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In a totally new place and need perspective? Cedar? Anyone?
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<blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 665271" data-attributes="member: 17461"><p>I miss my mom too. I am assimilating the truth of who she is, and of what passed between us and of how my sister fits in to the relationship between my mother and myself.</p><p></p><p>It's an ugly story, twisted and deceitful.</p><p></p><p>As is always the case when I post such ugly things about my family of origin as I have been doing the past weeks, I had begun to question the kind of person I must be, to choose to see things as I am coming to see them. I was feeling so badly about everything that I said as much to D H last night. He became quite upset with me. He does not understand how I could be fascinated by these people who are who they undeniably are. The end result of our conversation: (Paraphrasing. D H actually threw in any number of swear words that need not be included here.) </p><p></p><p>:O)</p><p></p><p>Sort of quoting D H, then: You know what happened to you, and to your brothers and sister when you were little. You have no witness. I understand that you would question the validity of what you remember. I can see that you would question your own integrity in remembering things as you do ~ that there would be a sense of disbelief at the ugliness of it. <em>But you have witnesses, now. </em>I have seen you. I know what you were thinking before whatever crisis it was that your sister or your mom created, and I watched you suffer for it afterword instead of placing blame where it belonged: On them. For the actions they took. Then, D H listed the catch phrases for many of the things I have posted about, here.</p><p></p><p>And added that I should have stood up for his sake, if not my own.</p><p></p><p>Then, D H said I need to stand up.</p><p></p><p>That no matter how many times I look at this stuff, it is always going to feel toxic <em>because it is toxic. </em>That there is no rhyme or reason to what my family does except that someone is forever being destroyed and betrayed and the game goes on and that the web spins out from my mother and it always will.</p><p></p><p>My sister, D H says, doesn't matter. She is a betrayer. As an adult. She is not walking around not aware of what she is doing. She means it.</p><p></p><p>No integrity. Not a person of integrity and that is true and that is by her own, adult choice. End of story. </p><p></p><p>My brother, so says D H, is worse. I am his sister. I stand up for him routinely but he buckled when he could have, and should have, stood strong for me. That if my brother had stood with me, the situation could have come to a low boil instead of erupting and that I need to see the betrayal and the adult choice in everything to do with my family of origin.</p><p></p><p>Thank heavens, Donald Trump came on then, and this whole mess with my family, and with me forever feeling guilty for the actions other adults have taken, and have betrayed any good or right or decent thing to do so and why can I not see that for what it is was dropped.</p><p></p><p>But D H does get really upset with me when I keep trying to put things together and wind up blaming myself.</p><p></p><p>I need to stop pretending it was something I said or did, or that I had any control over the situation at all. There was some talk at this point about certain people (my family) walking around with their heads so far up their ~ that all they can smell is their own ~ and what they want to do is cover me with it and have me smile and thank them and ask for more.</p><p></p><p>So, that is what D H said. </p><p></p><p>I had no witness in childhood. I have witness ~ not just him, but our kids and his family ~ in my adulthood. Stop wasting time. Stop being weak. Stop blaming yourself. "You are seeing from your eight year old little girl's point of view."</p><p></p><p>Stop it.</p><p></p><p>Grow up.</p><p></p><p>You are at the end of life. </p><p></p><p>And then he said? "Tell Copa to get out of that bed." </p><p></p><p>He went on to say that the thing we don't want to face is how truly awful everything was and we don't want to name the villain for who he or she was. </p><p>D H said the harder we try to make sense of things, the more we blame ourselves because we were hurt when we were little and those hurt places prevent us from hating the perps, so we turn it onto ourselves in an effort to not name what happened to us at their hands for what it was. That we were raised by people who have no integrity because people who operate from integrity do not routinely hurt their kids and we have to face it.</p><p></p><p>Routinely being the key word. </p><p></p><p>Repetition (of a multitude of betrayals, large and small) being another.</p><p></p><p>And stop wasting any more of our lifetimes (and of our D H time) trying to believe what they do into something we did or that we can fix into redemption for any of us, now.</p><p></p><p>That we are trying to exert some kind of control, to make some kind of sense of chaotic hatred when there is not a (colorful string of swear words) thing that can pretty or change what this is, what drives it: My mother. </p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>I understand the rewards accruing to my sister in her betrayal of me. Believing a sense of hurt drives it, I forgave betrayal after betrayal. I excused jealousy and the ruination of whatever time our families did have together. I allowed mistreatment of my own D H, who is a better judge of character than I am, in the sincere belief that he was wrong, that we could do this if all of us tried. For the longest time, I believed ~ oh, I don't know. I believed that over time we could do this, that a personal bond could be forged as adults that would lead, first to respect for the person alive beneath the role and then, to trust and real family. I would believe in her, and in all of us, again. And that is why, D H says, he thinks I will be revictimized if he should die before me, or if we are divorced. It could be that my sister was sincere in the words that she said...but does a sincere person go through a sister's journal and leave a note that she has done so <em>at the back, where the sister whose private thoughts she rifled will not discover it for weeks? Or rifle that sister's luggage while I was staying at her home?</em></p><p></p><p><em>Or stalk my daughter on FB, that biatch.</em></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I feel that way about my sister, too. Sometimes, and this could still happen, I think that if I were stronger, or if I were kinder, or if I'd been more welcoming, things might have been different. Then, I realize that is not true. I had to post very ugly things about myself, and about my sister and my mom, before I could see what it is that happens between the two of us, and between the three of us.</p><p></p><p>Ours is an ugly story. Twisted and deceitful.</p><p></p><p>It has been a hard story to look at head on. Nothing is as it should be, and nothing about it is as I'd hoped or believed. I like to think my mom and my sister wish it could be different. In my heart, based on their behaviors I see this is not true. </p><p></p><p>The way things are is exactly the way they want them or they would take action to change them.</p><p></p><p>I could take action too, of course.</p><p></p><p>That's why I am doing this.</p><p></p><p>I need to freaking stand up. I need to stop feeling regret for what I don't have, as though I've lost something.</p><p></p><p>I never had it.</p><p></p><p>I never will.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>I think what my sister wishes is not that it could be different, but that I could be seen as reviled by the mother and that my sister would encourage coming together to be seen as the good person who believes the family can come together when in fact, she would rather see me dead than to see me, at all.</p><p></p><p>My sister is looking not for a sister, but a supplicant. As I have posted, my mom would love to be at the center of jealousy between the sisters over the mother. My mom told me once that she finds the jealousy between us funny. So, she must have seen, and celebrated, jealousy from one of us. I don't think it was me. My mom is careful to accidentally say the most incredible things about what is said about the things D H and I do or do not have; do or do not merit; will or will not be able to keep.</p><p></p><p>I think my sister wishes she had a sister she did not hate.</p><p></p><p>But I think she hates the sister she does have, very much.</p><p></p><p>So, it could be that I am hateful, then. It could be that she has tried and tried and finally, given up.</p><p></p><p>That would surely be her take. That would dovetail perfectly for her. After all, she even prayed that ring of thorns or fire around me to bring me to the Lord and just look. She walks with the Lord and He may fix our relationship but as for her, she is done.</p><p></p><p>How exquisitely ripe.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>What happens between us got so much worse after my father's death...but there seemed always to have been jealousy and, now that I see it, thinly disguised rage. Out of fairness, I am going to write that I felt those feelings too, but I am not aware that I did.</p><p></p><p>I am glad I have a sister. I just don't want anything to do with her. The more I think back to what we had, the more I see the truth in it instead of the love-which-turned-into-enabling or which was always enabling or whatever it is that happened to all of us. There is nothing to pull back together. There never was. I am glad I tried, but I am messed up too of course, and seem not to have been able to say or do or be the right sister for her either.</p><p></p><p>D H would say: Stop it. There is no right sister. Your family is messed up. Get over it.</p><p></p><p>Only he would add swear words.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This you wrote in response to my contention that it was never them we wanted, but ourselves. What I meant was ~ boy. Again, I will reference D H family. Each of the sibs has a sense of self. They go off on one another routinely, they posture and threaten and form alliances and come back together wholeheartedly. They are who they are with one another. In my family, we all look to the mother to see who we are, today. It has that feel to it. My sister is who she is now because she is favorite child. (In her freaking sixties, she is favored child.) She is favored child enough now to exclude the others <em>and she is taking concrete steps to do that.</em> (In her sixties!) That is the essence of the betrayal. It isn't that she does not know this is how our family of origin works. It is that she has been working behind the scenes for all of her life to accomplish what now exists: Herself as gate keeper, through her favored child status (in her sixties), to the mother; to the remaining parent. That she claims this status now ~ not pretends to it, not thinks about and rejects it, but steps into that role <em>with the abusive mother at her side validating and celebrating this ugliness the mother has always believed in but could not accomplish now, when the children she once abused are adults, without the collusion of one of the kids to exclude the others and create...the twisted obscenity that passes family but that is, in reality...the vehicle for my mother's agenda: grandiosity and control, when everything might have been so different.</em></p><p></p><p>As D H says: It isn't different.</p><p></p><p>And that is the crime committed against us.</p><p></p><p>That it might have been different. That it should have been different. </p><p></p><p>That our abusers chose then, and are choosing now, what exists.</p><p></p><p>And we need to see that true thing.</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p><p></p><p>Serenity is ahead of us in this ability to see what is for what it is.</p><p></p><p>We will get there too, Copa.</p><p></p><p>Here is the essence of it: People who proceed from integrity do not cheat, do not prey on their own families to create environments where grandiosity is the coin of the realm.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 665271, member: 17461"] I miss my mom too. I am assimilating the truth of who she is, and of what passed between us and of how my sister fits in to the relationship between my mother and myself. It's an ugly story, twisted and deceitful. As is always the case when I post such ugly things about my family of origin as I have been doing the past weeks, I had begun to question the kind of person I must be, to choose to see things as I am coming to see them. I was feeling so badly about everything that I said as much to D H last night. He became quite upset with me. He does not understand how I could be fascinated by these people who are who they undeniably are. The end result of our conversation: (Paraphrasing. D H actually threw in any number of swear words that need not be included here.) :O) Sort of quoting D H, then: You know what happened to you, and to your brothers and sister when you were little. You have no witness. I understand that you would question the validity of what you remember. I can see that you would question your own integrity in remembering things as you do ~ that there would be a sense of disbelief at the ugliness of it. [I]But you have witnesses, now. [/I]I have seen you. I know what you were thinking before whatever crisis it was that your sister or your mom created, and I watched you suffer for it afterword instead of placing blame where it belonged: On them. For the actions they took. Then, D H listed the catch phrases for many of the things I have posted about, here. And added that I should have stood up for his sake, if not my own. Then, D H said I need to stand up. That no matter how many times I look at this stuff, it is always going to feel toxic [I]because it is toxic. [/I]That there is no rhyme or reason to what my family does except that someone is forever being destroyed and betrayed and the game goes on and that the web spins out from my mother and it always will. My sister, D H says, doesn't matter. She is a betrayer. As an adult. She is not walking around not aware of what she is doing. She means it. No integrity. Not a person of integrity and that is true and that is by her own, adult choice. End of story. My brother, so says D H, is worse. I am his sister. I stand up for him routinely but he buckled when he could have, and should have, stood strong for me. That if my brother had stood with me, the situation could have come to a low boil instead of erupting and that I need to see the betrayal and the adult choice in everything to do with my family of origin. Thank heavens, Donald Trump came on then, and this whole mess with my family, and with me forever feeling guilty for the actions other adults have taken, and have betrayed any good or right or decent thing to do so and why can I not see that for what it is was dropped. But D H does get really upset with me when I keep trying to put things together and wind up blaming myself. I need to stop pretending it was something I said or did, or that I had any control over the situation at all. There was some talk at this point about certain people (my family) walking around with their heads so far up their ~ that all they can smell is their own ~ and what they want to do is cover me with it and have me smile and thank them and ask for more. So, that is what D H said. I had no witness in childhood. I have witness ~ not just him, but our kids and his family ~ in my adulthood. Stop wasting time. Stop being weak. Stop blaming yourself. "You are seeing from your eight year old little girl's point of view." Stop it. Grow up. You are at the end of life. And then he said? "Tell Copa to get out of that bed." He went on to say that the thing we don't want to face is how truly awful everything was and we don't want to name the villain for who he or she was. D H said the harder we try to make sense of things, the more we blame ourselves because we were hurt when we were little and those hurt places prevent us from hating the perps, so we turn it onto ourselves in an effort to not name what happened to us at their hands for what it was. That we were raised by people who have no integrity because people who operate from integrity do not routinely hurt their kids and we have to face it. Routinely being the key word. Repetition (of a multitude of betrayals, large and small) being another. And stop wasting any more of our lifetimes (and of our D H time) trying to believe what they do into something we did or that we can fix into redemption for any of us, now. That we are trying to exert some kind of control, to make some kind of sense of chaotic hatred when there is not a (colorful string of swear words) thing that can pretty or change what this is, what drives it: My mother. *** I understand the rewards accruing to my sister in her betrayal of me. Believing a sense of hurt drives it, I forgave betrayal after betrayal. I excused jealousy and the ruination of whatever time our families did have together. I allowed mistreatment of my own D H, who is a better judge of character than I am, in the sincere belief that he was wrong, that we could do this if all of us tried. For the longest time, I believed ~ oh, I don't know. I believed that over time we could do this, that a personal bond could be forged as adults that would lead, first to respect for the person alive beneath the role and then, to trust and real family. I would believe in her, and in all of us, again. And that is why, D H says, he thinks I will be revictimized if he should die before me, or if we are divorced. It could be that my sister was sincere in the words that she said...but does a sincere person go through a sister's journal and leave a note that she has done so [I]at the back, where the sister whose private thoughts she rifled will not discover it for weeks? Or rifle that sister's luggage while I was staying at her home?[/I] [I]Or stalk my daughter on FB, that biatch.[/I] I feel that way about my sister, too. Sometimes, and this could still happen, I think that if I were stronger, or if I were kinder, or if I'd been more welcoming, things might have been different. Then, I realize that is not true. I had to post very ugly things about myself, and about my sister and my mom, before I could see what it is that happens between the two of us, and between the three of us. Ours is an ugly story. Twisted and deceitful. It has been a hard story to look at head on. Nothing is as it should be, and nothing about it is as I'd hoped or believed. I like to think my mom and my sister wish it could be different. In my heart, based on their behaviors I see this is not true. The way things are is exactly the way they want them or they would take action to change them. I could take action too, of course. That's why I am doing this. I need to freaking stand up. I need to stop feeling regret for what I don't have, as though I've lost something. I never had it. I never will. *** I think what my sister wishes is not that it could be different, but that I could be seen as reviled by the mother and that my sister would encourage coming together to be seen as the good person who believes the family can come together when in fact, she would rather see me dead than to see me, at all. My sister is looking not for a sister, but a supplicant. As I have posted, my mom would love to be at the center of jealousy between the sisters over the mother. My mom told me once that she finds the jealousy between us funny. So, she must have seen, and celebrated, jealousy from one of us. I don't think it was me. My mom is careful to accidentally say the most incredible things about what is said about the things D H and I do or do not have; do or do not merit; will or will not be able to keep. I think my sister wishes she had a sister she did not hate. But I think she hates the sister she does have, very much. So, it could be that I am hateful, then. It could be that she has tried and tried and finally, given up. That would surely be her take. That would dovetail perfectly for her. After all, she even prayed that ring of thorns or fire around me to bring me to the Lord and just look. She walks with the Lord and He may fix our relationship but as for her, she is done. How exquisitely ripe. *** What happens between us got so much worse after my father's death...but there seemed always to have been jealousy and, now that I see it, thinly disguised rage. Out of fairness, I am going to write that I felt those feelings too, but I am not aware that I did. I am glad I have a sister. I just don't want anything to do with her. The more I think back to what we had, the more I see the truth in it instead of the love-which-turned-into-enabling or which was always enabling or whatever it is that happened to all of us. There is nothing to pull back together. There never was. I am glad I tried, but I am messed up too of course, and seem not to have been able to say or do or be the right sister for her either. D H would say: Stop it. There is no right sister. Your family is messed up. Get over it. Only he would add swear words. This you wrote in response to my contention that it was never them we wanted, but ourselves. What I meant was ~ boy. Again, I will reference D H family. Each of the sibs has a sense of self. They go off on one another routinely, they posture and threaten and form alliances and come back together wholeheartedly. They are who they are with one another. In my family, we all look to the mother to see who we are, today. It has that feel to it. My sister is who she is now because she is favorite child. (In her freaking sixties, she is favored child.) She is favored child enough now to exclude the others [I]and she is taking concrete steps to do that.[/I] (In her sixties!) That is the essence of the betrayal. It isn't that she does not know this is how our family of origin works. It is that she has been working behind the scenes for all of her life to accomplish what now exists: Herself as gate keeper, through her favored child status (in her sixties), to the mother; to the remaining parent. That she claims this status now ~ not pretends to it, not thinks about and rejects it, but steps into that role [I]with the abusive mother at her side validating and celebrating this ugliness the mother has always believed in but could not accomplish now, when the children she once abused are adults, without the collusion of one of the kids to exclude the others and create...the twisted obscenity that passes family but that is, in reality...the vehicle for my mother's agenda: grandiosity and control, when everything might have been so different.[/I] As D H says: It isn't different. And that is the crime committed against us. That it might have been different. That it should have been different. That our abusers chose then, and are choosing now, what exists. And we need to see that true thing. Cedar Serenity is ahead of us in this ability to see what is for what it is. We will get there too, Copa. Here is the essence of it: People who proceed from integrity do not cheat, do not prey on their own families to create environments where grandiosity is the coin of the realm. [/QUOTE]
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