“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.” —Marcus Garvey

A memory: I was grounded. I was maybe in 5th grade? I was young. The infraction I don’t remember because it wasn’t memorable. It wasn’t anything I am sure. I was an extremely good kid, and I was living in a very toxic environment. I knew the punishment had nothing to do with me, even then. But back then, I didn’t know anything about the very old, very loving amygdala, not about mine, not about my parents’, or my sister’s. I didn’t know anything about emotional regulation. I didn’t know a lot, but I was learning and adapting very quickly.

My parents’ emotions, for a lot of reasons, their childhood or lack thereof, their poverty growing up, their life experiences and how people around them modeled behavior, their chronic economic hardship, were unregulated. Even with one data point alone: my mom had me when she was 21 years old, she had my sister two weeks after turning 19. They had a lot going on as individuals, as a married couple (my mom’s second marriage, my stepdad’s third…maybe second. I’m not sure.), and as a family. We had a lot going on in our tiny, tiny house. So, their big emotions meant punishment for us kids.

The Crush

The family facing external pressures, combined with inherited trauma and Trauma, without regulation may turn on itself, lash out at itself, for relief. Mine did. A toxic environment; a harmed and harming household, no one is immune to the churn, to the grind. Being good was the best way I knew how to try and prevent punishment. If you’re good, you can’t get in trouble. I tried to be accommodating to avoid stirring any ire or tripping any wrath. But like a veterinarian once said to me when I was looking for counsel on an aggressive dog who had bitten me several times, the best you can do with a dog that is being aggressive at that level, is manage the dog. Management is the best you can do. Manage the dog so it’s not put into a situation where its aggression will be triggered. But, like anything that is managed, the veterinarian told me, at some point, something is going to break down. Someone is going to drop a fork and go to pick it up, or get up too quickly, or, or or. 

Have you ever been grounded? What was that like for you?

Being grounded at my house meant, “go to your room.” And what “go to your room” meant was no tv that day. But it also meant no radio listening on my pink radio in my room, no card playing, no drawing and no reading. There was no activity allowed. Just sit there, and think.

Being grounded in my household was very harsh, near solitary confinement for a minor infraction meant to relieve the dysregulated big emotions of my parents, certainly not to provide guidance to a child. It was near solitary confinement because I could hear the family in our small house. Not that there was a lot of talking happening anyway. I could see my sister if she walked in and out of her room, or my mom if she went in or out of hers.

I was allowed “out” for meals that my sister, mom and I would eat at the kitchen table. I had to ask to use the bathroom.

I don’t remember details of the meals. But, I am curious: were we so flooded by cortisol that the situation happening to me was normalized? Did we just carry on a conversation as if I were not being so extremely, harshly punished? Or were we all in shock a little bit by my presence? Did I make a plea to be released? Did I refuse to speak at all? What was my sister feeling? What was my mom feeling?

You can save…yourself

And for me, this grounding was awful and it sucked and I was mad, and dysregulated but I do not remember ever thinking, “this shouldn’t be happening. This is not okay.” I thought other things. I thought, who could give me a lifeline out? Was someone going to give me a lifeline out? No. No one was. So, I stopped thinking about that. I understood there wasn’t anything that I could do about this moment. There was nothing I could do to change the situation, so, I thought, all I needed to do was get through it. Time would pass. It would. Regardless of what was happening to me, time was still going to pass. The time would come when I would be allowed “out.”

This is survivable. I told myself that. One day, it wouldn’t be like this. It just wouldn’t be. I knew that to be true. But I had to get through this grounding first in order for it not to be this anymore. The passing of a day. This is survivable. Just get through it. It won’t always be like this. It won’t always be like this.
And, it would be years still after this specific grounding and the few that came after that one, that my singular idea would begin to take shape. A singular idea that gradually became a singular plan that didn’t have much of a blueprint to it…yet. But, as the plan became that blueprint, I know my grounding, my punishment, helped generate the design of that blueprint. I talk about the nascence of the plan in Hardship.

When the kernel of that singular idea came to me, to not be poor, it was connected to something else, something bigger…it wasn’t distinguishable from the goal to not be poor. Connected to getting out of poverty was getting out, period. Getting out of my house. To not be poor meant I had to get out of my house. There was something in me, during those moments of confinement that said you will survive this. You will. And you will get out.