Stephanie Gagos - My Voice of Truth

I am eleven as I sit in the large hairdresser’s chair watching as he chops off my black, thick hair. My mother has instructed him to cut it into a D.A style, much like Fonzie in Happy Days. By this time I am aware of my appearance, aware of boys and I desperately want to look pretty. She has recently become aware of this and it is what motivates her on this day to make such a drastic change to my appearance. He cuts and cuts, I cringe as chunks of my dark hair gently fall to the checkerboard floor.

I am mortified. He is cutting off so much more than my hair.

She smirks as the last of my long hair slides down the black cape around me. I sit blankly staring at the mirror; I have now retreated into a familiar numbness. I am accustomed to disconnecting in this way. It is what saves me. I use it often when she beats me. It is quite effective when she begins her tirades about how stupid and weak I am and how the Devil himself lives inside of me, but mostly I use it when men molest me.

By this time the first four have come and gone. The chronic trauma in my life has conditioned my mind in ways that I have yet to discover. My mother is the main orchestrator of this conditioning; her words, slaps, punches and kicks creating in me mechanisms I would use to cope and thinking I would use to live. I eventually become “accustomed” to abuse, it becomes what I expect to receive.

The above incident was just one time in a series of repeated cruelties and abuse. It is a mere fraction of what my mother would do to me on a physical and emotional level and it is this repeated abuse that created much of my conditioning.

The following is a small list of the ways I was conditioned by the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of my childhood. By recognizing and understanding how I was altered, I can now create the necessary changes in my mind and in my life.

I was conditioned to expect abuse, pain, and danger. As an adult this translated to phobias and generalized anxiety. I was always waiting for the bomb to drop. When I was betrayed in my marriage, I accepted it because it was part of my “normal”.
I was conditioned to believe that beauty was sinful, that sexuality was evil and dirty. I have spent years covering up anything that is attractive by shielding myself with weight, dressing down, trying to be invisible and not attract male attention. I have been very successful at it.
I was conditioned to sit still and never tell as men abused my body. I knew well how to keep secrets. Today sexually i am somewhat still. I still keep secrets to protect others.
I was conditioned to believe that I was bad and at fault and that is why bad things happened to me. It was repeated over and over to me daily and so each time something went wrong later in life I blamed myself. Any verbal conflicts would bring up a feeling of having done something wrong, of being bad, even if I was just standing up for myself, and even if I was “right”.
My mother would force affection on me after beatings, forcing me to kiss her. My personal space was never personal and so my body was never my own. Boundaries did not exist; anyone could come at any moment and touch it, slap it, kick it, violate it.I learned to go away in my mind and detach from my body.
I was conditioned to be uncomfortable with closeness and affection. Physical closeness often meant something sexual in my childhood world. Affection was loaded with guilt and shame. It rarely felt good and therefore as an adult I was conditioned to avoid it. There was no sense of healthy/not healthy, it was all bad and uncomfortable for me, even when coming from my own child.

Today I am an adult battling this conditioning which led to engrained beliefs about myself and the world, which then led to behaviors that further reinforced my beliefs. It became a self fulfilling prophecy, an endless cycle always returning back to how my mind and body were conditioned as a child. Even though intellectually I was able to say, that the abuse was not my fault, that I was not a bad person, that sex is not dirty it didn’t matter. I was conditioned to my very core and would involuntarily react to my world from the distortions of my childhood. I couldn’t help myself. Even though I was transplanted to another environment free of physical threats at seventeen, I still operated from an abused mind. I was like a war veteran who comes back to the safety of his home after war and is still plagued by fear, still reacting as if he were walking on landmines, still witnessing the horror in the here and now.

In my teens and twenties I was lost in this conditioning, reacting mostly to my life, living an unconscious life. I suffered from PTSD, still expecting something bad to happen, still thinking that I would end up back in the cold hands of my mother or the warm but deadly hands of the men who molested me.

It wasn’t until my early thirties that I started to really look at my life and try to understand why I went in the directions I did. I wanted to understand what made me do the things I did so that I could end the self sabotage. I wanted to understand why I was paralyzed at crucial times in my life, unable to make choices to protect myself and my daughter. I wanted to understand so that I could take back my power. I wanted to say, "I control my life", "I create my destiny" and I wanted to believe it.

I needed to make conscious what was subconscious. I needed to bring to light the conditioning that kept me inextricably tied to the past so that I could one day move forward.