Finding the meaning of home after abuse

Finding the meaning of home after abuse.

I always wondered what it must be like to feel 'home'. It was a mystery to me. I marvelled at how people would spend their whole lives in one place and become so attached to the place they lived in.  Or that they would never want to leave the home were brought up in. Imagine that feeling.

But home to me was always a dangerous and chaotic place as a child and also as an adult. As a child I was brought up in the most appaling conditions. We lived in a run down old place with no water, electricity or even a toilet due to it being so remote. The damp ran down the walls and we had mildew on our clothes, black mould in the cupboards. That was my first home from being a baby. It was also a place where abuse happened to me.

After that old place was torn down, deemed unfit for human habitation, we moved several times. My parents divorced and I was placed with various family members. So I learned that home was something transient. In turn I chose a career where I moved from town to town, living in hotels and guest houses. I hated staying in one place.

When I met my ex partner I had moved 10 times, after leaving my abusive childhood home, in house shares and one room rented places. Moving in with him gave me a secure base and in a way I found a sense of home. But it was always his home and never ours. So I stayed when he became emotionally abusive. I lost the only home I had know when I left him and once more went into rented places, back to how it was for me when I first met him. While he carried on with the life I had helped him create, I was right back to the beginning living as I was when we first met. That was how much he didn't care about me.

I was to move 15 more times after that. As soon as I moved in somewhere I was looking for the next place to move to. It became a pattern. I thought I was free in doing so, unattached, a rolling stone. But in reality I was re-living my childhood fear of home, belonging meant abuse. As an adult my home was taken from me by a narcissist and throughout my life so much was stolen from me when I had met other narcissists that I learned that nothing was mine. I moved several times due to fleeing from narcissists. I felt I owned nothing. What was the point in owning anything when it was all going to be taken from me.

After I left my whole life behind, my narcissist parents, friends and ex, I moved into a new life but I worked my self into illness to cope with it all. I should have been healing but instead I was making myself worse. Forced to find a new and peaceful place to live I found a tiny cottage by the woods. I tried to move like I normally do but the universe had other plans. So the years went by and slowly it crept up on me. I was home. I still fear it, home. But I realise what it means now.

Home is and should be a place of sanctuary away from our stressful outer lives. It is a place that nurtures and supports us and gives us a sense of comfort. But this was new to me because home was the exact opposite.

It took me years to realise that the abusers were not in my home now but in my head. I was safe but still on alert. I kept wanting to escape and run. I tried to sell my house over and over but it never happened. So years went by and I started to nest. Buying things I liked myself to put in my home, instead of making it look saleable, I was free to create a lovely little sanctuary, helped by my partner.

I have a wonderful partner, who as a person, feels home to me. Over the years he has moved again and again with me and now he gets to stay in one place. The strange thing is that he was always reluctant to move but it was easy for me and now I don't care about moving he is up for a change!

I carried my childhood home with me on my back for years. A baggage of shame, and the shaming for living as we did. But now I see that I have let it go. I did not chose my childhood home and I found out much later that we did not have to live in such a place, there had been an option but my father chose to isolate and demoralise us. He was never there. He didn't get to experience the horror my mother and I went through each day.

But now I enter a new phase. I rescued that child from the place that haunted her and gave her a real home. It was a great discovery to recognise this. I am still learning the meaning of home but part of me likes it, likes to come back, open the door, and breathe a sigh of relief, I AM HOME! I am safe! I am at home with myself as a person. Wherever I am I take that with me now.