Hey Dana Jane

Tag: trauma

  • Naming the Darkness: How Neon Angel Resonates with My Experience

    Reading Cherie Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel, was a deeply moving experience. Cherie’s story of rising to fame with The Runaways and the darker struggles that came with it is raw, unfiltered, and deeply human. One quote in particular struck a chord with me: “Because there is a certain type of person in this world, a type that has something black inside of their soul.”

    Growing up in my dad’s bar, those words resonated on a level that’s hard to describe. As a teenager working behind the bar, the threat of sexual assault wasn’t some distant fear—it was an ever-present shadow. I was only 14 when I started bartending, and by the time I was 16, I’d seen the worst parts of human nature far too often.

    There were always those regulars who had my dad fooled. They’d come in, shake his hand, and laugh like they were the picture of respectability. To him, they were “upstanding citizens,” good for business and trustworthy. But once a few drinks loosened their tongues, their true nature came out. They’d flirt, they’d grope, and some even tried to manipulate me into being affectionate with them.

    It’s difficult to explain what it’s like to be in that position, teetering between fear and self-preservation. I never felt safe around those men, yet I also understood the stakes. My dad’s business depended on these customers, and I didn’t know how far I could push before accusations would turn into drama—or worse. At 14, 15, 16 years old, I had no idea how to navigate that fine line.

    How much do you tell your dad when you’re that young? What if he doesn’t believe you, or what if he does and things escalate? These questions swirled in my mind constantly, leaving me feeling isolated and unsure of how to protect myself. I learned to smile politely, sidestep advances, and deflect with jokes, all while keeping my guard up. Looking back, it was a survival strategy—but it shouldn’t have had to be.

    Reading Cherie’s words about the darkness inside some people’s souls brought back those memories in a wave of understanding and validation. She’d seen that darkness too, felt it closing in, and fought against it. There’s a strange kind of comfort in knowing you’re not alone, that someone else has faced the same shadows and named them for what they are.

    Her memoir reminded me of the strength it takes to confront those moments and the importance of shedding light on these experiences. When I think back to that time in my life, I feel a mix of emotions: anger, sadness, and pride. Anger at the men who thought their behavior was acceptable. Sadness for the girl I was, navigating a world where she didn’t feel protected. And pride for the woman I’ve become, who’s not afraid to speak the truth.

    Neon Angel isn’t just a story about music and fame; it’s a story about resilience. It’s about naming the darkness and refusing to let it define you. For anyone who’s ever felt that shadow looming, Cherie’s words are a reminder that you’re not alone, and that your voice has power. I wish I’d known that back then, but I’m grateful to know it now.

  • Full Circle: A Reflection on Penny, My Childhood Bully

    Life has a funny way of coming full circle, doesn’t it? As I sit here reflecting on my childhood, one story stands out—a story that I’ve spent years processing, only to find it has a twist ending that even I couldn’t have predicted.

    Let me introduce you to Penny, the girl who turned my junior high years into a battlefield. Penny and I met in 5th grade when she transferred to the same elementary school. At first, we were friends—two girls navigating the awkwardness of pre-adolescence. She lived in a trailer park with her mom and younger sister. I visited her home a handful of times, but there was never much adult supervision. Her mom worked second shift at a nursing home and would often head out to the bars after her shift, leaving Penny and her sister to fend for themselves.

    We spent summers walking around the trailer park—something I now realize was dangerous given the sketchiness of the area. Penny loved chasing boys and flirting, a hobby that didn’t sit well with me. But things shifted in 7th grade when Penny decided I was a threat to her relationship with her boyfriend. The accusation was absurd—I had no interest in him—but that didn’t stop her from turning on me.

    The insults came first. She called me ugly, accused me of stealing his attention, and declared I’d never be good enough for anyone. By 8th grade, she’d recruited a posse of mean girls to back her up. I was shoved into lockers, my head slammed against walls, and mocked with the nickname “Tuna.” They tried to make me feel ugly, unwanted, and disgusting. And for a while, they succeeded.

    Their cruelty stripped me of my confidence, leaving me feeling small and helpless. My father, furious at the treatment I endured, told me to steer clear of those girls, calling them “derelicts and deadbeats.” Over the summer before freshman year, I took his words to heart. I realized I had nothing to prove to Penny or anyone else. I learned to stand up for myself and started to see their behavior for what it was: jealousy.

    They envied the life I had—a stable home, loving parents, and opportunities they couldn’t imagine. I was more than just the girl-next-door pretty or the friendly face in class. I had potential, ambition, and resilience.

    Fast forward to now, and here’s the ironic twist: Penny is a bartender at my family’s tavern, a job she landed during a period when I was no-contact with my family. When I first heard the news, I laughed. The girl who once tried to make me feel small is now working for my family. Imagine being a single mother of five, no education, and needing to ask for a job from the family of the girl you tormented in junior high.

    Is she laughing about this, thinking she pulled one over on them? Maybe. I’m almost certain her thinking was, look how dumb the Jurgellas are, they know I bullied Dana and hired me anyway. But I can’t help but see the poetic justice in it all. Penny, who thought she was untouchable back in the day, is now slinging drinks in a bar owned by my family.

    Meanwhile, I’ve built a life I’m proud of—a college-educated professional with a fulfilling career, a loving husband, and three wonderful kids. I live in a home filled with love, a far cry from the chaos of her trailer park days.

    Penny once tried to make me feel like a loser, but life has a way of revealing the truth. I didn’t just survive her bullying; I thrived despite it. And that’s the ultimate victory.

  • The Rage Phase

    The worst part about suffering emotional, psychological and/or spiritual abuse is that most people don’t believe you. You don’t have visible scars or bruises. People can’t see the internal trauma. My own brother publicly shared on Facebook that I was not abused. It hurts to know that your siblings, people who grew up in the same house as you, and experienced similar things, choose to deny what you endured.

    For so long I felt the need to prove that I was right. I thought that I had to prove to others the pain I experienced, and still feel today, to justify my anger or sadness. When your own family calls you crazy and continues to mistreat you, because that’s all they know, and because this type of abuse is cyclical, it makes you feel devalued.

    Yesterday I finally asked myself, “Why do you care so much about what others think?”

    I contemplated for most of the day about this. Why do I need to be believed by the very same people who invalidated me? These are people who refuse to acknowledge my pain, yet I still feel as though I have to prove what I went through.

    I’ve come to realize how brainwashed I was, and it started when I was very young. I was taught that everyone else knew better or was smarter and that they had the ability and the right to define me. I didn’t belong to myself because they owned me.

    And now as an adult, I realize that I have the power to stop this never ending spiral. As long as I continue to fight to be heard my abusers have power over me.

    I’m no longer comfortable believing they are always right and I’m always wrong. That may have worked when I was younger; it doesn’t work now.

    I no longer believe this lie that I have to prove my worth. In my adolescence I was brainwashed to believe that love had to be proven through obedience, compliance and service. But I was never loved the same way. My dysfunctional family didn’t prove they loved me they same way they taught me to “love” them. They have a false definition of love. The rules are different for the abusers. Everyone always believes the one with the most power over others.

    I’m no longer powerless. I don’t have to give away my energy to people who have no intention of changing. I have learned to validate myself. Just because my parents and siblings invalidate me does not mean I’m invalid. Just because they don’t believe what I endured does not mean it didn’t happen.

    They love to tell others that I’m lying, that I’m exaggerating or that I’m dramatic. But the reality is they know I’m telling my truth, and it makes them look bad. They are living in denial. And I understand it. I lived in denial, too. I didn’t want to believe that the people who are supposed to love me unconditionally treated me with disregard. It’s painful. It hurts.

    I protected them for decades. No one wants to admit that their parents only show love when their children meet their expectations. I’m not hiding anymore.

    All the lies I believed about myself have surfaced. I had to dig deep into the cracked foundation of my dysfunctional family to see what really happened and how badly I was manipulated. I didn’t know any different.

    I can’t pinpoint the moment I realized the truth. It was an ongoing process but the catalyst was having an emotional and mental breakdown last year. I was blind with rage over being blamed for every problem in my family. My body shut down and I couldn’t function for several days. Then one day I decided I needed help. I went to therapy and began unraveling the knots of my past.

    It was brutal. Therapy messes you up when you begin to face the things you’ve repressed for decades. All the excuses I made to cover it up, all the times I accepted blame to keep the peace, all the times I was “the bigger person” – which usually meant opening myself up for more abuse – I faced it all.

    Denial came first. “No, that didn’t happen to me,” I remember saying out loud.

    But it did happen. I had to acknowledge it. I looked at myself in the mirror and said, “Yes, you were emotionally and spiritually abused.”

    Grief came next. Crying for days. Remembering every incident that I pushed to the darkest corners of my mind. Grieving over the lost parts of my childhood. Crying about past traumas and acknowledging that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way. That was hard.

    Then there’s anger. Pure unadulterated rage. That’s were I am right now, in the rage phase.

    But this time I know that it will dissipate. I know that I don’t have to prove my pain. I know that they don’t have to believe me. This abuse happened to me, I have accepted it, and I’m working through it.

    I don’t have to prove my worth. I know my own worth. I don’t need anyone’s validation. I validate myself.

  • Enmeshed Families, Emotional Abuse and Cutting Off Contact

    To heal from emotional and spiritual abuse, I learned to set boundaries. Setting boundaries is important. It helps me set basic guidelines of how I want to be treated. It helps me establish guidelines as to how others can behave around me.  This helps ensure that relationships are mutually respectful, appropriate, and caring.

    Setting boundaries also helps eliminate opportunities for me to be abused. I have used two methods: no contact and limited contact.  No contact means I have no communication with the offender: no phone calls, text messages, emails, or visits.  Limited contact means I determine the frequency and duration of all communication. I like to call it “small doses.”

    It’s not easy to cut someone out of your life.  Even after enduring emotional abuse, I often struggle with self-doubt, especially when the holidays are approaching.  It seems to trigger questions as to whether I’m doing the right thing. I start to wonder if I’m the actual problem for the strained relationships with members of my family. When your family is enmeshed, it’s difficult to develop a sense of self, or trust your emotions, and not having any contact with each other is unfamiliar and foreign.

    My decision to have no communication with members of my family was one I needed to make to find peace. I was emotionally and mentally exhausted from fighting to be heard. I cried every day because my feelings were not validated.

    My parents treat me with disregard. Sometimes they are dismissive, sometimes they are verbally abusive, and when I attempt to address the issues or give examples of past bad behavior, they gaslight me, or use guilt and shame to silence me. 

    My parents feel entitled to treat me however they want, and they feel entitled to having a relationship with my children despite their bad behavior toward me.  My children have witnessed the way my parents dismiss me and disregard me. The terrible part is I tolerated their behavior.  I wasn’t strong enough to stand up for myself.  Because I accepted the way that my parents treated me, my children received a specific message about me: Mom’s feelings don’t matter.

    My kids saw their grandparents, and their aunts and uncles, treat me like I was not important. They saw that my feelings were invalid; that it was okay to treat people with disregard.  My kids got the message that it was acceptable to treat their mother this way, too.

    What I’m most ashamed of is that my kids witnessed me trying to please these people despite the way they treated me. I showed them it was okay to accept poor treatment. Why should I be surprised when my kids disrespect my authority? I allowed their grandparents to do the same thing. Why should I expect my children to be able to set boundaries, or respect my boundaries? I didn’t set any with my parents or my siblings.

    Why would I want my kids to be around people who treat me poorly? 

    I want to believe my parents would never hurt my children. But I find myself asking why I think they would be so wonderful to everyone else and that I, as their daughter, was the exception to the rule. When it comes to the truth about who my parents truly are and how they treat people, I find myself facing contradictions.

    I know exactly why I believe that my parents would never hurt my kids. 

    When I was a kid, I was convinced that I was the problem. I was brainwashed to believe that I was deficient, or somehow defective, and that if I wasn’t so “worthless” my life and my parents’ feelings towards me would have been different. I was convinced that if only I could have been the daughter they wanted, then I would have been loved.

    I believed that my parents would have loved me if I was good enough. If I had been the daughter they dreamed of; smarter, prettier, more loving, more compliant, less of a burden, then I would have been treasured, loved, accepted, and secure.

    I don’t see my children the way my parents regarded me, so I can’t imagine that my mom and dad would ever treat my kids the way that they treated me. I see my kids as wonderful treasures, so it’s unfathomable that my parents would ever judge my children in the same ways they judged me.  Of course I wouldn’t see the danger of my children having a relationship with their grandparents, even if I decide not to have contact with them. It was ingrained in me to think I was the problem; that I was always at fault.

    In enmeshed families there is a lack of boundaries.  When I began to set boundaries they weren’t respected.  My parents feel entitled to step around me to gain access to my children. Sometimes they contact my husband instead of me. Sometimes they enlist my siblings to have a talk with me to “set me straight.” 

    My siblings have said they fear that I am using my children to punish our parents, and them.  They tell me that Mom and Dad love their grandchildren and I don’t have the right to cut off contact. This infuriates me.  What is loving about treating a child’s mother with disregard and disrespect? Where is the example of love in that treatment?

    Some parents and grandparents are narcissists. Let’s be clear: a narcissist is a narcissist no matter who they are dealing with. They are only interested in themselves and their interests. In that regard, what is their interest in a relationship with your children? I’ve thought about this for quite a long time.  I believe that they want to be right so badly that they will try to discredit you when it comes to your children.  Their sole purpose is to prove that they are right about you (and that you are wrong); so right that your own children have turned against you.

    When making decisions about my children I cannot be blind to the truth. I am the parent. I have a choice, even though I had been brainwashed to believe that I didn’t. I have power even though I was convinced that I was powerless. I reject those lies. I’m taking control of my life. I’m taking back my power. I’m taking control over my choices.

    I’m not obligated to do anything just because the word family is involved. People who don’t care about me are not good role models for my children. People who treat me as though I am nothing and call me crazy don’t have a place in my life or the lives of my kids.  These people are going to communicate their judgments about me to my children, even if those judgments are non-verbal. I’ve experienced this before and sometimes these people are very convincing.

    We might be accused of seeking revenge when we decide to have no contact, but when it comes to me, my husband and my kids, we are a package deal. If you can’t deal with me, you can’t deal with my kids. Accusations are not truth. Whose fault is it, truly, when we decide that it is best for our children not to see our parents? What situation or behavior caused us to consider this decision in the first place?

    My decision wasn’t made to seek revenge. I sought peace. My motive for finally standing up for myself was to demand a relationship that is mutually respectful and kind, and to set an example for my kids as to how they deserve to be treated. The cycle of abuse stops with me.