“Pilgrim, it’s a long way to find out who you are.”
-Enya, Pilgrim
The Start Of A Journey
One of the core elements within recovery from Complex Trauma is the resurrection of your true self from beneath the mountain of rubble deposited by abuse and neglect.
I’ve only been to counselling for a bit more than three years now and in general I feel a lot of frustration and despair over how slow the work is (and how there’s way too little time). However, one gradual change that I’ve started to note is the emergence of my true self. This is a process that goes parallel to more and more of my parts unblending and rising to consciousness. I learned some new things about myself and I also rediscovered old things that I had been forced to give up in order to survive the abuse and neglect.
One aspect of exploring this new/old self is that of cultural identity. I’ve always been interested in this topic and I’m sure that at least one partial cause of this is my own lack of and yearning for a sense of belonging and deep connection. It wasn’t until I started with counselling though that I actually became fully aware of this lack.
I remember one session pretty early on in which my first counsellor suggested that I might tell her something about my culture. This really made me stop short and I had to think (and recover from being triggered) for a while until I could figure out why.
“I don’t really feel like I have a culture,” I told her.
Beneath my dissociation, I could tell that I was surprised at my own realisation. I’m part-German, was born in Germany, and grew up there. I always had identified as German, but there never had been any nurturing or space for an active cultural identity. On the contrary, conditions were absolutely toxic and hostile in general, so this was no exception. One contributing factor was my parents’ attitude of looking down on German culture and treating another as superior (more on that further down). But there’s also a more general social reason, which still affects many other Germans – like them I learnt early on that anything connected to patriotism is bad, because of the association with Nazi ideology.
A good example for this is folk music:
Ask a German person (especially city-dwellers and those from the North and Middle of Germany) about German folk music and very likely you’ll get a reaction of embarrassment and disgust. They will think of “Schlagermusik”, which translates to hit-music, and denotes a genre of modern popular songs for the masses, which might be compared to the level of The Sun in literature. Very often this is the only genre in which you will find modern adaptations of folk songs, but in such a gruesome fake and artificial way, that it really hurts. The fact is that most other modern musicians simply stay clear of anything to do with local folklore for the reason named above. Which is why many Germans don’t even know what authentic, traditional folk music from their home country or home region sounds like.
I found it very difficult to explain this state of things to my British counsellor and inwardly I was also wondering whether I was just generalising my personal experience. After all I had never talked to anyone about this. But when I did an internet search soon after, I quickly learnt that I was not alone – I found an English article about a recent German documentary that topicalised exactly this issue and put into words what I had been struggling to explain. I felt a huge sense of relief. And what’s more, this was the first time in my life that I felt a sense of “togetherness” between me and other Germans as a group.
Because this is part of a cultural package that we share, and even though it’s a burden, we can derive a feeling of connection from sharing it.
This became the start of the exploration of my cultural identity. Already some weeks before this session, I had started to suffer from home sickness. I had moved to the UK roughly one year previously, but as I had been stuck in an abusive relationship for most of that time, I was not surprised that I had not felt it before.
As the dissociation from that was slowly melting away, I felt a sudden and intense longing for my home country. Although I was well acquainted with the emotions of grief, yearning, and loneliness, this was another first time – the first time I truly felt that I loved my home country. Not just a regional locality, but the concept of the whole country and what distinguishes it.
As a way of coping with this homesickness and from a new perspective of curiosity about my own culture, I started to research German folk songs. I already knew a lot about the folk music of other countries, as this is my favourite music genre. Now it filled me with anger and grief that I didn’t know a lot about and had no connection to the traditional music of my own country. Sadly there is still a huge need for a German folk revival (which I hope I will be able to contribute to).
I found exactly ONE band who specialises in traditionally played German folk songs. One!
The best other things that I could come across were choir versions and private interpretations of folk songs on YouTube.
And within this dearth there is also a particular lack of folk music from Northern Germany, where I come from. This has a lot to do with the stigmatisation of Low German, the native language - not a dialect, as many people think- of North Germany during the last centuries as unrefined and being connected to low social status. A situation very similar to what’s been and still is happening to Gaelic in Scotland, for example.
It was very hard for me to approach Low German, because my abusive mother always had used a lot of vocabulary from it. As a historical linguist (and now researcher of my own and my country’s roots) I felt a great interest to learn more about this language, but the association with the abuse was of course very strong. This was the reason after all why I had never felt any interest in it before. It didn’t help that a lot of the material that I could find was just as sarcastic and vulgar in tone as my abusive mother. And the stereotype of the rough, simple-minded North German farmer is still very popular as a form of toxic masculinity (again, this is a stereotype you'll find across the world).
There were a lot of drawbacks and re-traumatising experiences in relation to this. I only ended up with a handful of songs, but I also trained myself in reading and understanding the language, I created my own fictional stories centred around it, and even tried to write and think in it.
I learnt a lot and by the end of the day I forged a new connection not only to my regional homeland, but most importantly to myself.
I was able to identify and reject the things that were abusive, both from my memory and within the things I discovered now, while I chose to take the few positive things that I remembered (from a different context than my family) and melted them with the positive things that I could find in the here and now. I decided what I wanted to identify with and what not. It was especially significant to make these chosen elements completely mine through my personally preferred activities and talents (writing poetry, storytelling, and drawing), because it was an experience of empowerment.
It was my own, individual creation – an expression of my true self.
On The Road
I continue to explore my sense of “German-ness”. I’m aware that there’s still a lot of trauma in connection to the topic which I don’t feel ready to address in therapy yet, so I’m sure that more will change in the future. Sadly all of this work comes with an incredible amount of emotional pain. A pain that needs to be expressed, heard, and validated.
But trauma recovery is anything but an organised, linear process. It’s something very organic that grows in all directions and can seem so chaotic that it’s difficult to know sometimes whether things are going in the right direction. The cruelest part is that it gets worse before it can get better.
So while my German identity is still a work in progress, another aspect of my cultural identity has begun to shift – much to my own surprise.
I mentioned earlier that I’m part-German – my abusive father was from Chile. Anything in connection to that country was never anything else but trauma for me – from being forced to travel there as a child and teenager, to the visits of abusive relatives and friends of my father, to my father himself and his language. Both of my parents spoke fluent Spanish, because my mother had lived in Bolivia for some time growing up. So South-American culture was the only allowed culture. Most importantly so because my father was a narcissist, so of course he defined the family’s culture.
As my family was so abusive, this meant that German and any other culture was treated as inferior. Everything was always a competition and there were only absolutes – either things were superior and perfect, or they were inferior and bad. Abuse or be abused. This climate where no equality exists is essential to a narcissistic family.
I remember very well how my father loved to give speeches (narcissists only ever deliver monologues, they are incapable of partaking in a dialogue) on how the Spanish language was oh-so much richer and better than German, because so many other languages had flown into it. Or how the forests in Chile were better than German forests.
My mother, despite her German cultural identity, didn’t oppose these petty attacks, because it was her role to enable my father’s narcissism. Enablers or echoists live to please other people and are basically the polar opposite of a narcissist – extremes tend to be similar, so the two actually share a lot. Nothing is more important to an enabler than to stay in favour with their narcissist, so they will gladly join in abusing and neglecting their own children in order to achieve this. Like an antithesis to what a parent should be, it's the ultimate "Better you than me".
Needless to say then why I never felt any strong German cultural identity. Only the hurt and anger when listening to my father’s attacks gave me a sense of defiance, which has helped in embracing that side of my cultural identity now.
But with the other side, it is much more difficult. I never felt an interest in incorporating my Chilean heritage into my own identity. I don’t even know whether I’ll ever want to feel that interest. Part of me feels sad, because I’m aware that it’s completely about my abusive parents and not about the culture itself. And any culture is interesting and full of universal human treasures like folklore, music, language, and landscape.
But if I never want to identify with this part of my heritage, then that’s okay. Cultural heritage shouldn’t be something that you have no say in. You can’t choose your family and you can’t choose where you are born or you grow up in. But at least theoretically you can choose to leave your family and find a new one and you can choose to only identify with the culture(s) that you feel most connected to.
It’s not about what’s in your blood. It’s about what’s in your soul.
So even though my parents were mostly speaking Spanish, I never became a fluent Spanish-speaker. I was forced to take Spanish classes in school (no one asked me) and I have no trouble whatsoever understanding spoken or written Spanish, I just get blocked when I try to produce Spanish myself. Studies about bilingualism have found that people’s personalities seem to differ depending on which language they speak. However, as the linked article explains well, it’s the context (in which we might speak a different language) that triggers us to take on a certain role or show more or less of our personality.
Since my childhood and teenage experience with the Spanish language were situations in which I had to completely hide myself and become invisible (including some of the worst traumatic memories in social group context), it makes perfect sense that I literally lose my voice when trying to speak Spanish.
As there is so much more trauma connected to Spanish than to German culture, I’ve felt certain that this identity issue wouldn’t move for a very long time.
But then something did move within me.
One important part of my personal identity is my interest in ancient cultures. My special interest lies in Celtic and Germanic cultures and languages. As a teenager I discovered Irish music and I’ve loved Celtic music since then (I know there’s a whole lot of a debate about the term “Celtic”, but I would have to dedicate another whole article to that!).
Now, the connecting point between that and my identity issues lies in Northwestern Spain. Galicia and Asturias, to be precise. I first visited these regions as an older teenager - travelling with my parents, so of course in an abusive context. But I immediately fell in love with the green landscape that was so different from South Spain and which surprises many people. I also was surprised to learn that Celtic tribes had lived in Spain during the Iron Age. I devoured every scrap of information that I could get my hands on about the archaeology and folklore of the region and was hungry for more. And I didn’t have to wait for long.
Standing on a city square in Santiago de Compostela, I suddenly heard something that seemed almost otherworldly (the metaphor is intentionally chosen). It was music, beautiful music that sounded decidedly Celtic, but not really Irish or like anything else I had known before then. I distinctively remember this moment, where I felt a sudden and intense connection to that music. It felt like something calling me home, because there was something eerily familiar to it. It may sound like something out of a film or a dream, but as rare as these moments are in waking real life, they do exist.
It turned out that the music came from a music store nearby and the music in question was from the Galician band Irtio. I soon discovered more artists like Carlos Núñez, Susana Seivane, and Luar Na Lubre, as well the Asturian artists Hevia, Tejedor, and Llan De Cubel.
In typical narcissist fashion, my father first faked a grandiose interest in this music, which made my identification retreat for a painful while. But as that false interest soon was abandoned and the bought CDs never played again, I sneaked out to copy the CDs, so that I could reclaim my discovery and connection.
Now some years before this trip to Spain, I had learned that some of my father’s ancestors who had emigrated to Chile at the end of the 19th century, had been from Galicia. I had thought this incredibly exciting and had felt annoyed that one of these people had decided to change his last name from a typical Galician name into a common Spanish/Latin-American name à la John Smith.
A long time has passed since then. It was in the recent context of one of my personal archaeological and linguistic researches about the Celts and also my need for new music, that I stumbled across Galicia and Asturias again. And as I am now in a completely different place than all those years ago, I’m also freer to feel even more of a connection and to explore this connection more deeply.
What if I decided to claim this part of my cultural heritage? Would it be okay to do so? Would I be accepted? Could I forge a new identity from the fragments of the past and present, just as I had started to do with my German identity?
These are the questions rushing through my head. One the one hand, I feel a huge surge of Imposter Syndrome, which is still a recurring issue for me (and a typical burden of people who grew up in a narcissistic family). But on the other hand, my emotions are what they are. As I stated above, it’s really about where you feel you belong.
I’m also wondering whether that deep sense of familiarity that I get when listening to Galician and Asturian music stems from early experiences in infancy. As far as I can remember, most of my father’s vinyl records were of Latin-American music. But at some point I learnt that there also was one very old record of a Galician artist. Of course Latin-American and general Spanish music have a lot in common, though I’m aware of some important differences. The language alone is a factor of recognition.
I will probably never know for sure, but my experience fluctuates – very rarely does music from South America stir a chord in me, though this is in part due to my internal walls of dissociation and pushing away. It has happened though, and I recognise the type of music from my childhood. There’s also a whole lot of different styles that belong to this genre, and most of them are simply not my cup of tea, as they say. And with folk music from other parts of Spain, it also doesn’t give me that same feeling, though I rationally can spot similarities. It’s quite frustrating, because I’d love to solve this puzzle.
Just what exactly is it about Galician and Asturian music that feels so much like ME?
Maybe it’s just a mix of music that I heard in infancy and my personal preference for and identification with certain types of music. Like other artists, I definitely see the similarities between Galician/Asturian music and Irish/Scottish/Breton music, as well as the typically Spanish ones, which also include Arabic elements (it's a super exciting topic). I’ve even considered whether my knowledge of my roots might subconsciously influence this, but then again when I first heard that song in Santiago de Compostela, I had no idea where that music came from or what it was. It also couldn’t create a truly authentic sense of connection.
All I know is that there is an incredibly strong connection to this music, which amazes and overwhelms me (in a good way) every single time that I listen to new songs from these lands. As with German folk music, it is my dream to embody my love and sense of identity by creating my own versions of these folk songs. In conjunction with my recovery from Complex Trauma I'm sure it will be the key to gradually, eventually claim the Spanish part of my cultural heritage after all.
Not the one that they designed, but the one that I design for myself.
Never-Ending Road
To quote and slightly change the lyrics of Loreena McKennitt’s song Amhrán Duit/Never-Ending Road:
“All roads lead to me – there is no journey’s end.”
Even though the recovery from Complex Trauma is extremely slow and it can feel like you’re going nowhere a lot of the time, these are some important things I learnt from my own journey:
My true self is still there inside of me. It’s alive and it can grow.
I marvel at my own resilience.
It’s important to talk with all parts and let them speak – all at their own pace.
Amazing things happen when you give space to yourself/all of your parts.
The connection and fullness I feel when expressing my true self is the feeling that I’ve been longing for all my life.
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