When people are ostracized from family, it is because the family did not like their choices.

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
For Confused.

And for me too, of course. (See how crummy and rundown the neighborhoods of our abusive childhoods were, Confused? But there we are, choosing to have it ~ to have all of it, against all odds, just like Rocky.)


Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
But all the women talked about was the emotional stuff that made them think they were nothing, which is what happened to me. Nobody cried. Nobody wanted pity.

No; and to be pitied...that is the final abuse, the place where the thing is sealed in contempt.

That is exactly where we have to go, to heal.

Right there.

There is compassion, and there is staring, like a greedy voyeur, into the broken-spirited core of the very thing you were pledged to protect. The final step; a biting, ecstatic pity for the hurt done, for the thing accomplished. I think I died there about a million times.

I see you.

I see you back.

***

I was thinking about my mom this morning. I have been so mean about her. No one would enjoy doing what she did; no one would do such things, again and again for all of her life, on purpose.

But that isn't true.

There have been those who enjoy torment and torture through all of time.
I can't decide if choosing compassion for her would be the final bastion of denial to my healing.

So we are going to keep the pressure on, here.

As it is in our lives with our children: If this doesn't work, I will go back to the old forgiving, compassionate ways.

A choice, and mine to make.

***

But compassion, true compassion, must be based in truth. When it is based on something less, it is only a twisted form of pity.

Okay, then:

I see you.

I see you back.

And we are both human.

And we break, and break, and break.

Sunlight through rotted cloth. The Light; the joy underpinning all things, breaks through. The joy of creation, itself. Not to be outrageously dorky here, but it is all energy. As conscious beings, we are given, but must claim, the right, and the rightness, of self definition.

This is not about what kind of person, daughter, or even, mother, I am. This is about recovering myself in a way I can understand. For me, that would be words. If I can name it, I can know it for what it is; through awareness of what it is, I can will it into, or out of, existence.

What is real.

Reality is as I define it to be. They have been telling and telling us that all along, the mystics. Perception determines reality. What we believe is what is true, for us. In cases of abuse, our poor, battered egos have had to work overtime, forever. How sad ~ remember the times even my ego believed the abuser's determined interpretation. So...unlike Tolle, I believe my ego too, to have been a heroic thing.

Can't believe we made it.

It is what it is.

Another miracle. Probably able to do that because my grandmother loved us, one and all.

So do the right thing, the strong and strengthening thing. Because you never know. Whatever it looks like, you never know how much what you do matters.

Across the generations, even.

Maya Angelou touches on that idea, too. She says we have already been paid for, by those ancestors, and who knows how far back, who survived what they survived for that dream of a better future.

For us, though they did not know us and could not even dream then, of who we might be, of how we might look and feel and go about our business in the world.

But here we are.

***

I was thinking last night too about why we need to go through this old business at our ages. Because it is still happening, that's why. There is comfort and cherishment and strength and identity in functional family that even now, even at this late stage of the game, we are excluded from.

That is why it matters.

What do we do with that.


I wish and wish I had what I see other women sharing with their mothers. When I go back, when I give my mother access to me, to the heart of me, she is the same: Sly, and so determinedly destructive.

Like always, why?

Whatever could be the win, there.

Whatever could it be.

The patterns in her marriage are so similar to the patterns SWOT describes in her parents' marriage.

How could this be.

***

I love it that SWOT is reconnected with her father.

My father is gone.

How wonderful ~ truly, how incredibly amazingly wonderful that you did not lose him. Can you imagine the wonder in it for him, to have a daughter come home, truth in her words and her heart a living, courageous thing.

Wow.

Miracle.

Bona fide miracle for you, SWOT.

And we never even saw it coming, and you stood up, anyway.

Spirit of the white mare and of the dancer's breath; colors, flaring and flying so high, the mosaic coming seamlessly together, beneath.

Beautiful.

If we all keep reclaiming ourselves like this, we are going to create an unmistakable path right through that primitive forest I am always posting about.

And you know how I am always posting about that lantern, that light we are holding for the rest ~ for the rest of us, for our full reclamation of self?

There is no lantern.

That is us.

That is how we look, now.

Remember?

"Comes the silence, burning

Burning...
bright."

***

I think recovering from an abusive past has to do with recapturing a destroyed sense of efficacy. That is what locus of control is all about.

Efficacy.

And that is the thing shame destroys. Whether the shame is come of childhood abuse or abusive therapists or loving a child who turns defiantly self destructive, that is the thing shame destroys.

Efficacy. A sense that we are capable of shepherding ourselves and those we love through it. That is the essential thing those of us who took our courage in both hands and did the best we knew, though we were never taught the good and strengthening things ~ that is what we did, what we have done, a thousand times. Believed we could do this thing.

That is why we are strong enough to do it, now.

But it was a choice, for us.

That was where it all caved in, when our children lost their ways: We lost faith in ourselves and maybe, in redemption itself. Not at first, but over time, we did.

I did.

We had been broken, before. We had been taught "broken".

Echoes of our own destruction; helpless in the face of our child's pain.

So, we break.

BOOM

Like a gunshot, right?

We hold and hold and hold, and then, we break.

We lose faith in ourselves.

Our abusers are there, like the witch in the dream that was a fairy tale come real, after all ~ as my mother was: "Well, you weren't such a good mother after all, were you?"

Here is a strangeness: I can usually see her, hear her, know the words by heart. Today, I am not so sure anymore, exactly what she said.

Healed, that hurt place.

No echo.

But now, instead of the shameful "No, I guess I wasn't.", the response would have to be: "What business is that of yours?"

So, that must be the taste of individuation.

If our abusers were consistent enough, if they were determined enough to destroy our faith in ourselves, we might never get it back, might never recover.

But we did. We took the broken pieces and created the mosaics of our lives, and they were beautiful, precious things.

BOOM

What must it be like, to believe in ourselves, to hold faith with ourselves that we can do anything we set our minds and hearts to and to understand that if we fail, it is correct to hold faith with and to believe in ourselves, again and again?

That is what we are recovering through this process. The right to hold faith with ourselves. That was the damaged thing, the thing that was taken from me, the thing about me my abuser could not abide.

Faith.

Strength.

Courage.

Note: When our daughter fell into the problems that would come to dominate her life, what did I sacrifice?

The thing that defined me.

The thing I had defiantly pursued, confronting and banishing that question both literally and figuratively every time that I took my courage and my faith in both hands and wrote.

"Who do you think you are?"

"Who do you think you are / How dare you / Don't you dare / Just don't think, Cedar." You are what I say. A thing with no will of your own.

Believe as you like.

Maya: "You are here on purpose."

So, that is why we have engaged to this degree. We are back because we took the courage to defy the abuser's will and create our good lives again and again, a thousand times over.

Cedar



:starplucker:

:hugs:

So, this is us, all of us, telling our stories and listening and being heard.

:choir:


:O)

Thank you.

WE spoke about life long triggers and how to deal with them.

So that is what I mean, what I am trying to define, in posting about the shame response.

A trigger.

Very helpful imagery, SWOT.

Thank you.

I don't give a f**** how I look

And in my secret heart? I was certain I was repulsive. In some way that couldn't be seen, maybe. And in a thousand million ways that could.

Now, I am not so sure...but I think that, even at my age, I might be...hmmm. I might be something very different than I thought. There were many issues with my mother, over my appearance. This is an interesting piece. I probably do not even know what I look like, never having seen myself through my own eyes. Looking, and finding, proof of what the abuser decreed was there.

I never thought about it this way, before.

Okay. That's next, then.

***

It would strike, and it still tries to, when I am putting on makeup or doing my hair. Working the Gallery has been very good for me. The artist has made an artform of wild, out of bounds hair. Sometimes, her only makeup is a line of bright blue paint beneath her eyes.

So I could be as ugly, as not-perfect, as I was on any given day.

A thing to be celebrated for what it was.

It is what it is.

Valid.

:O)

***

Okay. I am going to post this before I go back over this thread. Don't want to get a 10,000 word notice and not be able to post it, at all.

Keeps me honest, to post it.

The good things and the bad ones, too.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
They all, every one, agreed that their siblings, who were not abused, did not lived the same type of abuse that they did.

Each of my siblings was abused. A gamut of abuse, from cruel response to some faceless something come live in the middle of the night.

Scary, that stuff. I am a grown up person close to a million years old, and that place, those places, are still breathless.

I kept trying to make them LIKE me

I don't get that part, either. I still get a little punched in the stomach feeling when I think that what I think about my sister now might be what really happened. Might be what is really happening to this day. Maybe that is why we keep going back. We keep poking at the things that could not possibly be true.

D H says: Toxic is toxic. Every time you open that vial, it is poison. The essence is in the bottom of the vial, but the fumes are poisonous things.

I say: (Thank you, Eckhart Tolle) "The pain body cannot stand before the ~ however it goes. Something about the pain body cannot stand before the fact of my presence.

What I know about this now is that my sister, like me, like I am too, is healing the best way she knows how.

I don't have to like it.

It is what it is.

But it is a good thing to see what is for what it is.

but that was at a time when going no contact with your own mother labeled you a horrific person.

I blamed some rottenness in me for the last time my parents and I were ~ for the last time my parents chose not to see me. And my mother said, "I told you I was going to do this."

And my father said, "Is there anyone else here you would like to talk to."

He was on her side. That is why she gave him the phone. To make that very clear. The hero, the one protector any of us had, had decided to take a freaking powder.

Alone.

Reviled.

Judged and found wanting: Nothing to do with fairness or decency or hope.

It is what it is.

But I was pretty ashamed of that. Ashamed that happened. I think I took it as just something my mother did. The betrayal was in that my father chose sides against me.

Wonder how he felt, about that.

In his secret heart, I mean.

Perhaps I won't post this part.

So that is why I have to, I suppose.

For heaven's sake, dammit.

Yep.

My shame cannot stand before the fact of, before the force of, my presence.

Feets, don't fail me now.

Stand up.

Feel the Wind. (Child of the Wind before and behind her....)

That happened, to me.

Ours is an ugly story.

WE also discussed how we are usually tossed out of the family for making choices the family didn't like

I don't know to this day ~ and neither does D H, what I did.

I know my sister was involved. I mean, I know she was visiting when it happened. Maybe, given what has come to be now, with my mother staying with my sister during the winter months...must have been the same dynamic.

What...the win must be what the win is, now. Get rid of the other sibs and have the parents for her own.

?

So, the question becomes what is the win for my mother?

Can it be that she hates me that much.

Why doesn't matter.

It is what it is.

It is better to know.

What in the world were they thinking, to do this thing?

But I have seen her do it, for no particular reason that I can figure out, to my brother, and to the woman who drives her to my sister's.

I have heard how she and my sister and my sister's family roll their eyes at the woman,, at her predicament in being tired from the long drive and of still having hours to go.

There was a time, in the beginning, when my sister would have the woman, the driver whose car it is, spend the night in her home.

This time, the time I heard about, the woman was told there was no room; that she would have to find a hotel, if she was tired.

And they all thought that was funny.

I can see it sometimes, how messed up they all are, in the things I see or hear about them doing to others.

I cannot see the wrongness in what they do as it applies to me.

That is where we are working, today.

And I actually laughed when I told the group how my sister wrote that I had NPT/Borderline Personality Disorder (Borderline Personality Disorder (Borderline (BPD))).

My sister doesn't do things like that. She does: "What would Cedar do." I have posted about the hurtfulness of that one, before. My sister is uber-religious. There is not a chance she would confuse me with her concept of Jesus ~ just the opposite.

She told me about that, about what she and my mother do, about the feeling tone of how they see and talk about me. It was supposed to be funny.

But it hurt me, to know they saw me that way.

"Cedar is the romantic in the family."

I have been a fool for lesser things.

Remember that song about the boxer? Simon and Garfunkel?




Brother? Who cares what his issues are.

I do.

But as I am becoming healthier myself, I see that he does not need my protection; he is his own champion.

And if I am strong enough? So is he.

Same bloodline.

One refers to her by her first name.

My son refers to me by my first name.

But he has been calling on Mother's Day, on my birthday, and sometimes just out of the blue. On Mother's Day this year, he called twice. Once, he talked to me. The second call was so his children could talk to me.

He wanted me to know, after I had talked to the kids, how much I had missed in not being in their lives these past four years.

All I could do was agree.

I know things he does not, about how irreplaceable those times with a little boy are. And I know how it is, when things change.

But all I said was, "Yes."

I told him too, that there was a time I loved him in that exact same way he loves his son.

He could not understand yet, that this does not change.

But I know that, and that is more than enough.

For now, for today.

Sometimes, we just have to fly by the seats of our pants. Hearts in our throats, flying by the seats of our pants.

Hey, baby. Remember that, when we finally saw the faces of the children we had been pregnant with?

"Hey, baby. I waited so long for you. I wondered so many times who and how you would be...."

:O)

And in my case, my mother was angry that HER mother would take care of me, no matter what.

Maybe SWOT, this is why my mother so passionately, years and years after her death, hates my paternal grandmother.

I didn't even realize how much was still fooling myself and lied to myself and told myself that it was ok for my mother to abuse me and disown me.

I still don't believe it. I mean, surely this way I am seeing now could not be true. Surely, every one of us (my sibs) would want to form a community of support for ourselves and for one another.

?

I feel badly for you that you went through that disowning part too, SWOT.

What in the world were they thinking? I know I sound like a broken record. I still don't get the win. Well. If the win were anything I could understand, then I would have to reinterpret what my situation, all of my life, has been.

Huh.

Well, how do you like that.

I refused to think about how my siblings said nothing in my defense while, at the same time, using my company, advice and,yes, compassion when they felt entitled.

Yes.

True for me, too.

With my sister, not with my brother. He doesn't talk about these things. Not with me. He does the right thing by our mother. Whatever she does to him or to his family, he does the right thing by his mother.

She holds her death over all of our heads.

Here is a story: So, I was helping my mother clean in the Spring. I was doing exterior windows. I am not sure what she was doing. I walked around a corner, and there she was, facedown on the ground.

Motionless.

And I said whatever ~ Mom are you alright, or whatever.

And she jumped up and thought that was very funny.

So I finished cleaning the windows.

But I still don't think that was very funny.

They address a few incidents that they didn't approve of, but do they know the good we do, the love we have (yes, even for them before t he final tumble), the truth we are not afraid to look straight in the eyes?

Well, that is a true thing.

We are looking it straight in the eyes right here and now.

Anonymously, of course.

But I could just pretend this was not my story. Here on the site I could do that. I could just be an advice-giving person.

Instead of some person posting away and posting away.

So, that takes courage, that choice to be ugly and to be not enough. And to admit that my own mother doesn't find value in me ~ twice, now. (Ha! Twice now ~ except for all the times in all my life that she hit or kicked or bit or burnt. Or pulled the strings out that held me together in whatever possible way that she could. I just thought of that, as I reread this before posting. In case I decided to chicken out on posting some of it.)

It is what it is.

Looks like I am still here. And actually, am reclaiming the territory of the heart at a pretty good clip.

They weren't there. They were never there.

BOOM

They never were who I grieve, today.

They never were.

I never had that stuff I keep believing could be real.

Huh.

That must be why saying I don't believe in my sister anymore feels right.

She never was who I believed myself into believing she was.

But still, that was a dirty little trick, to pretend we were making a pact not to exclude.

Grrr.

I have been a fool for lesser things ~ pretty much, every day of my life...but that was a pretty freaking big thing.

How could she know that would work. And why would she use it if she did know it would work on me. I know, I know. Why doesn't matter.

It is what it is, and it is better to know.

Can't help but feel a little stupid about believing that with all my heart, though.

Cheesh, Cedar.

Do NOT believe what a scapegoat tells you.

Well, that's pretty good advice.

Just in case my sister does show up at my door one day this summer. Which D H says she is going to, as per her threat to do so on the last phone message I didn't pick up but somehow, could not help listening to just in case my mother...you know.

Because I don't know how I am going to feel about myself once it is too late to undo this.

D H says I will have to be very careful then, because that will be how my sister latches onto me.

"Do NOT believe what a scapegoater (I added the "er") tells you."

On the fridge it goes.

Sisters can be scapegoaters, too.

Well, duh.

I always see those times when I could not stop what was happening, when I think of my sister. I don't get it that she doesn't see me that way.

It could even be true that she sees me in a very unattractive light.

:bravo:

Ahem.

Anyway, if I post that phrase on the fridge, I will see it, when I go to the door.

Research indicates that we will open the door, even to a criminal, when someone knocks.

I wonder how I want to treat these people, if they come here. D H says: Sanctuary. If I am here when they come, I will deal with them. (Between D H and me? His muzzle regarding my FOO is off. That is just how he describes it. I swear he is eager for a confrontation. He says that is how I need to be, too. But you know? I just wish....)

"Do NOT believe what a scapegoat tells you."

The only place I am...not eager for confrontation, but willing to stand up, is around what my sister did to my daughter when she was so hurt.

Snip.

They don't get to come to my house. And if they show up, I am going to say:

"You shouldn't f*** with someone who is loyal to you."

There is nothing about me that is any business of yours.

Cedar

One more time, everybody: Thank you.
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
I was thinking last night too about why we need to go through this old business at our ages. Because it is still happening, that's why. There is comfort and cherishment and strength and identity in functional family that even now, even at this late stage of the game, we are excluded from.

That is why it matters.

What do we do with that.
Bingo.
As I said before, my sister went no contact with me the first so many years ago. WHY DID I TAKE HER BACK??? I wasn't as knowledgeable about what was going on in my family then, but life would have been much less painful without her. I did forget about her during those years and by now she would just be a little star in the sky among infinity. I have the God given ability to move on.

Why did my mother speak to on the phone me when I called her when she had known, in her head, that I had already been disowned in her heart? She wasn't doing it to be nice, trust me. She didn't do anything just to be nice when it came to me and was very snide when she spoke to me. She did it to hurt me. Everything she did to me was deliberately premeditated just to hurt me and make me feel like an outsider. Evil woman, she was, at least to me. And I am an outsider...and I'm glad. I would not want to be one of them. But it hurt when I realized the game she had played with me. But...but...but...

But it was my fault for not just letting her go before she could get in the final punch. I'd have been better off. She was a cruel, heartless lady when it came to me AND my kids. My kids are better for having not known her. From what I've been told, she used to have tiffs with Sis when she stayed with her too...threatening to leave, but not leaving. And she played favorites. Sound familiar? Playing favorites was banned in my house. But I digress back to me and the fact that she made me a DNA outsider.

It was a hard, good life lesson.

Yet her horrible words are still with me today. If you were not abused, you do not have tapes of your mother's derisive, mocking voice in your head all your life. I know my reality was real.

But she's dead. The things that keeps her going is my sister's involvement in my life, whether or not she is No Contact with me or not (I still believe she is unable to have the willpower not to read this, although I hope not). She also would get my poor father involved in the idiotic like a Facebook site gripe of hers. For what?

But as the days go by and she stays out of my way, at least so that I don't see or hear from her and my father is compliant about never bringing "them" up, I care less and less and will get over her. She did change after her divorce. Any stability she had, left when her marriage was over and I can't enable dating married men or abusive men anymore. I can't. I can't. In one of her posts that I read that one time, she asked what she did that was so awful that she was stuck with abusive boyfriend?

Well, she isn't stuck. She could do what she did to me, and I was never sp horrid to her as he is every single day. She could cut him off cold and be rid of him. It is HER fault that she can't. Her weakness. Her weak personality.

I think it's karma.

Cedar, let's write letters to those who were deliberately mean to us, burn them without sending them (that can be symbolic of the end of them regarding us) and just live our lives. I am getting better at this.

Karma. I should have changed my name from Midwest Mom to Karma.


JMO.
 
Last edited:

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Cedar, let's write letters to those who were deliberately mean to us, burn them without sending them (that can be symbolic of the end of them regarding us) and just live our lives

I like that idea. All my letter could say would be "Miss you. Wish I had a freaking family. Wish you were kind and wise like Maya Angelou and I was, too. Then, I would know how to do this, and I would only want you, not need you. Life has been a harder thing than it might have been, because you did what you did every time, over time. I wish with all my heart that you'd been there when I needed a mother. I am better at it than you, but I still have so many questions and no one who is my own mother to ask. Hate you for what you cost me, for what something so stupid as whatever warped you this way cost all of us." Goofy stuff like that. Ha! Maybe I would say, "Who did you think you were?", beating and justifying beating, your own children. And maybe, that would be a good thing. To watch the letter go up in smoke and declare freedom even from what is left.

It has been a hard thing, to reclaim myself. I am savoring the truth of that. No letter, yet. Maybe to that first therapist. But even there, what could I say that hasn't already been written into poetry? That I lived, I suppose.

That I did make it, and am approaching strong and whole at warp speed.

He would be happy for me about that. He set me on this path, and here I am.

Ritual is a good way to mark the time; a good way to believe and declare that we intend to live free of any kind of purposeless pain. That we will entertain only valid teachings; that we will recognize, every time it comes to us, that the negativity we were raised to believe was wrong then and is old wrongness now, and can be safely discarded. Maybe, we could envision those old negative messages as having been printed into words in an old book, into a kind of ledger where, identified and trapped on paper now, they can be examined safely and turned into legend, into something that never was.

We could speak our intention to live our lives openly, joyously, lovingly, intelligently, prosperously, generously, kindly, powerfully without secrets or shame.

It's been good to have you to go through this part with, SWOT.

I think we are doing this.

We are actually healing. I can feel the difference, can feel an underlying lightness of being ~ just as they tell us will happen as we heal.

I am so happy for us both.

One thousand thanks, SWOT.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Whoa. It seems the post I have been posting for so long, here at the end of this thread, is gone. I feel badly about that. Wish I'd posted it here, as a map for all of us. In it, in this chain of consciousness post, I dug for and found and worked through so many shaming things, through so many vulnerabilities, all of it sealed in contempt.

I had a rough couple of days, a time when the shame of it was so heavy. Maybe, a time when I too wondered whether I would be able to come back from it, this time.

But I did come back.

Now it's gone. The post, I mean.

But I am changed.

I just can't leave the exact map for you, for anyone following this post.

What I can tell you is that you can do this. I am doing it, and you can, too. Beautiful music, the absolute certainty that I refused to live with those toxicities weakening me anymore ~ those things helped me.

It was like I had nothing to lose. So I lost what I had. Whatever roles were holding me up had to be let go, and I had to choose real. And I didn't know how to do that.

Beautiful music, finding the imagery I needed in the things I posted earlier in this thread for Confused, and for me, too ~ those things helped me know where I was.

Cedar
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
Cedar, I am so sorry you were going through a bad time. I wish I could have been there for you. The post is still here. You can still add to it. I will read. I will respond.

I care.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
It was at the end of this thread, SWOT. I kept coming back to it, going deeper, but then not posting it.

There must be a time limit, a number of days after which posts we have chosen not to post disappear.

Thank you for standing with me, SWOT. I knew you would hold those intentions for me, and so, I could be stronger than I would have been alone. It was difficult to acknowledge that what I felt at the exclusion my mother is practicing to this day was resentment, jealousy, envy.

That was a small feeling, like maybe I was not strong enough to do this, after all.

But here we are.

Thank you.

Cedar
 

InsaneCdn

Well-Known Member
Cedar -
If I'm accumulating a LONG post over time? I don't start on the board. I start in wordpad. I can save it, edit it... and when I'm ready, post it.
I learned that from AnnieO. It was more of a problem on the previous version of the board software - back then, we were losing in-process posts on a regular basis.

(thanks to Cheryl, THAT isn't a frequent occurrence any more)
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
Start a new post, Cedar. You know I'll be here to read it after I get back (have to run chores and need a workout like you don't know...good way to blow off steam) :)
 
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