, and pervman was let off due to "lack of evidence". Judicial system left me and my friend without any type of justice. Again, not good enough.

• The summer I turned 15, (went back to Nova Scotia for the summer to visit my mom and family), my great great uncle sexually molested me. When I told my mother, she admitted he had done the same thing to her when she was a kid. The only person she told was her sister (my aunt). I was told not to tell anyone- family or RCMP, because it would "tear the family apart". So I didn't tell anyone for nearly 30 years, because I put my mother on the pedestal for so long, and my 15 year old self didn't want to be responsible for breaking up the family.

  
  

  About 7 years ago I watched a documentary called "Rewind", done by a brave man named Sasha. He brings out into the light the sexual abuse he and his sister endured from their uncle when they were kids. When Sasha finally told his dad, it was revealed that Sasha's uncle and another of his dad's bothers sexually assaulted his dad when his dad was young. It was tragic to watch and know the sexual violence at least three people in the same family have lived with, but it was also heart-felt to see Sasha, his sister and their father work through this together.

It wasn't until I saw that documentary that I realized what my mother did by asking me to keep silent was so wrong. She sent me to visit this great uncle that she knew was a pedophile. And then told me to not tell a soul. I had thought about telling my father when I returned home from Nova Scotia that summer, but my dad really liked and was friends with my great uncle. I was afraid of making my dad mad for one, but I had also witnessed what he did to old neighbor-perv 2 years earlier when dad found out about my assault. He drove around following this old man in dad's big scary military like vehicle, as oldperv tried to escape once he jad heard the cops were coming. My father may have been emotionally abusive to me, but he was HELLA protective of me as well.

So another "fact" remained from this situation: I still was not good enough of a kid for my mother to protect me from a known child pedophile.

• I moved away from home at age 19 to get out from underneath my dad's iron thumb. I moved in with then boyfriend and father of my first baby. Long story short, I got pregnant and had a baby boy 6 weeks before my 21st birthday. Our son was born with many challenges, the main being Vacterl Syndrome. He spent 8 weeks in NICU before he could come home, and had surgery at just two days old. (I am sure I will get deeper into my first born at a later date). My boyfriend was in the army and doing courses to join the reg force and was out of town a good portion of the first 8 months of baby's life. I have never and never will hold that against him, as some people over the years have asked. He fought bravely for our country and was badly injured years later in active duty over seas. He also raised our son. I don't think he knows how proud I am of him, despite everything we went through together.

  There was some infidelity on his part while in training for reg force and it was something I could not forgive at that time. I ended things just before our son's 1st birthday. So in my mind, I wasn't good enough for him, and my body wasn't good enough to grow a healthy baby.

  
  

• After I met my now husband we got pregnant and had our daughter. Got married, had another little boy. We survived two separations. We still had a lot of love to give.

And now—almost 27 years together, 21 married—we are happy.

Actually happy.

Not perfect.

But real.

For decades, every event in my life reinforced the same belief:

I am not good enough.

It took years—therapy, classes, spiritual work—for me to even consider another possibility:

That I wasn’t the only factor in those situations.

That other people made choices too.

That harm done to me was not a reflection of my worth.

I still struggle with the grey.

I still have to catch myself when I slip into those old ruts.

But I’m learning—slowly—that people are not all good or all bad.

Including me.

We are complicated. Messy. Human.

We make mistakes. We hurt people. We heal. We grow.

And maybe—just maybe—being “enough” was never something I had to earn in the first place.

I see the grey more now.

Not easily. Not naturally.

But intentionally.

And today, I can say something I never believed for most of my life:

I could be enough.