Cedar, I didn't realize how horrible it was until I distanced myself because I was used to her
I still miss my family. It isn't that I don't want them in my life, it is that I never had them in the way I wanted them. The things I excused again and again, the times we did have that were kind of crummy, that were a little weird and inappropriate...that was what was real.
All the rest was hope.
Or misplaced faith.
But I am happy I believed and tried and walked the path I chose. I don't quite understand why my heart is no longer open to them. I felt nothing but puzzled, when my sister called. I could not generate warmth or even, curiosity.
In a way, that is very sad.
How will anything change, if there is no one to believe the change into reality, if we all just turn away?
***
It is very hard on the husband (or the wife), when the spouse's family of origin is dysfunctional.
We never talked so much about that ~ about husband's rage at having to be polite, or at having to watch the underlying patterns, or at being "muzzled" as he phrases it. It was hard on him; very hard on our marriage.
I don't have an answer for that one.
I love our sharing sessions. Reminds me of pajama parties when I was little and we girls shared which boy we liked
I am deeply grateful for your honesty and compassion to me. Through your stories, through the things I write here that I never talk about with anyone, not even husband (who is about ready to explode with how fixated I get on this stuff) I am breaking through barriers of such depth that I did not know they existed.
Maybe others who read this can learn from it and get out of Dodge earlier than we did. I hope so.
I hope so too, with all my heart. This site is anonymous. We are sincere, we are right here, and we will listen and share our own stories with you. If there is someone reading along, please feel free to chime in. Healing may be a long time coming, but it changes everything.
Suddenly, as deep as you want to take it...there will be no shame. No anger. Nothing to protect.
That is what freedom feels like, for those of us who'd never suspected we were imprisoned.
When my sister put me on cut off, I was chastised and saddened and felt so guilty because, of course, she did it because I was so horrible.
That is how I felt, too. As though inability to establish and maintain relationship were due to some intrinsic flaw in me which I can neither name nor understand. There is a poem about the center not holding.
It was like that.
So many things in my life have conspired to put me here, in this emotionless place of lost faith, of no purpose.
I feel very much a separate entity.
But I cannot unsee it.
I asked if he missed her. He said, "Not at all."
Perhaps that time will come for me.
In the time when I was so deeply under the influence of my family's toxicity, I was ashamed, all the time. They say that numbing anger, swallowing rage, saying nothing, turns those negative emotions back onto us, where they express as self contempt. The dynamic there has something to do with whose perspective we believe. The abuser's, whom we have habitually believed, or our own. The battle is to recover our own perspective; to believe, not in the primacy of self, but in the primacy of self interpretation. To do that, to learn who we are and to leave behind us the roles, the separate selves we have nurtured to keep our dysfunctional families working requires a time of suspension of belief; it requires both time alone and the presence of a safe witness, to bring us through that time when everything is suspect, that time when we cannot believe it could have been what it was and is.
We are rethinking every value we were taught mattered, and every true thing we believed about what mattered, about who we were and who we have a right to aspire to be.
That is why the world looks so different once we have done the work and made it through to the other side.
We no longer see ourselves through the eyes, through the valance, of the abuser. They begin to look foolish, and pointlessly, stupidly, cruel.
But we love them. These are our people. Seeing them in that way feels wrong. We begin to fall away from it, which is why we require safe witness. I have learned though that we seem to require increasing levels of complexity and understanding in those who witness for us.
One way or another, we have learned to function in spite of. In spite of contempt, in spite of shame, in spite of what it was to be discounted or actively hated by those whose honor it should have been to love us.
How strange, and how sad for me, and for all of us, that this is so.
But...how will anything change if those who can see the family dysfunctions for what they are no longer have the will to confront it?
I am surprised at how nasty we all can be, surprised at the places we are blind, at the things we refuse to see, at the ways we twist and choose the facts. At the senselessness of trying to make sense of any of it in the end. What they say is true: the energy of love, without judgment, is the force required. Unconditional love, unconditional positive regard is the healing force required.
I believe in that with my whole heart, and always have.
But since difficult child daughter's beating I feel differently about everything. I've described it as a loss of faith. Part of that loss is that I no longer believe the hurtful things we do to one another are innocent or thoughtless.
It took me six months of dating this man in a mostly friendly way to get it into my head that he wasn't horrible for shunning his family and family events.
It's confusing, and requires time. I don't see how anything can get better this way, but I cannot seem to generate either warmth or curiosity for them.
I feel I am letting myself down in not holding strong, for them.
I want to leave them behind, not think about them at all, anymore.
He said he did not love his abusers. They could die tomorrow and he wouldn't care.
I am having a protracted look at this now. My mother is 84. The answer to that one is that none of us knows how old we are. I could be killed in an accident tomorrow, and it would turn out that I was older than my mother, after all, because I was closer to death. Her age cannot be an excuse, a threat.
It's all very ugly.
He didn't WISH them dead, but just admitted that he honestly wouldn't miss them as they were a source of trauma to him
I think that is how I feel, too.
When my sister did call, I wondered and wondered why she was calling...what did she want?
In the past, I would have felt joy, felt that little "this is how it's supposed to be." Without that? I could not imagine why she was calling.
It is sad to me that this should be so. But I see the sadness from a distance, now. Regret that things are what they are, but no more than that.
I never had what I thought I had.
In fact, those people are rats. ("Oh, you dirty rats." says James Cagney in my voice. Gun at the ready...but do I want to be my mom? Even in my James Cagney disguise...do I want to turn away, do I want to condemn the others simply for being human, do I want to be my mother....)
This is the central question. If I become my mother, if I adopt her belief system...then there is no purpose to any of this.
And all that is left is the ugliness.
I thought it was my duty as a daughter to always make sure I was looking after them, even if they didn't look after me or my kids. Even if they'd abused me.
OH FOR SURE. IT WAS A PRIMARY DUTY. MY SELF WORTH IS BOUND UP IN THAT.
And my sense of purpose.
My Christmas wish for all of us is the gift of loving ourselves and the people who matter to us.
Thank you, pasajes. This is lovely.
:O)
It is generous and kind to be good to yourself, both for yourself and so you can function well for those REAL loved ones in your life.
I am beginning to learn this true thing. At first, it is difficult to know what that means ~ to be good to ourselves. I found self worth in ballet, in martial arts, in my writing. In loving my children. They still seem like miracles to me, though everything is so messed up and difficult child son is mad at me all the time.
In the growing, changing, kaliedescopic relationship I have to husband.
One way to look at is to count your blessings that it is not YOU that has been dealt the hand of this awful DNA (even though you may have had to continue to deal with it through your difficult child
I think about this, especially where our daughter is concerned. It tears my heart out to see her in such pain, in so much danger, unable to stay true to herself or stop the trajectory once it starts again.
I am overwhelmingly grateful we are all still alive, so grateful that the story is not ended.
Cedar
I think denial, wanting to believe what we want to believe rather then the truth, is for some people a very powerful pull.
Truth is difficult to pin down.
But you are right, Recovering. I have not been able to change a thing with my insistence that we can believe change into reality.
Just the opposite.
Had I not foolishly believed in the good, in the second chance, the beating may never have occurred.
I am trying very hard to come awake.
I do not see the value in turning away. I no longer see the value in not turning away.
It is very, very quiet, in this place I am.
Cedar
