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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: 662399" data-attributes="member: 17461"><p>Immediately, my mind created ten thousand images of why this could not be so. My children would never in a million years abuse me, right?!? But they do, don't they, or they would never have done what they are doing. Part of who I want to be when I come through this is someone others ~ my children included ~ do not want ever to disappoint or cause pain. </p><p></p><p>I want to be someone they respect, and I want them to be able to respect themselves. I want them to be able to choose for themselves, and to believe in themselves. Which sounds pretty generic and self-justifying until you really do have a look at the nature of the toxicities roaring through the family line. They seem to devolve into the question, not of capability, but of sustained ability to hold faith with strength and rightness and all the things represented when we say the word love in the agape sense.</p><p></p><p>This is a major upswing. <em>In the past, I have been the one who did not want to cause pain. </em>In the past, I have assumed others would be disappointed with me. I apologize sincerely and immediately and I mean it and try to listen and do better and have been that way all of my life. I am often in that place where I am not exactly sure how this thing, whatever it is, happened. Writing and writing here as we all have, I see so many weird, hurtful patterns. So, all at once, toxic is not just a concept I read about in a story about a poisoned pond. Toxic, the kind of toxicity we all have been left with, is a living, breathing virulence, a miasma of rot and sickness with tendrils everywhere in our psyches.</p><p></p><p>Out it goes.</p><p></p><p>First, like always, we need to become aware of the shape of these things we wish to become aware of and change. </p><p>A mystery story, in a way. Track and confront the faulty or downright toxic belief systems. Joe Friday time, again.</p><p></p><p>I like Monty Python for this business of clearing the toxicities, too.</p><p></p><p>Yay.</p><p></p><p>*** </p><p></p><p>I am examining professional life versus personal expectations, this morning. Tracking through there to find and expose FOO. Initially, I posted they did not seem to have affected my professional life.</p><p></p><p>This is so terribly not true.</p><p></p><p>The lady who came to see me yesterday was someone I graduated high school with. I learned that those in our class followed the paths set out for them ~ some, so horribly destructive.</p><p></p><p>Clearing this material in our psyches matters.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>It was not until I had succeeded and then, failed so abysmally in "mother" that, finding myself with nothing to lose, I even allowed myself to <em>have </em>a professional life.</p><p></p><p>There is anger in this kind of thinking, and I am glad. In following anger, I have found and cleared many things. Here again, as in Copa's wondering about arrogance and the strength in it and the feeling of wrongness in it, anger may not be the correct term. So, we will watch as these parts come clear to us. Just as arrogance turned out to be reclamation of the right to boundaries, anger will have to do with something which was always ours, which was our right thing from the beginning, and which our toxic upbringings and belief systems have ensured that we will never access.</p><p></p><p>When we feel shame, that is where we must go.</p><p></p><p>Anger, arrogance, that feeling of fraudulence.</p><p></p><p>Here we go, then.</p><p></p><p>In the engine that drove where I would place myself in my professional life, I see the intense toxicity of my FOO. In having created and recreated myself, over and over again, I understand </p><p>my FOO had nothing whatsoever to do with those beginnings <em>but everything in the world to do with what I did with what I attained so easily and well.</em></p><p></p><p><em>Again then, with a sense of legitimacy or fraudulence.</em></p><p></p><p>How extraordinary.</p><p></p><p>Those raised as we were are at a serious disadvantage in the arena. That set of belief systems regarding what we are capable of needs to be addressed, too. That will take us into the real world, and find us reporting on our successes or failures, here.</p><p></p><p>Here is a thing I did last year in the real world:</p><p></p><p>So, I am afraid to drive across bridges. Last summer, I committed to doing something that meant I would have to drive across a bridge. </p><p></p><p>I did it.</p><p></p><p>This summer?</p><p></p><p>I have not done it, yet.</p><p></p><p>Should I survive this summer's driving-across-the-bridge experience, successfully resolving whatever the real fear is there, I will post about it, here.</p><p></p><p>Crossing the great waters is a metaphor for transformation.</p><p></p><p>A fantasy: We are within an hour of the shores of the largest of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior. If I can overcome this fear of driving over bridges, I will climb onto the boulders that line the shore of this Great Lake and watch the sun rise and declare myself healed of this part of things.</p><p></p><p>These kinds of limits ~ fear of driving, fear of heights, fear of rising ~ I think they are all bound up in what our FOO taught us about who we were and what we dared consider ourselves capable of. They are in there, those old belief systems and toxicities, weakening us in our professional lives in ways we cannot help but acquiesce to. </p><p></p><p>It's almost like we are hypnotized; dangerous to challenge the chilling horror of what we were named when we are sickened by what rises into the night air, convincing us it is real. Copa, you have posted that one of your most puzzling questions is how you could have accomplished what you did away from your family and wound up in bed after coming to interact with them, again.</p><p></p><p>After coming to identify with them, and with who you are in their eyes.</p><p></p><p>This is true for me, too.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>It will take time, I am sure. I am not going to push or traumatize myself over undoing the identity forged by my FOO, but I am going to begin becoming aware of where they live, of what they tell me about myself in the larger world. I think I have been engaged in this process already.</p><p></p><p>Here is another observation: It was while I was living away from this area, away from the area my FOO inhabits, that I was able to raise my family, survive its loss, recreate myself. Buying the cabin here was a mistake. D H insisted. It is beautiful, but it has been weakening me, setting me up in emotional flashback and I knew it and I did it anyway and I did my best and that took strength, too.</p><p></p><p>But I did not have SWOT's term: emotional flashback, then.</p><p></p><p>So, those are the kinds of things I am going to try to become aware enough of to address.</p><p></p><p>I am grateful we have undertaken this journey.</p><p></p><p>Thanks, you guys.</p><p></p><p>:O)</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p><p></p><p>So, here is the question I have been wondering about lately: As we learn to respect ourselves, as we face and free those caches of anger or resentment or fear of self-loathing...will that change the family dynamic we have created with our children?</p><p></p><p>Yes of course it will.</p><p></p><p>That is the reason, the why behind it and that matters for the generations to come.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>Copa, if you are willing, I would like to hear more about your dancing. I hear regret when you speak of the loss of that Copa.</p><p></p><p>Driving, the fear of it, is a piece of what happened to you when you went home; when you chose to care for your mother and re-engage with the sister.</p><p></p><p>These things are true for me, as well.</p><p></p><p>Ballet taught me my body in a way that made it mine. For the first time Copa, I knew my body as an intricate instrument capable of creating a kind of breathtaking gift, a kind of beauty come of strength and choice.</p><p></p><p>Those are the feelings I would like to know about Copa, that came for you in your dancing.</p><p></p><p>When we moved here to this small town, ballet in the way I was meant to do it was possible <em>only if I drove across the bridge.</em></p><p></p><p>That is when I began karate classes. Karate is not the same thing. Tai Chi is not the same thing. Though I was well along the path, before I created of myself a black belt, we moved, again. Then came Tai Chi.</p><p></p><p>I gave up writing too, before completing the try on that.</p><p></p><p>The question: Who do you think you are?</p><p></p><p>Hello there, mother.</p><p></p><p>Who I think I am is on you. Who I create of myself: that is where we are going, next.</p><p></p><p>Without you. Without my sister, though I am not sure how she would fit in here except that for each of us, these younger sisters do figure in somehow. </p><p></p><p>There is something here that matters, something we need to know about how our sisters fit in here, in our adult lives. Something having to do with hatred, with targeting us for...? Something to do with their feeling illegitimate unless we are crushed or discredited or usurped.</p><p></p><p>Something we are wound into again, when we interact in any way with our families of origin.</p><p></p><p>So...why would my sister have continued calling me once I'd decided, and acted on the decision, to turn away? <em>Again, what I see here is a usurpation, is a taking over of, is a kind of I am the Cedar role, now.</em></p><p></p><p>Thoughts?</p><p></p><p>I see that in your sister's actions toward your mother, and toward the money aspect of things too, Copa.</p><p></p><p>So, none of this is unique. However outrageous, these have to be typical patterns in dysfunctional families. Here is the question: Does anyone know of a dysfunctional family that was ever able to develop the role flexibility described as the difference between a healthy and a dysfunctional family?</p><p></p><p>What it must be, for my sister in my FOO, is that until I am destroyed, she is not legitimately the Cedar role.</p><p></p><p>For me in this time, the role playing in the Cedar role is looking a little tattered around the edges. (Or, blasted apart would be a great analogy, too.)</p><p></p><p>That was a joke.</p><p></p><p>:O)</p><p></p><p>So...given that my father named me Cinderella; given that these changes in our family of origin occurred after my father's death; given that my sister hated the male who would swoop in and save my mother <em>from her</em>. Given that my sister seems somehow to need to see me ~ I don't know ~ humbled, I guess would be a good term. given that my sister seems to need to see me however it is she needs to see me ~ and it isn't good, not at all ~ before she can be the hero in my mother's life instead of me, instead of the man who would have taken my mother away from my sister's evil influence altogether.... But my sister is not the Cedar role because her true intent is to exclude and shame and be the legitimate provider of largesse, stealing the mother's authority and usurping the Cedar role to do it.</p><p></p><p>?</p><p></p><p>Given that you were the hero figure who swooped in and saved and cherished and found value in and deeply loved the mother your sister sucked dry and tossed aside, Copa...how do all these disparate pieces, each so eerily a part of some pattern, fit together.</p><p></p><p>You are the hero figure who saved the mother, Copa.</p><p></p><p>the man who wanted to marry my mother, the Greek Orthodox priest? Believed it was his purpose, believed he had come into my mother's life to save her. No one knew what that meant.</p><p></p><p>Not even him.</p><p></p><p>Now we see.</p><p></p><p>Well, isn't that something.</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>:O)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 662399, member: 17461"] Immediately, my mind created ten thousand images of why this could not be so. My children would never in a million years abuse me, right?!? But they do, don't they, or they would never have done what they are doing. Part of who I want to be when I come through this is someone others ~ my children included ~ do not want ever to disappoint or cause pain. I want to be someone they respect, and I want them to be able to respect themselves. I want them to be able to choose for themselves, and to believe in themselves. Which sounds pretty generic and self-justifying until you really do have a look at the nature of the toxicities roaring through the family line. They seem to devolve into the question, not of capability, but of sustained ability to hold faith with strength and rightness and all the things represented when we say the word love in the agape sense. This is a major upswing. [I]In the past, I have been the one who did not want to cause pain. [/I]In the past, I have assumed others would be disappointed with me. I apologize sincerely and immediately and I mean it and try to listen and do better and have been that way all of my life. I am often in that place where I am not exactly sure how this thing, whatever it is, happened. Writing and writing here as we all have, I see so many weird, hurtful patterns. So, all at once, toxic is not just a concept I read about in a story about a poisoned pond. Toxic, the kind of toxicity we all have been left with, is a living, breathing virulence, a miasma of rot and sickness with tendrils everywhere in our psyches. Out it goes. First, like always, we need to become aware of the shape of these things we wish to become aware of and change. A mystery story, in a way. Track and confront the faulty or downright toxic belief systems. Joe Friday time, again. I like Monty Python for this business of clearing the toxicities, too. Yay. *** I am examining professional life versus personal expectations, this morning. Tracking through there to find and expose FOO. Initially, I posted they did not seem to have affected my professional life. This is so terribly not true. The lady who came to see me yesterday was someone I graduated high school with. I learned that those in our class followed the paths set out for them ~ some, so horribly destructive. Clearing this material in our psyches matters. *** It was not until I had succeeded and then, failed so abysmally in "mother" that, finding myself with nothing to lose, I even allowed myself to [I]have [/I]a professional life. There is anger in this kind of thinking, and I am glad. In following anger, I have found and cleared many things. Here again, as in Copa's wondering about arrogance and the strength in it and the feeling of wrongness in it, anger may not be the correct term. So, we will watch as these parts come clear to us. Just as arrogance turned out to be reclamation of the right to boundaries, anger will have to do with something which was always ours, which was our right thing from the beginning, and which our toxic upbringings and belief systems have ensured that we will never access. When we feel shame, that is where we must go. Anger, arrogance, that feeling of fraudulence. Here we go, then. In the engine that drove where I would place myself in my professional life, I see the intense toxicity of my FOO. In having created and recreated myself, over and over again, I understand my FOO had nothing whatsoever to do with those beginnings [I]but everything in the world to do with what I did with what I attained so easily and well.[/I] [I]Again then, with a sense of legitimacy or fraudulence.[/I] How extraordinary. Those raised as we were are at a serious disadvantage in the arena. That set of belief systems regarding what we are capable of needs to be addressed, too. That will take us into the real world, and find us reporting on our successes or failures, here. Here is a thing I did last year in the real world: So, I am afraid to drive across bridges. Last summer, I committed to doing something that meant I would have to drive across a bridge. I did it. This summer? I have not done it, yet. Should I survive this summer's driving-across-the-bridge experience, successfully resolving whatever the real fear is there, I will post about it, here. Crossing the great waters is a metaphor for transformation. A fantasy: We are within an hour of the shores of the largest of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior. If I can overcome this fear of driving over bridges, I will climb onto the boulders that line the shore of this Great Lake and watch the sun rise and declare myself healed of this part of things. These kinds of limits ~ fear of driving, fear of heights, fear of rising ~ I think they are all bound up in what our FOO taught us about who we were and what we dared consider ourselves capable of. They are in there, those old belief systems and toxicities, weakening us in our professional lives in ways we cannot help but acquiesce to. It's almost like we are hypnotized; dangerous to challenge the chilling horror of what we were named when we are sickened by what rises into the night air, convincing us it is real. Copa, you have posted that one of your most puzzling questions is how you could have accomplished what you did away from your family and wound up in bed after coming to interact with them, again. After coming to identify with them, and with who you are in their eyes. This is true for me, too. *** It will take time, I am sure. I am not going to push or traumatize myself over undoing the identity forged by my FOO, but I am going to begin becoming aware of where they live, of what they tell me about myself in the larger world. I think I have been engaged in this process already. Here is another observation: It was while I was living away from this area, away from the area my FOO inhabits, that I was able to raise my family, survive its loss, recreate myself. Buying the cabin here was a mistake. D H insisted. It is beautiful, but it has been weakening me, setting me up in emotional flashback and I knew it and I did it anyway and I did my best and that took strength, too. But I did not have SWOT's term: emotional flashback, then. So, those are the kinds of things I am going to try to become aware enough of to address. I am grateful we have undertaken this journey. Thanks, you guys. :O) Cedar So, here is the question I have been wondering about lately: As we learn to respect ourselves, as we face and free those caches of anger or resentment or fear of self-loathing...will that change the family dynamic we have created with our children? Yes of course it will. That is the reason, the why behind it and that matters for the generations to come. *** Copa, if you are willing, I would like to hear more about your dancing. I hear regret when you speak of the loss of that Copa. Driving, the fear of it, is a piece of what happened to you when you went home; when you chose to care for your mother and re-engage with the sister. These things are true for me, as well. Ballet taught me my body in a way that made it mine. For the first time Copa, I knew my body as an intricate instrument capable of creating a kind of breathtaking gift, a kind of beauty come of strength and choice. Those are the feelings I would like to know about Copa, that came for you in your dancing. When we moved here to this small town, ballet in the way I was meant to do it was possible [I]only if I drove across the bridge.[/I] That is when I began karate classes. Karate is not the same thing. Tai Chi is not the same thing. Though I was well along the path, before I created of myself a black belt, we moved, again. Then came Tai Chi. I gave up writing too, before completing the try on that. The question: Who do you think you are? Hello there, mother. Who I think I am is on you. Who I create of myself: that is where we are going, next. Without you. Without my sister, though I am not sure how she would fit in here except that for each of us, these younger sisters do figure in somehow. There is something here that matters, something we need to know about how our sisters fit in here, in our adult lives. Something having to do with hatred, with targeting us for...? Something to do with their feeling illegitimate unless we are crushed or discredited or usurped. Something we are wound into again, when we interact in any way with our families of origin. So...why would my sister have continued calling me once I'd decided, and acted on the decision, to turn away? [I]Again, what I see here is a usurpation, is a taking over of, is a kind of I am the Cedar role, now.[/I] Thoughts? I see that in your sister's actions toward your mother, and toward the money aspect of things too, Copa. So, none of this is unique. However outrageous, these have to be typical patterns in dysfunctional families. Here is the question: Does anyone know of a dysfunctional family that was ever able to develop the role flexibility described as the difference between a healthy and a dysfunctional family? What it must be, for my sister in my FOO, is that until I am destroyed, she is not legitimately the Cedar role. For me in this time, the role playing in the Cedar role is looking a little tattered around the edges. (Or, blasted apart would be a great analogy, too.) That was a joke. :O) So...given that my father named me Cinderella; given that these changes in our family of origin occurred after my father's death; given that my sister hated the male who would swoop in and save my mother [I]from her[/I]. Given that my sister seems somehow to need to see me ~ I don't know ~ humbled, I guess would be a good term. given that my sister seems to need to see me however it is she needs to see me ~ and it isn't good, not at all ~ before she can be the hero in my mother's life instead of me, instead of the man who would have taken my mother away from my sister's evil influence altogether.... But my sister is not the Cedar role because her true intent is to exclude and shame and be the legitimate provider of largesse, stealing the mother's authority and usurping the Cedar role to do it. ? Given that you were the hero figure who swooped in and saved and cherished and found value in and deeply loved the mother your sister sucked dry and tossed aside, Copa...how do all these disparate pieces, each so eerily a part of some pattern, fit together. You are the hero figure who saved the mother, Copa. the man who wanted to marry my mother, the Greek Orthodox priest? Believed it was his purpose, believed he had come into my mother's life to save her. No one knew what that meant. Not even him. Now we see. Well, isn't that something. Cedar :O) [/QUOTE]
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Hey, Cedar, or anyone interested in FOO (Family of Origin) issues. Cedar, WHY NOW???
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