Like COM, I had been getting error messages telling me I had been blocked for the past week or so. The messages did not require me to key in a series of letters or numbers to validate that I was human. Yesterday, I completed a post and lost it to that "You have been blocked". I wrote it again, and again lost parts of it. I disregarded the error messages, as I had been doing for some time. When the post was finished, I was not allowed to send it. I learned then that nothing had been saved any of the times I had been blocked and had started over.
That was something different.
It looked to me like whoever had been sending those messages meant it, this time.
Ew.
Convinced I had been booted off the site for crimes unmentionable (since no one mentioned them to me), I felt terrible.
I was too sad, about that.
Then?
I was like, "WHAT?!? They can't do this to me!" That was when, like Quasimodo making the bells peal so everyone would know what happened, I made the post you saw yesterday.
And it posted.
:O)
This morning, I have been happily posting away, so grateful for this site and for every one of us who posts here.
Thank you, Runaway Bunny and Recovering Enabler. Given that I thought I'd been blocked? Your timely responses helped quiet that guilty little voice that had been assuring me, with great conviction, that whether I knew what it was or not, I had done wrong enough to lose what I had.
Interestingly...this is the same way it felt to acknowledge that my family had somehow fallen off the tracks.
There too, I did not know what I had done wrong. Like so many of us here on the site, I would devote my life to trying to fix it, to figuring out what happened. Though I was never to know where I went wrong with my kids...there was Recovering, here on the site, telling me it was not intentional and that I'd been missed.
And then, Runaway Bunny with an explanation that told me it was nothing personal.
I had not been judged and found wanting.
I was not being punished or ostracized.
Ultimately, what this experience has done is to give me a peek into the workings of the self-accusation (and self-condemnation) that found me fixating and then, self destructing, over what happened to my kids. I am posting the how and why of the experience because what I am learning here is that, just as I was not judged, targeted and blocked from the site...I may not have done anything wrong in parenting my children, either.
Which takes me back to the theory of detachment, and how, when our kids take a wrong path and helping them straighten out becomes the habitual rescuing of enabling...we come to blame ourselves. How that dynamic works, I mean.
Like we do here where our troubled kids are concerned, I worked from the result. (BLOCKED OH NO I'VE BEEN BLOCKED WHAT DID I DO AND HOW DO I FIX IT.)
Given the result, what I had believed to be true (about my interactions here on the site, about family of origin issues, about what happened to my children) seemed not to have been true.
How is it that I did not see this coming shakes our faith in ourselves, in our capacity to judge a situation accurately.
We failed, and never even had a clue saw it coming.
It has been an interesting thing, to trace those responses.
Equally interesting is that, as happens so often to us here, events in my real life just lately have included strange coincidences and weird, unexpected endings.
Theme words for the healing of this time:
Legitimacy: Did I see what I thought I saw, or did I miss something really important and what is the matter with my perceptors, that I did not see this coming?
Legitimacy.
Integrity: How do I rebuild the who I thought I was but must not be or have been? What is integrity composed of? How did I not see this coming?
What is the matter with my perceptors?
It would be like you were walking down the street and suddenly sprung a leak of vital fluid.
So, that is how we stumble into self condemnation where our children (or our families of origin) are concerned.
Something doesn't fit, and we take responsibility for it.
But it never was anything personal; it never had anything to do with our actions, with anything we did or could have exerted any control over, at all.
Computer glitch.
Cedar