I attracted friends because I was very pretty, smart and interesting to be with. I had no understanding of what friendship should be
I am not sure I have an understanding of friendship. To those of us enmeshed with an abusive parent, the attraction that brings trust and eventual friendship would feel like some version of enmeshment.
***
When my sister seeks relationship where the rules are clear (a marriage with no possibility of divorce that does not destroy some intrinsic belief, some vow made to himself, in the self concept of the male involved; a group of women who define themselves as loyal sisters in the ways my sister would like to be validated or protected without risking the vulnerability that leads to trust over time ~ or a pact not to exclude sibs whose intent was solely to guarantee that
she not be excluded from whatever I brought to the table...like the freaking table, itself [roar].
Where was I going with this.
Family of origin rules do not work in the larger world.
A toxic mix of disparagement, ridicule, flattery, manipulative gossip, sly taint of fish in the mouth hatred and power over. That was all I knew about being a person. No wonder I read all the time, spent so much time alone!
Well, good for me then, that I did that.
That is why we become embroiled in unhealthy relationships, I think. What feels familiar is wrong from the beginning. Betrayal would be the norm. An acceptance of victimization or vengeance in advance for the hurt that is surely coming would be the norm. Some of us would have taken the abuser role in our friendships and some, the victim role. Or maybe those boundaries were more fluid than that.
It makes sense that this could be true.
I have changed very, very much, as I have grown into a person and yet, I haven't changed in an essential way, at all. I remember those last months I was able to spend with my mother. The feeling with my mom was like I was in suspended animation; always more attuned to her emotional state than my own. It was tiring, but the kind of tired that carries no sense of accomplishment.
Here is a story. So, neither of us knew so much about pumping gas. (One of the threats D H would make, back in the day when I was first doing whatever I wanted, like working or going back to school, was that I could damn well pump my own gas, then.)
:O)
Anyway. So, I was going to pump my mom's gas for her. And do you know, I could not get it to pump until the tank was full. I swear, you would have thought the theme from Jaws had begun playing in the background as I approached that stupid gas pump. By this time, I had gone back, taken the degree, was working and filling my own gas tank routinely
but I could not get the pump to work to fill my mother's car. Contemptuous glares flying, my mother got out of the car and finished filling the tank.
Can you say self sabotaged into the role my mother insisted I take?
Isn't that something.
Regarding friendship: I remember what the therapist from Family of Origin told us: There are predators and abusers everywhere, targeting everyone. It isn't that we are unique Copa, or that we are stupid. It is that predators ~ those who assuage their own woundings by proving, again and again, that someone else (eventually, it will be you) victimized them in spite of, or because of, their wonderfulness and generosity and kindness and etc. It always comes down to that they have no choice but to do whatever the thing that they always do, to everyone, is.
So, we just need to learn to say: "Oh. Predator." We need to learn that we are all doing our best, here. We need to learn to bless ourselves first and if we have anything left over, to bless the predator and believe they will come through whole and healthy, too.
But we must bless ourselves, first. For the courage to risk, for the heart to remain, for the guts to survive the thing's ending without going under, ourselves.
For the longest time, I would fall into relationships with predators. In the strangest ways, too.
***
We are making such good progress, here. Thank you, SWOT and Copa especially, and everyone reading along and posting in as you can. It works, it can work, to examine and free ourselves of shame as we have been doing it, here in the FOO chronicles.
As I've worked through the sort of wordless, global feel of the shame in having been turned away from, in walking alone, in being named that guy others turn away from ~ as I've faced up to the feelings beneath the shame of having been judged and found wanting and condemned for the lack in me...I've learned to see shame as the signpost and the challenge and the opportunity it truly is.
I've learned that once we uncover any smallest thing having to do with the original shaming event and learn to see it through our own eyes and never again through the eyes of the abuser, every aspect of that piece of the global shame our abusers hurt into us comes together and the wound, in its entirety, is healed. There are still little charges in it, like electrical charges. These are the stories of our lives after all. In honoring the truth of what happened to us, we honor ourselves and our stories and our coming through it.
In a way, shame is where we are most real, most alive, most aware.
We need to learn to see even our shame through our own eyes and never again through the eyes of the abuser. Each of us has issues. We must have courage enough to face them; it is so hard to do that without condemning ourselves when we have been hurt into the victim role.
But it can be done.
We are doing it, here.
That energy to heal, to come whole, is within and can be accessed, if only we have courage and believe we can change these wrong things our abusers have done to us.
We can.
Copa's Sleeping Beauty kiss, my lifting the curtain on the Wizard of Oz...SWOT, with her determination to read every bit of research and name and inform herself ~ each of us has found her own way, has gone determinedly back to the forest, to the core of the hurt, and come through it.
So, it can work, and any one of us can do it.
It's like rebalancing our energy, in a way, or changing the course of a river. (There is the myth of Sisyphus and the stable he cleaned and the river whose course he changed to accomplish the impossible task.) I wouldn't say it's a matter of cleaning something out so much as it is a matter of thawing frozen energy, of unfreezing the energy of something that hurt so much that we could not have faced it then and survived, intact.
When I see my abuser hating me into some hapless victim to service some disbalanced something in her ~ those vignettes show me now, eye to eye with the abuser ~ any of them, all of them.
"I see you."
That is the essential crime, right? That is the thing the abuser cannot face. Who he or she is, really.
It could be that part of the difficult in coming clear about what happened to us in our childhoods is that we protect the abuser in our memories from what we know about them and about why they do what they do. It would be the final terror to understand your parent is twisted the way a person who would bully a child is twisted. I remember deciding, again and again, as we went through this, that compassion could come later. it was hard to push through those places where I was protecting my abuser, even in my own mind.
If you find yourself in a place where you cannot face down your abuser, imagine someone who can. Imagine someone who could see what your abuser was doing and know it was wrong, so your witness can teach you too to believe, to know in your heart, that what your abuser did or said when she had been given the incredible gift of a child to teach, was dead wrong.
Seeking Strength, your mother should never have cheapened either you
or herself with her words and her labeling and her hatred. She was very wrong to do that to a beautiful young girl.
It bothers me so much that she said those terrible things to you. You are such a nice lady.
***
What else do I know about this process?
The determination to go back is scary. There is hatred trapped in every traumatic memory. The danger to us is that without support, we will come away having revalidated the abuser's truth, condemning ourselves and sealing the whole works beneath yet another layer of our own life energy that
we need and that
we should have and that is legitimately ours and that the abuser never had a right to in the first place. Whoever your abuser was, however certain it feels, the abuser is always wrong. To commit acts of abuse, the abuser would have to be a person without integrity; the abuser would have to be a coward, would have to be a bully, with all that entails, before he or she, given trust over a child
or another adult, would choose to victimize.
Knowing this, we never have to listen to them again. Look into their eyes, instead. Is what lives in the abuser's eyes when they speak words of hatred valid? Could it ever be valid, given what we know now, as adults, about anger and judging and naming and rage?
No.
They have nothing valid to tell you; nothing in all those times you were abused meant anything
but the meaning it had, to you.
And the ultimate meaning there is the betrayal that happened between parent and child.
That is an important point.
How do we recover when recovery means we need to invalidate everything about the abuser? How could I invalidate all the good things that happened with that first therapist before the one bad thing?
How could I just let that go, when he meant so much to me at one time?
How could I hang on to my own integrity if I condemned everything to do with my mom or my sister or brothers, when there is so much about each of them that is admirable?
That is an important distinction, too.
We need to sail our crafts with skill, not just blindly take off in them, trusting the same fate that left us broken and abused and shame laden in the first place will take us anywhere we would want to go.
We are, indeed, Captains of our own ships; there is a wild kind of integrity in being pirates, a kind of courage. Lil posted for us the true story of the woman pirate. In fact, she was a brave, refined woman with courage and integrity
depending on who was being asked about her motivations.
That's us, too.
Maybe, that is where we have been able to hold strong for one another, here. As each has told her story, one of the others of us will have seen through to the heart of the one suffering, today.
***
My mom...I don't know how they keep seeing themselves as all powerful, or why they would want to. As each of us matures, one of the most important things we learn is that we all make mistakes, and that we all get to make mistakes. We make mistakes because we have courage, and because we push envelopes and take risks and try new things and new ways of doing and seeing things.
And sometimes, we lose.
But most times, we win.
So...how is it that abusers never, ever, admit a mistake? Think about it. They are always right. They know everything
or at least, they know everything more than their chosen victims and that's how they want it. We come out of abusive environments feeling that our mistakes are game changers, are deal breakers, are the last chance
and now we will be abandoned.
And then we are.
And in the past, the shame of that abandonment, the certainty that I would be abandoned again, never once left me.
Interesting then that, having been broken and brought up to fear abandonment, it is my mother ~ my abuser then, and now ~ who leads the charge to abandon me
and the charge to bring me back, but only on her terms.
So, there is a game there that I will figure out one day, but not today. I...my mom's motivations, her hatred or love for me, matter less than they did, once. I do love my mom. That has nothing to do with her. Why would I not, now that I have my own perspective, now that I know those terrible things I have always believed true of me were not my burden, but hers...why would I not love the good things about her?
And they were terrible, deeply shaming things, those things that happened to us. We minimize. We say things like: I lived. (How many times have I posted that very phrase.) But the reality is that if we look also at the things, at the ways of being and seeing that would have taught us strengthening, positive self image...then we can see where our abusers fell short.
And supply those things for ourselves.
***
If there is wrongness, I no longer wonder, with a kind of sick fascination, what it is about me, what thing it is that is so wrong and so dark and so overwhelmingly frightening that I am left abandoned and bereft over and over again.
That thing, that darkness that is shame, that is what I have learned to seek, and hear and heal. It feels familiar to me now, to remain present for the full taste of it and to ~ like we were posting the other day, to pull myself up the fishing line and pull the hunter into the water with me.
Once and for all.
This is the memory of abandoned. One of them. There are many. One of the themes of abandoned is that the abuser will have taught us, will have known that a child will feel overwhelming fear and shame
and will have taught us on purpose, as my mother did, that only she can save us or can let us be killed. I understand this sounds melodramatic. A child knows only the emotional taste of what the abuser intends. There is a difference between what the abuser can actually do to us and the darkness the abuser celebrates in his or her head.
Abusers are abusers. They do not think like us. They think eyeless things. They actually do. Like listening to some f**** up internal radio station. I think they do try to do the right things. Of course they do. We all do. It must be very hard for them to know the things they have done. That must be why they hate us, and why they have to keep hating us and believing we are nothing.
Because we saw what they did.
We saw, and we knew it was wrong
and so did they.
There is something important here. In places where things we would consider abusive are the norm, the child is neither frightened nor scarred by the shame of it. They may lust after revenge, they may become heartlessly cruel themselves, but they are not done in by shame in the sense that they believe themselves inept. We are targeted by the abuser's own sense that what they are doing is wrong and the rationalizations they employ to justify what they routinely do. It is that justification, that certainty that we deserve what they need to do, that we face down and bring justice to in our changed perspectives about what has happened to us. It isn't the word or the act, but that we believe the filth in them was unavoidably called by something the matter with us. When we are raised like we were, that is the awful true thing we carry around.
***
The other thing I know is that, as grandiosity is the other side of that coin of shame, we can follow that feeling too to the core hurt and have it and heal it.
When we become conscious of either grandiosity or shame, then we have a clue, and can follow it up or down the line to have a look at it in the daylight.
We will feel ugly.
That is okay.
Mistakes are okay.
Cedar
