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Family of Origin
Hey, Cedar, or anyone interested in FOO (Family of Origin) issues. Cedar, WHY NOW???
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<blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 657002" data-attributes="member: 17461"><p>No. You are having a look at whether you believe her. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>As it is your right and your obligation to do. That is your mother. The end of her story is the beginning of a new phase in your life. You should have been able to join with your sibs and your father and have gained strength there for the journey to come.</p><p></p><p>Your abuser prevented that, too.</p><p></p><p>Poison in the Will.</p><p></p><p>She probably relished knowing what would blow up on all of you ~ not just you, but your brother and your sister too, who had to trade integrity for a role even after the abuser was dead.</p><p></p><p>So, yeah. Your mom did it on purpose, SWOT. But not solely to hurt you. You were the weapon she used to destroy your and your siblings relationships to one another <em>and to your father, </em>forever.</p><p></p><p>Your father is a good man, a man of integrity. He has proven that already.</p><p></p><p>Good. One less thing.</p><p></p><p>Their names are not Thing 1 and Thing 2, SWOT. Their names are Victim 2 and Victim 3. And that the family cannot come together, even now, even after the abuser's venom is old news, is the abuser's ultimate victory.</p><p></p><p>Our mothers were very ill, SWOT.</p><p></p><p>But the time for their illnesses to define us is past <em>because we say so.</em> And we always had that power. That is the magic and the truth in the classic tale about the Wizard of Oz. We always had courage; we always were intelligent; we always had our hearts and our love and our strength. We were taught not to believe in those good things in ourselves. <em>We need to journey through illusion, through the poppy field, to the Wizard. We need to recognize the Wizard for the shyster he intentionally is. Then, we need to figure out what to do about that. Nothing is as they taught us it was.</em></p><p></p><p>Good. We will make our own ways.</p><p></p><p>We are in the poppy field, now. But we have our courage, our intelligence, and our hearts there with us.</p><p></p><p>And all the little Munchkins want us to succeed; and the Wicked witch is dead.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>I am sorry this happened to you, and to Thing 1 and Thing 2. You all should have found staunch allies in one another, should have found staunch allies who could bear loyal witness, strengthening yourselves and one another to go out into the world and create lives of cherishment and value. You, and we all do, need an inviolate core to help us define ourselves in the world. </p><p></p><p>We, you and me and all our sibs <em>and both our fathers,</em> don't have those things, those good things, SWOT.</p><p></p><p>So we have to create our own. Against the will of the abuser, dead and gone or still spinning poison elsewhere, we will create our lives as we will them to be ~ as we already have, in loving our own children and in choosing, again and again, to love, or to choose a another mate, who is committed to love, to the strength and integrity in it.</p><p></p><p>Our abusers will have taught us we have no option but to choose someone who hates and will detest and confuse us, as she did, herself.</p><p></p><p>Why doesn't matter.</p><p></p><p>We need to stand up.</p><p></p><p>Radical Acceptance.</p><p></p><p>We have done harder things. We know now, how the story ended, for the abuser. We know now, who the abuser was in her heart. Why doesn't matter. Our sibs are not the enemy. There is no enemy. There is only the sadness of isolation where family should be.</p><p></p><p>We have done harder things. </p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>There is a period of vulnerability that happens as repressed feelings are pulled up, in all their ugliness, and let go. That is what this is. It will pass in two to three days and when it does, there will be a new stability, a feeling of balance that feels strong and unfamiliar. The energy you were using to repress the old, meaningless energy that hurt you when you were just a little girl is yours, now. Here is the miracle: You lived a life, anyway. Without access to the strength, to that inviolate core, everyone else has, you survived. You did what you could, all you could, to assist others, to make the world a better place than it might have been.</p><p></p><p>So, that makes you a hero, SWOT.</p><p></p><p>Like the heroes in the Greek myths. You are out there right now battling the monster; soon, you will turn for home, triumphant.</p><p></p><p><img src="/community/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/emoticons/hugs.gif" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hugs:" title="hugs :hugs:" data-shortname=":hugs:" /></p><p></p><p>ISC is right. We will not give ourselves more than we can bear. If the feelings have come now, then you are strong enough to bear it and are ready to heal it. There is nothing you need to do. <em>Given the way it feels to relive them now, imagine what it must have been to live through it when you were just a little girl, or a beautiful adolescent filled with potential, or a young mother who needed her own mother.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p>I think you are doing so well, SWOT.</p><p></p><p>We are further along than just to need to know that these things happened. It took enormous courage just to admit it; more courage than most people have, maybe. We are doing this by choice and for our own sakes. They say people will live with almost any inconvenience, because we hate change and because change is difficult. We are calling change; we are actively seeking and confronting traumatic events. There is no hurry, SWOT. There is nothing you need to do. We are meant to be healthy and whole. You are already more balanced, stronger, steadier, than you were. This part is just where you have the feelings you did not know how to incorporate, then. They are very bad feelings. It feels terrible to be treated the way people who are not entirely sane treat their children. It puts us at a further disadvantage, and it is a heavy thing to carry around, however strong we are.</p><p></p><p>I can never figure out why. So, I had to let "why" go. I had to just let it go. It is what it is.</p><p></p><p>Ugly.</p><p></p><p>Read something beautiful, play beautiful music. Think about the Leonard Cohen Halleluiah...there are others who have been here before us, SWOT.</p><p></p><p>They came through it, and we will, too.</p><p></p><p>D H says: Toxic is toxic. Don't open the lid. I agree with him that it seems never- ending. I don't know why I keep going back either, except that I am not going to live like this because of someone else's meanness or stupidity or downright wickedness. That is why I danced all over about what the win could possibly be for people who abuse. This is what I know:</p><p></p><p>1) There will be a pattern of this exact kind of abuse in the lives of every abuser. What they did to us, they do to everyone, replaying their abusive pasts, forever trying to get their needs for grandiosity or safety met by hurting someone defenseless or by hurting some unsuspecting someone before they can leave them. Look for it. Whether the betrayer is a parent, a sister or brother, or a friend (or a therapist) the pattern of abuse, the basic precepts they employ to reflect the reality they need validated (at your expense) will be the same. Only the victims change. You were, and I was too, caught in an abuser's reality. This leaves us vulnerable, all of our lives, to other abusers using the same modus operandi.</p><p></p><p>Step out of the trap.</p><p></p><p>There is another quote that I like, about being caught, like a fish in a net. </p><p></p><p>We are not to wail and bemoan our fate at having been caught in someone else's net. We are to find the hole in it, the escape clause.</p><p></p><p>When we are the ones <em>being</em> abused, it feels that we have done wrong, that we have been targeted, that there is some rhyme or reason to the things that happened, to how it all came together. There is no rhyme or reason, SWOT. <em>Search out the patterns in your abuser's life (or in your abusers' lives, if they function as a pack) and you will be free.</em></p><p></p><p>It was nothing personal to you.</p><p></p><p>Abusers abuse because they abuse.</p><p></p><p>Radical acceptance. A bedrock understanding that what happened should not have happened, not to anyone.</p><p></p><p>Get out of jail free. Gold plated get out of jail free card.</p><p></p><p>Woot!</p><p></p><p>You are courageous and generous and strong. You are coming through this beautifully. If it were easy, if your abusers had been easy on you, you would not have believed them in the first place. They hurt their belief systems into you.</p><p></p><p>Why doesn't matter.</p><p></p><p>It is all in how what happened taught us to think about ourselves, SWOT. We don't have to do what they say. We don't have to be who they say we are. We never have to believe them <em>or believe in them</em> again. Your mom was not a good mom. She was not altogether bad, or you would not have survived your childhood. She loved you the best the evil in her would let her. Could be she was a messed up person who, like my own mom maybe, picked hate because it feels stronger than the strength in vulnerability that real love, real trust, requires. And maybe that worked for her, but it was devastating for each of her children. Your brother and sister are not exactly Thing 1 and Thing 2, SWOT. Steeped in poison and betrayal themselves, they have been trained, like you have and like I have too, to hate themselves and their siblings. In the abuser's lair, all things serve the abuser. Not a one of you came out of it healthy and trusting and whole because your abuser (and mine, too) saw to it that did not happen. Betrayal is the order of the day because that is how the abuser keeps control.</p><p></p><p>Divide and conquer. If that division can be an internal division, if it can be a desertion of self or can grow into hatred for the self? Even better. If we can be broken, we can be ridden, can be enslaved to the abuser's dysfunction. </p><p></p><p>So, you can go back, and you can see, and you can witness for yourself. It isn't going to change that these things happened. But what going back and witnessing for that mistreated little girl will do is allow you to love her, to hold her and mother her and teach her compassion and cherishing for herself. That is how we do this: cherish ourselves through the poison. Expect the bad feelings. Be very gentle with yourself; bring yourself positive things like beautiful music. You are hard at work doing an impossible thing <em>and you are doing it.</em></p><p></p><p><em>There was never an abuser in the world, not in all of time, who said: "Ooops. Did that hurt you? Sorry." No. They abuse us, they target and hurt and destroy us if they can and then, they seal what they have created ~ a broken doll of a child ~ in contempt, so we can never access it, can never be whole and healthy and strong enough to defy them or anyone else, ever again.</em></p><p></p><p>I think you are doing great. If you need a time away from it, SWOT, take a little break. I think you don't need a time away. I think you are doing just fine and that is a scary thing. You have been warned, all of your life, to be the role, not the real you.</p><p></p><p>It's scary.</p><p></p><p>We don't know what to do with ourselves, how to behave or what to think. So, just don't do anything.</p><p></p><p>This is all something to be done on your timetable. You have all the time you need. This is meant to happen, this healing. There is no reason to rush or delay. Every day will be sufficient unto itself, so they say. Something about the tasks of every day being sufficient unto themselves. Cherish yourself through it.</p><p></p><p>Brene Brown quotes Theodore Roosevelt in the beginning of her book, <u>Daring Greatly.</u> If you google it, you will find it, and we are so fortunate in that. The quote revolves around the idea that there are some of us who step into the arena. Who fall and get up and fall again, bleeding and roaring and crying and standing straight up the whole time. The others...the others are only the audience, are only the watchers, the witnesses to our courage and daring and pain. And at the end of the day, they will go home, unchanged.</p><p></p><p>We are the victors; we will walk away upright and in full possession of the things we claimed for our own.</p><p></p><p>That is the essential click that has to happen, for us. We think we are our abuser's audience. We think we are dependent on our abusers for definition and maybe, for the right to be alive at all. The true thing beneath it all is that they are the audience...and for heaven's sake, they couldn't even get that right. A mother mirrors positive grandiosity to her infant. Ours mirrored negative grandiosity.</p><p></p><p>They could not even do that right and they hurt our sibs, too. </p><p></p><p>And they destroyed, from the grave, sometimes, our abilities to ever depend on or draw strength from or support them, <em>our own people with whom we were little girls or little boys, </em>ever again.</p><p></p><p>All so the abuser could keep us trapped; could keep us isolated, could keep us betrayed and separate and weak.</p><p></p><p>That is what they fight us so hard for. Everyone in a dysfunctional family is trying so hard to be real. We have all been our roles for so long that we feel exposed, without them. Like animals in cages too small, we keep going back and trying to stuff ourselves into the cages. But we were never meant to be caged.</p><p></p><p>Bye, mom.</p><p></p><p><img src="/community/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/2012/mcsmiley1.gif" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":mcsmiley1:" title="mcsmiley1 :mcsmiley1:" data-shortname=":mcsmiley1:" /></p><p></p><p>Here is the final thing: Our mothers had a choice, too. They are not made of what we are made of, and they lost or gave in or dived in. When we were young we were vulnerable to them; we had no choice but to believe what they told us was true.</p><p></p><p>Now, we feel disgusted by the pointless pain in the game they insisted on.</p><p></p><p>Turns out it was a stupid game <em>and they STILL cheated. </em>That is what abusers do. Why let them continue to ride us, to draw the strength out of us? They were wrong. They destroyed our families that we should have access to, to this day.</p><p></p><p>Roles and role playing, and they never stop.</p><p></p><p>So, we do.</p><p></p><p>Snip.</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p><p></p><p>SWOT? We are all right here for you. Right here.</p><p></p><p>And you are here for me.</p><p></p><p>And that is a living miracle.</p><p></p><p>And so, we are stronger, enough.</p><p></p><p>Bye, mom.</p><p></p><p>Snip.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 657002, member: 17461"] No. You are having a look at whether you believe her. As it is your right and your obligation to do. That is your mother. The end of her story is the beginning of a new phase in your life. You should have been able to join with your sibs and your father and have gained strength there for the journey to come. Your abuser prevented that, too. Poison in the Will. She probably relished knowing what would blow up on all of you ~ not just you, but your brother and your sister too, who had to trade integrity for a role even after the abuser was dead. So, yeah. Your mom did it on purpose, SWOT. But not solely to hurt you. You were the weapon she used to destroy your and your siblings relationships to one another [I]and to your father, [/I]forever. Your father is a good man, a man of integrity. He has proven that already. Good. One less thing. Their names are not Thing 1 and Thing 2, SWOT. Their names are Victim 2 and Victim 3. And that the family cannot come together, even now, even after the abuser's venom is old news, is the abuser's ultimate victory. Our mothers were very ill, SWOT. But the time for their illnesses to define us is past [I]because we say so.[/I] And we always had that power. That is the magic and the truth in the classic tale about the Wizard of Oz. We always had courage; we always were intelligent; we always had our hearts and our love and our strength. We were taught not to believe in those good things in ourselves. [I]We need to journey through illusion, through the poppy field, to the Wizard. We need to recognize the Wizard for the shyster he intentionally is. Then, we need to figure out what to do about that. Nothing is as they taught us it was.[/I] Good. We will make our own ways. We are in the poppy field, now. But we have our courage, our intelligence, and our hearts there with us. And all the little Munchkins want us to succeed; and the Wicked witch is dead. *** I am sorry this happened to you, and to Thing 1 and Thing 2. You all should have found staunch allies in one another, should have found staunch allies who could bear loyal witness, strengthening yourselves and one another to go out into the world and create lives of cherishment and value. You, and we all do, need an inviolate core to help us define ourselves in the world. We, you and me and all our sibs [I]and both our fathers,[/I] don't have those things, those good things, SWOT. So we have to create our own. Against the will of the abuser, dead and gone or still spinning poison elsewhere, we will create our lives as we will them to be ~ as we already have, in loving our own children and in choosing, again and again, to love, or to choose a another mate, who is committed to love, to the strength and integrity in it. Our abusers will have taught us we have no option but to choose someone who hates and will detest and confuse us, as she did, herself. Why doesn't matter. We need to stand up. Radical Acceptance. We have done harder things. We know now, how the story ended, for the abuser. We know now, who the abuser was in her heart. Why doesn't matter. Our sibs are not the enemy. There is no enemy. There is only the sadness of isolation where family should be. We have done harder things. *** There is a period of vulnerability that happens as repressed feelings are pulled up, in all their ugliness, and let go. That is what this is. It will pass in two to three days and when it does, there will be a new stability, a feeling of balance that feels strong and unfamiliar. The energy you were using to repress the old, meaningless energy that hurt you when you were just a little girl is yours, now. Here is the miracle: You lived a life, anyway. Without access to the strength, to that inviolate core, everyone else has, you survived. You did what you could, all you could, to assist others, to make the world a better place than it might have been. So, that makes you a hero, SWOT. Like the heroes in the Greek myths. You are out there right now battling the monster; soon, you will turn for home, triumphant. :hugs: ISC is right. We will not give ourselves more than we can bear. If the feelings have come now, then you are strong enough to bear it and are ready to heal it. There is nothing you need to do. [I]Given the way it feels to relive them now, imagine what it must have been to live through it when you were just a little girl, or a beautiful adolescent filled with potential, or a young mother who needed her own mother. [/I] I think you are doing so well, SWOT. We are further along than just to need to know that these things happened. It took enormous courage just to admit it; more courage than most people have, maybe. We are doing this by choice and for our own sakes. They say people will live with almost any inconvenience, because we hate change and because change is difficult. We are calling change; we are actively seeking and confronting traumatic events. There is no hurry, SWOT. There is nothing you need to do. We are meant to be healthy and whole. You are already more balanced, stronger, steadier, than you were. This part is just where you have the feelings you did not know how to incorporate, then. They are very bad feelings. It feels terrible to be treated the way people who are not entirely sane treat their children. It puts us at a further disadvantage, and it is a heavy thing to carry around, however strong we are. I can never figure out why. So, I had to let "why" go. I had to just let it go. It is what it is. Ugly. Read something beautiful, play beautiful music. Think about the Leonard Cohen Halleluiah...there are others who have been here before us, SWOT. They came through it, and we will, too. D H says: Toxic is toxic. Don't open the lid. I agree with him that it seems never- ending. I don't know why I keep going back either, except that I am not going to live like this because of someone else's meanness or stupidity or downright wickedness. That is why I danced all over about what the win could possibly be for people who abuse. This is what I know: 1) There will be a pattern of this exact kind of abuse in the lives of every abuser. What they did to us, they do to everyone, replaying their abusive pasts, forever trying to get their needs for grandiosity or safety met by hurting someone defenseless or by hurting some unsuspecting someone before they can leave them. Look for it. Whether the betrayer is a parent, a sister or brother, or a friend (or a therapist) the pattern of abuse, the basic precepts they employ to reflect the reality they need validated (at your expense) will be the same. Only the victims change. You were, and I was too, caught in an abuser's reality. This leaves us vulnerable, all of our lives, to other abusers using the same modus operandi. Step out of the trap. There is another quote that I like, about being caught, like a fish in a net. We are not to wail and bemoan our fate at having been caught in someone else's net. We are to find the hole in it, the escape clause. When we are the ones [I]being[/I] abused, it feels that we have done wrong, that we have been targeted, that there is some rhyme or reason to the things that happened, to how it all came together. There is no rhyme or reason, SWOT. [I]Search out the patterns in your abuser's life (or in your abusers' lives, if they function as a pack) and you will be free.[/I] It was nothing personal to you. Abusers abuse because they abuse. Radical acceptance. A bedrock understanding that what happened should not have happened, not to anyone. Get out of jail free. Gold plated get out of jail free card. Woot! You are courageous and generous and strong. You are coming through this beautifully. If it were easy, if your abusers had been easy on you, you would not have believed them in the first place. They hurt their belief systems into you. Why doesn't matter. It is all in how what happened taught us to think about ourselves, SWOT. We don't have to do what they say. We don't have to be who they say we are. We never have to believe them [I]or believe in them[/I] again. Your mom was not a good mom. She was not altogether bad, or you would not have survived your childhood. She loved you the best the evil in her would let her. Could be she was a messed up person who, like my own mom maybe, picked hate because it feels stronger than the strength in vulnerability that real love, real trust, requires. And maybe that worked for her, but it was devastating for each of her children. Your brother and sister are not exactly Thing 1 and Thing 2, SWOT. Steeped in poison and betrayal themselves, they have been trained, like you have and like I have too, to hate themselves and their siblings. In the abuser's lair, all things serve the abuser. Not a one of you came out of it healthy and trusting and whole because your abuser (and mine, too) saw to it that did not happen. Betrayal is the order of the day because that is how the abuser keeps control. Divide and conquer. If that division can be an internal division, if it can be a desertion of self or can grow into hatred for the self? Even better. If we can be broken, we can be ridden, can be enslaved to the abuser's dysfunction. So, you can go back, and you can see, and you can witness for yourself. It isn't going to change that these things happened. But what going back and witnessing for that mistreated little girl will do is allow you to love her, to hold her and mother her and teach her compassion and cherishing for herself. That is how we do this: cherish ourselves through the poison. Expect the bad feelings. Be very gentle with yourself; bring yourself positive things like beautiful music. You are hard at work doing an impossible thing [I]and you are doing it.[/I] [I]There was never an abuser in the world, not in all of time, who said: "Ooops. Did that hurt you? Sorry." No. They abuse us, they target and hurt and destroy us if they can and then, they seal what they have created ~ a broken doll of a child ~ in contempt, so we can never access it, can never be whole and healthy and strong enough to defy them or anyone else, ever again.[/I] I think you are doing great. If you need a time away from it, SWOT, take a little break. I think you don't need a time away. I think you are doing just fine and that is a scary thing. You have been warned, all of your life, to be the role, not the real you. It's scary. We don't know what to do with ourselves, how to behave or what to think. So, just don't do anything. This is all something to be done on your timetable. You have all the time you need. This is meant to happen, this healing. There is no reason to rush or delay. Every day will be sufficient unto itself, so they say. Something about the tasks of every day being sufficient unto themselves. Cherish yourself through it. Brene Brown quotes Theodore Roosevelt in the beginning of her book, [U]Daring Greatly.[/U] If you google it, you will find it, and we are so fortunate in that. The quote revolves around the idea that there are some of us who step into the arena. Who fall and get up and fall again, bleeding and roaring and crying and standing straight up the whole time. The others...the others are only the audience, are only the watchers, the witnesses to our courage and daring and pain. And at the end of the day, they will go home, unchanged. We are the victors; we will walk away upright and in full possession of the things we claimed for our own. That is the essential click that has to happen, for us. We think we are our abuser's audience. We think we are dependent on our abusers for definition and maybe, for the right to be alive at all. The true thing beneath it all is that they are the audience...and for heaven's sake, they couldn't even get that right. A mother mirrors positive grandiosity to her infant. Ours mirrored negative grandiosity. They could not even do that right and they hurt our sibs, too. And they destroyed, from the grave, sometimes, our abilities to ever depend on or draw strength from or support them, [I]our own people with whom we were little girls or little boys, [/I]ever again. All so the abuser could keep us trapped; could keep us isolated, could keep us betrayed and separate and weak. That is what they fight us so hard for. Everyone in a dysfunctional family is trying so hard to be real. We have all been our roles for so long that we feel exposed, without them. Like animals in cages too small, we keep going back and trying to stuff ourselves into the cages. But we were never meant to be caged. Bye, mom. :mcsmiley1: Here is the final thing: Our mothers had a choice, too. They are not made of what we are made of, and they lost or gave in or dived in. When we were young we were vulnerable to them; we had no choice but to believe what they told us was true. Now, we feel disgusted by the pointless pain in the game they insisted on. Turns out it was a stupid game [I]and they STILL cheated. [/I]That is what abusers do. Why let them continue to ride us, to draw the strength out of us? They were wrong. They destroyed our families that we should have access to, to this day. Roles and role playing, and they never stop. So, we do. Snip. Cedar SWOT? We are all right here for you. Right here. And you are here for me. And that is a living miracle. And so, we are stronger, enough. Bye, mom. Snip. [/QUOTE]
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Hey, Cedar, or anyone interested in FOO (Family of Origin) issues. Cedar, WHY NOW???
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