A Long Roll Down

The cyclical, spherical, all-encompassing, exponential, pervasive effects of childhood trauma as told through the lens of my life and maybe a bit of yours, so we can start to understand and grow.

Dear Person Who is Going Through an Estrangement and Feels Like Your Life is Wrecked,

You don’t know what you don’t know.

You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it.

It takes time and experience to learn what you don’t know, and even more to implement the lessons once you do.

Each person has their own journey reckoning with the wreckage of their traumas. We are all different.

Like…snowflakes.

Part I-a Snowflake is Born, not Rolled

A person, let’s say, ME— a snowflake—if you will, is born, in my case, into an environment flush with financial resources but not conducive to healthy childhood development. Caregivers were distracted, self-involved, immature, neglectful, abusive; and at times, sadistic. Older siblings were mean-spirited, jealous, unpredictable and unreachable.

Weave within the intricacies of that snowflake, my folks were from the Silent Generation. Layer in the horrific models of marriage and parenting their parents provided.

Add to that, it was the 1970s when I arrived. Twas a time that, despite significant advancements made in the academic study and professional fields of child and family therapy, was famous for social norms of adultification and neglect.

Born in 1938, my mother carried undiagnosed mental illness as well as traumatic stress. Her own mother, for the sin of adultery, was removed from the family home for six months, during which time time my mother was expected to look after her younger brother. Institutionalized and administered electroshock, my grandmother returned, acting like “a zombie,” but still returning to affairs.

My mom juggled a lot by the time I was there. Three stepchildren (two adopted). Three biological children (with two different dads). Difficulties in career (being a highly competent professional woman in the last part of the 20th century, subjected to multiple male colleagues whom acted like talking bags of dicks.)

She could be frightening, bitter, and cruel. She could be brilliant, lovely, and kind.

My father, born in 1929, also had PTSD, from a Depression Era childhood that included discrimination, poverty, beatings, prejudice, sibling death, child labor, and sadistic nuns, with rulers. His parents were Italian immigrants with a mismatched arranged marriage that, by the stories, involved verbal abuse and very little love.

From early on, Pop appeared to have displayed what we would now call traits of several different personality disorders: namely, sociopathy, narcissism, and, acting like a talking bag of dicks.

And what I mean when I say that someone is behaving like a talking bag of dicks, it is not that the person, or even the bag itself is talking. He and it might be; unfortunately, but it is actually each individual dick in that bag that is talking; loudly, authoritatively, and interruptingly saying things like “feminism has ruined the family!”  or “Clarence Thomas was framed!” and “I can put myself in this! I can put myself in that! And maybe this? And surely that!”

Get a quorum of this type of man in a room and you will observe all of them, talking at once: the men, the bags, the dicks. A cock-ophany.

My father’s parenting style involved putting his children in danger, lecturing constantly, and then giving them a Benjamin and setting them loose, unsupervised.

Nothing delighted the man (except for, perhaps, adultery) like putting his offspring in their place, which was beneath him.

When I would bump into something, his automatic response would be “God punished you!” with a twinkle in his eye, which proved it was a joke.

That still pops into my head whenever I accidentally stub my toe, or jam my knee, or get hit head-on by a drunk driver. I’m working on it.

He could be also clever, charismatic, and comical. He knew how to be everything anyone who meant anything wanted: just enough hardscrabble, poor New York. Just enough polished California. Like a plate of escargot, he seemed slimy and off-putting, until he didn’t, when he became something you craved.

The crabs-in-a-bucket-bullying culture among my completely traumatized half siblings, one side Team Mom and the Other Team Pop, added another layer. I learned to camouflaging the outside of my snowflake-ness with dirt and dust to hide that which I loved about myself, so they couldn’t take it away.

I did my best to roll the fuck away from my siblings, who gave me a weird, scared, angry, and hollow feeling. But any scapegoat knows, “shit rolls downhill,” and, for the purposes of my tortured little simile, so do snowballs, though they try not to absorb it.

I knew no different until I was exposed to that which was different: other peoples’ loving families:  friends, teachers, tv parents, and sometimes emotionally attuned televised puppets.

Out in the world, the personality snowball  arranges itself into a crude approximation of a person it thinks it should be. We would rather have real facial expressions, but for now this carrot and coal will have to do the work of approximating joy.

Every therapist knows that one supportive, consistent adult in an otherwise topsy- turvy childhood can make a huge net positive in a child’s emotional development. And thank goodness.

But still, most of any child’s influence is from home.

Our little snowball keeps rolling, picking up influences; some of them good, others, bad.

When the ball rolls fast, it’s tough to see the difference.

II. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Down the Hill

I’d learn how things were for kids with secure attachments, and then act out at home, trying to get my needs met. Family systems theory teaches us that one or more children within a dysfunctional family system act out in an unconscious attempt to get the entire system (the family unit) into therapy, which under that theory, focuses on healing the entire system.

That didn’t happen. When I acted out, my parents would perform the emotion of anger without holding me accountable or enforcing consequences. That terrified me far more than getting in trouble.

Unfortunately I imitated  undesirable social behaviors that had been normalized in my family culture. Without appreciating that they were wrong, I absorbed attitudes and beliefs from my parents, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins that, rules don’t apply to us, we were special,  jokes could be cruel, and he who is the center of attention wins.

I made jokes at others’ expense. I engaged in toxic, frantic bragging. Used to not getting a word in, I didn’t know when to stop talking. Unaccustomed to being heard, I overshared. Although I was in the habit of stuffing them down, or maybe because of it, I had big feelings that spread  over friend groups like storm clouds.

Not knowing that I could set boundaries, or what they were, I got into situations that were way over my head, and never talked about them because of the shame. In turn, I sought out external experiences and relationships that matched the inner shame. It was just easier that way.

Cue loneliness, isolation, and resentment. With people and without them. Which drove me deeper towards people with their own disjointed families and secret shames. So deep into their own stuff, they mostly didn’t notice mine. Which reinforced the lack of connectedness in all my relationships, and turned me into a social chameleon. I would usually attempt to rise above conflict until I burst, making everything worse. At the same time, I did annoying shit that hinted at a lack of housebroken-ness.

I wouldn’t be capable of confronting my own longing and jealousy until much later. The presence of a talented and caring therapist plus physical distance from the traumatizers created a container that allowed me to get out of fight-or-flight so I could stop reacting, unpack the past and see patterns, and make behavioral change.

Until then, I bounced between judging myself and judging everyone else; with varying degrees of success.

When parents are incapable of being reliable guides to help their children make behavioral changes, children blame themselves.

We see it as our problem to fix.

We seek. We find self-help and spirituality. We join things. We consult the oracles of our own self-doubt.

The goal: to achieve perpetuity through hyper-vigilance.

Experience is a salty bitch, and she teaches us this is unsustainable.

Which leads to more self-doubt, self-blame, and rumination.We second guess every action and all words uttered in the past 24 hours. And when we are done with that we turn on our partners, who are of course perfect in every way and also terrible assholes whom we then turn on to let off steam as we second guess, doubt, and blame them

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Fight, flight, fawn, freeze, frappe.

I received some therapy as a child,  and which should be noted in my chart that this was with my mom’s therapist, who—from my humble 2024-trained-in-2004-LMFT-perspective— didn’t have a great handle on the situation. Without the benefit of consistent, trustworthy and functiona early intervention, many less-than-desirable social behaviors impressed upon a person during their younger developmental stages persist, even when the adult patient learns new coping skills.

(The last I heard of her she had an office next door to my hairstylist and came barging into his salon screeching about parking spots.)

What starts out unique and snowball-y picks up influences, covering the core self and building a mass that is also a mask.

To manage social anxiety and feelings of non-belonging, some of us find ourselves experimenting with substances while still in adolescence. While this may temporarily help the patient mask in social situations, loosening up enough to make friends, it also tends to worsen anxiety and paranoia.

It also fucked my chances in advanced math when I was already behind, due to undiagnosed dyscalculia, a disorder which, although known at the time, was never applied to me even though I met all of the criteria as a child and still do as an adult. (There still exists disagreement on the diagnosis and there are very few interventions that exist, leaving new generations of children feeling as needlessly stupid as I did.)

Threads of shame wound themselves around and inside of the snowball. The adults I consulted couldn’t seem to help me: they either didn’t understand the math themselves or I couldn’t understand the explanations. I was too embarrassed to ask a teacher, a tutor, even a friend to go slower, and the shame snowball grew.

I was drawn to troubled, complicated kids who sassed teachers, snuck around, and drank.

A lot of them were and are good people. Many of them proved to be brilliant and well-adjusted. Some were off. Some of them ended up not being so great to me, while others were. Whatever was happening, it always felt like everyone liked each other and were closer to one another than they were with me. It always felt like I fucked everything up.

Having never been taught real resilience (and not people saying: “Get a thicker skin! You are too sensitive!”) I further floundered.

Maybe you know the feeling: like a stained, cold, shame-ridden snowflake-ball with a snowball’s chance in hell of ever succeeding at anything, hiding the best parts the self, and avoiding those who might bring it out.

Drawn to frenemy situations and lopsided relationships, I constantly felt left out and would do things like pout  (which didn’t change anything and probably made me even more annoying.)  bad vibes that kept others at bay. That, and what Patrick Teahan calls an “overdeveloped sense of fairness,” caused me to confront peers, teachers, elders, and parents (everyone except for my siblings) fueled the shame ball to roll, picking up those bad vibes and also teaching me that it’s safer to put on a mask around friends.

The frenemy situations reinforced my own negative social behaviors and sparked tendencies towards resentment and passive aggression. That annoyed people around me, which made me even more anxious.

Layer in, moving around a lot geographically. Layer in, friendships that didn’t last. Layer in, the people who would stop being friends because they believed my family, later on down the road.

Arrive at adulthood with issues in friendships and relationships. Big ones, like being able to self-regulate during conflict. Enter romantic partners who are their own special snowballs of issues, with what my first and best clinical supervisor, Joe used to call “complimentary dysfunctions.”

III. Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow

Some of you understand what I’m saying from experience, and are maybe nodding along. Those of us in this unfortunate club know that trauma from the past not only hurts, but also imprints us with negative thoughts, beliefs and behaviors that take work to unlearn.

The unlearning happens in real time with real loved ones, safe loved ones who have our best interests at heart. Sometimes we have to put a lot of distance between ourselves and the stressful environment that perpetuated the childhood trauma to be healthy enough to meet those kinds of people, let alone be able to enter a mature, loving adult relationship. And others still have the excruciating task of not only extricating themselves from an abusive family of origin, but also an abusive romantic partner, whom they chose largely due to the influences and expectations learned in that initial trauma.

College was the first time I went to therapy in earnest, with a therapist I chose. There I learned about boundaries. When I tried boundary-setting techniques that my therapist suggested with my parents, however, their explosively negative and distressing reactions keyed me in to something “extra” being wrong, and that the Very Wrong Thing possibly wasn’t ME.

The ridiculous and frankly immature amount of blowback my parents gave when I set reasonable and thoughtfully-articulated boundaries was enough of a red flag that it set me on the path to learn why some people were unwilling to accept boundaries.

That led me to information and a deep dive on narcissistic personality disorder, which OBVIOUSLY I can’t, as a licensed therapist now, diagnose in loved ones, but I sure can observe the traits! Certainly I can and must talk about how their abusive behavior affected me.

I went to therapy during college in the first place because I was doing clueless, self-involved, and shitty things as a friend and a roommate. While I have good friends from that period, there are some that keep me at a distance, and others still who don’t talk to me at all. Those are natural consequences.

Seeing that and things like it, now, with a gentle and self-loving gaze, while also holding myself accountable to change negative behavior is ongoing and will stop when my heartbeat stops.

Graduate school for counseling psychology, which, at my school, required 150 hours of personal therapy, was a huge moment of awakening, and piece of the puzzle. All hail the genogram, where too-difficult-to-ignore insights into family dysfunction confronts therapy patients and students.

“Have you considered,” my next therapist once suggested, “that your father might have some sociopathy?”

See also: “Do you think that your mother might show some narcissism?”

That was a lot of bang for the buck in terms of therapeutic insight.

But heck, I still moved back home, much to the confused denial of that particular therapist.

I was a young, newly minted therapist, I had insight and tools now, and I was going to fix everything.

Determined to be part of the large, eclectic extended family and colorful array of hometown friend circles, I would settle near my roots. I would go back to the source, and conquer family dysfunction armed with what I had learned in personal therapy and graduate school.

I would start a therapy practice in the family office building and help generations of Cazzatas heal. I would patiently charm and dazzle them with how gosh dang mentally healthy I now was.

This profound state of wellbeing and health would spread throughout the clan, from the bottom (me!)  up.

After all, we were diverse. The elders allowed many of us to vote democrat, and still broke break with us. Guido and I smoked weed and still got to go to the family picnic. There was my gay brother, who was still in the fold. There was the one cousin who had a baby without getting married, and the other one with an interracial marriage. We would transcend both sides of the aisle. We would be so close, so multifaceted, and with my help, all of us would boogie into the new millenium, joyfully and compassionately setting boundaries, communicating intentionally through any awkwardness with “I-statements,” plus we would have love, support, and pride in each other.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. ha.

IV. A Snowball’s Chance in Hell

It’s near impossible to process and heal childhood abuse if the exact same motherfuckers who abused you in childhood are still there, doing the same abusive shit to you into your adulthood.

What actually happened is that within two years, I accrued even more trauma that added to the snowball, I rolled to the very bottom of the hill, all the horseshit rolled after me  and hit me full force in the face, right at the same time that I started a business, fell in love, got married, and had a baby.

Layer in, Obama got elected, and the sudden swarm of conservative men that were in my life since returning home held me personally responsible.

No tricky family wants to get rid of a good scapegoat, and if one wanders back into the yard for scraps, all the better. My parents and siblings’ commitment to keeping me in the scapegoat role caused them to treat me as if I was still a child, and a dim one at that. None of my help was accepted, unless it was them asking me for a favor. Then difference between then and my childhood was that I had gone through a whole adult life, earned degrees, had a career, and was accustomed to being treated like a human being, and usually one that had earned respect. But suddenly, these yokels were sneering at my education, like I got it just to feel bigger than my britches.

My britches were far more embiggened from the stress eating I did while dealing with them.

None of my expertise was accepted, let alone sought, until it was doing someone else’s emotional dirty work, something my siblings didn’t want to deal with, like our declining mom.

I came back to San Jose feeling changed from education and lived experiences. I shouldn’t have been, but at the time was genuinely surprised to come home to my family being the terrifyingly indifferent, sneaky, and manipulative people who lived in my childhood home, and not only that, but also, I got the feeling they were hoping for me to fall down some more stairs, or at least step on a nice, fresh banana peel.

My high school friends kept forgetting to invite me places, and, come to think of it—so did my dad.

It only took a few months after my homecoming before realizing I needed to meet people. I was lonely, and in my mind, ready for a relationship, and if I wasn’t, I was going to forcefully therapize myself into readiness by force because I was running out of time. I was 34 by the time I met him, and pretty much everything after that point was a breakneck-speed race against my saggy ovaries to get married and have a child before my eggs turned into dust mites.

When I met Husband, a person who did not grow up here or know any of my family or friends, I was already starting to create distance and carve out as much of an independent life as I could while renting a psychotherapy office down the hall from my uncle’s insurance office inside of my father’s criminal law building.

Husband was enough of an outsider that he could be like, “why is your dad acting like such an asshole, and why does your sister keep repeating the same question over and over, despite me having had answered it? Why is your dad’s office so odd, and why does he have a pew in front of his desk instead of normal chairs? And why does everyone keep saying that your father is a great speaker when he conversationally runs in circles, making the same dubious points over and over?”

Plus, thusly stunted, I was 34 by the time I met him, and pretty much everything after that point was a race against my saggy ovaries at breakneck speed to get married and have a child before my eggs turned into dust mites.

Speaking of mites, when I married Husband, a lot of my icky personality spiders came crawling out, of which he, and sometimes the kids, were beneficiaries. Because I have been raised with strong shaming mechanisms (not to mention cis-heteronormative-white-supremacist-patriarchy) , I adopted a pattern—first, try to be perfect, hide my real feelings or intellectualize them, micromanage things to keep them in control and then, blow up, followed by shame spiral.

Some of the icky personality spiders bit my children, so to speak, creating an egg sac and then a birth of many, tiny guilt-spiders, like those asshole baby spiders who aren’t Charlotte at the end of Charlotte’s Web.

In short, I had gaps in knowledge in interpersonal skills as well as a solid practice of emotional regulation.

I met someone who I didn’t grow up with! Who likes me more than my family! But also, he’s from Ohio, along with my daughter and stepson’s uncle, Grandma, and Grandpa.

While creating distance between myself and my parents and various siblings was necessary in order for me to have enough bandwidth for my job, husband, and kids; it created a situation where I had few people to rely on in terms of a “village” in which to raise children. The infrastructure of having multiple people available to watch my child for longer periods of time is not and has never been available, which can be hard on my marriage. Our daughter missed out on a lot, not having nearby aunts, uncles or grandparents available to show her the unconditional love she deserves.

[And the knowledge gaps in parenting-oof. There has been lots of listening, learning, trying new ways of parenting, and apologizing to my kid when I mess up. Humility, not humiliation. With a lack of elders to consult and who might normalize things for me, I turn to peer support, books, and intuition. And the internet—home of so many messy, opinionated, not really great parenting information that is not based in fact, but fad. Things you look back on and think, shit. Anyone who had a baby around 2011 or 12 knows all about coconut oil and amber teething necklaces. (WTF were we thinking, asks post-Covid me.)]

During the two-and-a-half years of no-contact style estrangement with my father, the trouble with siblings and cousins from his side of the family began. That was another point where our proverbial snowball picked up more mass, more speed. Because my father was seen as a bit of a demi-god in the family, I caught a lot of shit from his adorants that were both subtle and blatant.

I made the deadly assumption that someone in the Cazzata family would be on my side and agree that my dad is a prick. Nah. They all fell in line.

Plus, I was just different and stuck out in all sorts of ways and forgot to shut my big feminist mouth.

Layer in: having a child late in life.

This is a point in the general cycle of things where anyone in the situation can fall into a shame spiral of self-doubt. If it is just the relationship with a parent that is traumatic, you can say, ah, well it’s just the one person. But when multiple people start to take your parent’s side, it can erode your sense of self and spark all your (readily accessible; ingrained) self-doubt. Maybe they aren’t really that bad. After all, I am the common denominator. It must be me. Any repetitive verbal or nonverbal or cultural gaslighting you have received from the outside now becomes your inner voice.

And I think if it had only been that (plus all the annoying and slightly sketchy shit my half-siblings on that side tried to pull afterwards) I probably would have started healing more after my Pop died, but then my mom starting drinking again and the two cherubs that are my half-siblings on that side started yet another round of exhausting fuckery.

And then the final descent: estrangement. Starting with my father, then on-and-off with my mother, then briefly ending with my father long enough for us to connect and sort of clear the slate enough for him to pass, which caused (just about) his entire family to shun me, and then began my mother’s own descent into alcoholism and loneliness, and finally her own sad death, all to the tune of my relationships with cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles and friends to drop like flies.

The juggling act of protecting my children from my alcoholic mom while simultaneously trying to support her, and also “fix” her enough that I could feel supported by her, or at least feel entitled to ask for support, or trust that she could offer it, wore me down. That is when the trouble began with her side of the family. Once my mom was truly in the process of dying, all hell broke loose. This is a story for another day— a story that started with a letter from Tiffany and Mervin’s lawyer and ended with me —finally!!! settling the estate, without their help and with their hindrances—just a few months ago.

While I did a lot of work to heal and grow, I was stuck with an unrelenting amount of immovable bullshit until both parents’ estates were settled.

I lost hair. I gained weight. I called out to self and nobody answered for a long time. And then, I lost my mind. As I was losing it, I packed in my therapy career, out of self-care and ethics.

And still sometimes I bargain…if it had been one and not both parents with an insecure attachment, if I hadn’t had all of those half-siblings, if the half-siblings had been whole siblings, if I wasn’t so much younger than them, if it wasn’t the 70s and then 80s, if I hadn’t have made friends with Kayla and Shayla, if my boyfriend in ninth grade hadn’t taken all of those shrooms, if I had dated the sweet boy in high school who gave me a necklace instead of the wounded lush who took my confidence and gave me rage, if I hadn’t sassed my math teacher, if only I was less of a salty bitch, if I had hung out with the smart kids more, if I had protested carbon emissions more, if I had not eaten those peanuts that day that my brother body-shamed me so virulently that I see his ratty little face every time I eat a peanut, if, if, if…

VI. The Grass Ain’t Greener, But the Snow is Cleaner on the Other Side of the Hill.

You can’t change what you can’t change and you can’t control what you can’t control.

But you can control who gets access to you, even if they pretend that it is not a precious thing to be in your presence.

Your system can heal and repair if you are poisoned, but if you keep needing to drink water from the poison well, you are basically in survival and maintenance mode until you can find another water source.

The ability to break free from toxic people has all sorts of legal, financial, familial and cultural complications that make each person’s case completely unique. We only have the choices that we have, until circumstances change and give us different ones.

If you have had even a smidge of the types of experiences, patterns and relationships I have described, please know it is normal to feel at one point or another along the way that you are damaged, that you don’t know how to do things everyone else knows, and that you have nobody. Just know, those are only half-truths, and two/thirds lies (magical survivor math.)

You may have sustained wounds that have prohibited what you could have become without them, but you are not past repair. You may have gaps in knowledge, skills, and experiences, but guess what? Those are all things you can gain.

If your “picker” (of friends and partners) got broken because you were surrounded by people who weren’t looking out for you, please be patient with yourself. No matter what, be your own best friend. If you remember nothing of what I have said in the totality of these newsletters, know that.

You must be your own best friend not for any other reason than because you deserve it, but for many more purposes, besides.

The most healthy friends and friend groups are probably (small groups and individuals) who are slightly boring. They have their life together and adhere to routines, don’t gossip, and floss their teeth. It’s never too late to make new friends, embrace joy, and start flossing. There is going to be a combination of lowering expectations (because your indignant inner child is being too hard on people) and raising them (because simultaneously, your compliant inner child is being too easy on people).

It takes a lot of time to smooth these things out. Each experience is a lesson, an opportunity to observe, make shifts, slow down, and feel things enough to process it, and then know what is next.

A lot of times survivors think, I just want to be free of this pain so I can live. And, I’m here to say, that the grief never really goes away, you just make more room for the joy to get in.

Those of us who are estranged, or low-contact, no-contact, grey-rocking, BIFFing, serving it up medium chill, or figuring out what to do next, need time, support, and simplicity. All the cliches apply: fresh air, water, sleep, exercise, journaling, and therapy. And it will still be hard.

But not as hard as burying the pain and trying to be perfect. Not as hard as running away. Not as hard as wearing a mask. And not as hard as staying in a harmful situation without creating boundaries or leaving when there is that choice.

Try not to worry about “normal” people who don’t get it. They should be glad they don’t get it. It’s amazing how easy it is to deflect a conversation by saying something vague instead of explaining your history.

The keepers know we are evolving, and will believe us, immediately or soon.

Eventually, snowballs reach the bottom of the hill. There, they can melt down (ha!) and evolve to another form like ice, water, or the release of steam.

Even a meltdown is sacred when the freeze is long enough. The earth is here to catch you; true community is the water cycle that will transform and renew you, so you may come clean, and no longer roll like a snowball, but cleanse, like the spring rain.