These are the ones my mother drags out any time we talk about FOO memories - to prove that things could not have been bad when we were growing up.
Yes. And there is a feeling of that poem about the gyre, and about the center not holding, because the two extremes cannot come together in the middle to create a coherent story for our lives. We need, I think we need, to be able to ferret out what was true for us, and what we saw and heard, and honor the truth that the dark things were real too, before we can make that coherence for ourselves in our life stories. I am not sure about this part, but I think it is those broken places where what went before and what happened after make no sense that weaken us in our thinking, today. We leap to positions where no one will be hurt or excluded anymore. That is our bottom line, our guiding precept. In fact, reality is multi-faceted. There is no one right answer that is the right answer every time. When we are expected to take someone else's "this is how it was" when we
know very many things contradictory to their "this is how it was" were just as real, and were often traumatic, we cannot put the pieces of self together coherently.
We are role, and not real.
This works for us amazingly well actually, until trouble comes.
That is why it would be best for us to know ~ whatever it is we need to know. Each of us has his or her questions, his or her traumatic memories, buried deep but echoing away just the same.
We should know what that's about.
Instead, sometimes, in our trying to make sense of things, we trust the adult who abused us to start with. Trusting them more than we trust our own minds or honor our own memories, we come to distrust ourselves and our thinking and remembering. We wonder what in the world is the matter with us that we remember such dark things that everyone else swears never happened.
"Just don't think, Cedar."
"Don't you dare."
Or an even worse thing perhaps, would be that the person who was an adult in our lives when we were just little girls or little boys minimizes what happened to us because their own story was "so much worse".
And since they said it?
We believe that, too.
And another leg to base our realities on goes shaky.
And we become more uncertain.
It is like someone saying "Roar! Stop stabbing me in the back." And someone else saying: "Stop being a baby. What happened to you was nothing. That's why it doesn't matter."
The point being, as it always is when we are raised in abusive situations, that we are the ones who do not matter.
And there is a key, and that is how to recognize and heal that place, and find coherence in the stories of our lives, and integrity for ourselves
Maybe, that is how it will feel to be healed. We will know our own stories. That will be integrity of thought and action and understanding and then, we can accept current reality in a multi-faceted way, too.
I lived much of my life believing my family of origin could come together. I believed it in every fiber of my being and right straight in the face of anything they did.
This turns out not to have been true.
There is now and there was then and there was, forever, a force at the heart of my family of origin who wanted everything to be exactly as it was.
It was not good for me, or for the innocent family my innocent D H and the not-innocent me created, for me to be in denial about those dark places, or for me to pretend their darknesses no longer mattered.
They did matter.
We were hurt by them.
Because I believed with a fanatic's determined belief that they were good when they were not, my family of origin was in a position to attack when the family
D H and I had created fell into such troubled times.
And attack they did.
And it hurt to acknowledge that mine was, after all, the cup half-full. But my story has coherence, now. I was forever asking why, was forever wondering who was the liar here, as I went through this process. Those of you who have been reading along will remember that, maybe. Those were the most painful questions I asked. I knew what had happened. I did not know why. The only answer I had is the one the abuser had given to justify abusing her own children in the first place.
That was the lie.
That was the why behind all of it.
This is how the abusive person insisted it would be then (traumatic snapshots, one after another: boom, boom, boom), and she will accept nothing less now.
That is not a pretty truth, but it is a truth that enables coherence in making sense of me, that enables coherence in the story of who I am inside where there is only me and those hissing, negative tapes.
Cedar