In a totally new place and need perspective? Cedar? Anyone?

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
I was afraid too Copa, that my sister would call me as she had promise/threatened to do. By the time she did? We had done enough work here that I was no longer afraid.
You're lucky. I can never not be afraid. If she got mad enough, she'd get the cops involved again or maybe do something worse since her world is now a mess and it's her fault and her choices that caused it, but it's me she is taking it out on. I never plan on talking to her again. Part of that is fear/part is I've just had it. We are all too old, her included, to be playing little games. Dangerous games, really.

I quit the game. I no longer care.
 

Copabanana

Well-Known Member
I found this definition online of "Working Through...(which refers to) a process that involves repeating, elaborating and amplifying interpretations of actions and reactions that is seen as a major step in the success of mental health therapy."

While we are not in therapy, we are doing self-therapy.

It makes sense that we would engage in some of the same processes.
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
I will vote for Hillary if she is the nominee, but I doubt she will be. I really do. Every day there is a louder crescendo of doubt and fear about the ramifications of her email server and continued defense of same.
She is the only one who sh res my views with a chance of winning. Joe Biden would go down quite badly and I don't think Elizabeth Warren can do it either. I'm really thinking we'll get another of our wonderful conservative white males who Limbaugh touts and cheers for because so many Americans who need to vote the most do not vote. And the conservatives make it harder for the poor to vote.
That's why I said I'll vote for Hillary. I'll vote straight Democratic as I've done ever since Bush stole the election wrongfully from Al Gore. And I won't watch the campaigns because they are jokes and smear campaigns only and I'm often embarassed that Americans are worldwide jokes because of our anti-intellectual attitude. We are willing to seriously consider people who think a fetus should have personhood rights or that when a woman is raped her body shuts down...no wonder we are the joke of the first world.
Before the country started going back to the bigotry and hate of earlier days, I did split my ticket. I don't think the Republicans exist today. I'm not sure wh at they are anymore. Anyhow, I'll leave it at that.

I'm quite sure Donald Trump were irritate me and that he will never win, but we are not that smart. I shouldn't be so bold. He did irritate me the first time he ran and I don't think he has much personal character either. I have skipped voting entirely in one election. Forgot which. Long time ago.
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
While we are not in therapy, we are doing self-therapy.
It IS therapy, just not run by a professional. And at times that is good. I have always enjoyed self-help books and groups. Most our therapists probably don't know what it's like to have a mother who doesn't love you. How can they relate, except from what they read in a book? Books are pretty cold and unemotional.
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
he acted like the wounded party. She wanted her terms. She wanted me to overlook really wrong things she did. She ignored the elephant in the room. I could not.
I think it is a interesting that our mothers all blamed us. WE were the baaaaaaaaaad ones. They are good people. (I don't think my mother helped a soul in her life.)

I don't think my mother liked herself very much. In her gut, I think I looked and behaved too much like her (minus abusing my kids) and she picked me out partly because of that. I don't think she had any self-esteem at all. That I threatened her by standing up to her may be that she thought standing up for myself was abusive. How dare I not give one child money from an inheritance and leave out the other two. That's abusive. I made her do the dirty work herself. I think she truly saw it that way. But the end of the story is, I wouldn't do it.

That was unforgiveable.
 
Last edited:

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Good morning, everybody. As always, a warm and special hello for Copa and Serenity. And, another Thank You, to you both. Like I always do, I will leave the how-did-I-get-here in, in case it could help another of us trying to pull clarity regarding herself (or himself) in the present from the harms of the past.

I found another one.

Maybe.

I was thinking about my kids, and about all of our children. I was thinking especially about my son. I was thinking about how broken I was, and we all were, in the family D H and I created, when we lost ~ when son lost, the dream he was heading for, too. So, I wondered...why was it that I felt so broken, so confused. So afraid to parent, though I had been proud and happy about all of it ~ the good things and the challenges ~ before I came to a place where nothing I did fixed what was happening.

How did I lose confidence. Why did I feel so fraudulent, so foolish and stupid and wrong?

It could be that I was confronted with a version of my own grandiosity. Or it could be:

And I found this: I am just going to say what I found. The ramifications of the thing will be different for each of us but in the end this is the issue. What the grandiose mother, physically abusive or not, teaches that the good enough mother does not: Certainty. The grandiose mother is certain she is right.

About everything. We pattern on that. That is how we know what to do, how to choose. But it doesn't make us strong because it is not real. The things that make us strong (and we are undeniably strong or we would not be here, battling away by our own determined choice) are our innate qualities. Nothing to do with our mothers, who hated us for that thing in us that refused to believe in them. Evidence: Automaton; responsiblility to, but not love for, our aging abusers. Regret at what never was. Blame for ourselves that we could not give them what we dare not expose to them: our hearts.

Contemptuous of everyone and everything in her life, the grandiosity addicted mom climbs that sense of contempt for all things (including, and maybe especially, us) into her favored status: Certain. Famous. Slick with it, sick with it. Martial music and waving flags, every one of her face.

Like Kim Duck Jewel, the Korean leader's son. (I know his name isn't Kim Duck Jewel. Good enough for him.)

As we responded to children ever more deeply troubled, the sense of self created at the hands of grandiose mom taught us that there was an answer but that, just as we were somehow stupidly inept imitations of children, so as adults we were the same.

"Well, looks like you weren't such a good mother after all, were you."

We did not feel certain. Our abuser's did. And what they were certain of is that we would fail. And those are the echoes destroying us, now.


That certainty the grandiose mom reflects that we are nothing; that she is the one who matters. That certainty.

We could not find the right answer. That is, as we have learned, here on the site, because there is no right answer. There is hope. There is stubborn belief. There is love.

But there is no right answer.

Stay with me, here.

Repeatedly broken into shamed acquiescence to the views of our grandiosity addicted mothers (Or, whoever our abusers were. I think the essential pattern in abusive relationship is the same, whether we are talking about Security Boy or his paperless counterpart, take-the-woman-I-just-beat-to-breakfast boy; whether we are talking brainwash the soldier egomaniac or overrun my own children so I am king mother.

Or, sister. Though sister can only take what she intends to have over something to do with the mother, the grandiose mother.

What the grandiose mother (or any abuser) teaches is that feeling of scattered panic; those feelings we have when the unimaginable happens and we no longer know what to do and cannot say I don't know.

Grandiose people do not make mistakes. They are right. Always. And the only way to be right all the time is to weaken and scatter, and twist into subservience to the abuser's grandiosity, the chosen victim.

Us.

Stay with me, here.

At the hands of an abuser, there is a right answer. It is whatever serves the grandiosity the abuser will sacrifice anything ~ even his or her own integrity ~ to have reflected back to him or to her.

So, when we are at the ends of our ropes regarding any challenge in life, and especially the kinds of unbelievable challenge that happens when a child is in trouble because we have come to believe there is a right answer, an answer we cannot find...we feel stupid. Inept; sure we have missed something vital, something crucial.

Something the abuser has always known we don't have.

Which is exactly how we felt at the hands of our abusers. That we'd stupidly missed something, that we'd broken some rule. To end the chaos, we find
some thing; we make a child's sense of it and seal it in shame. Into the bottle (which I describe later) it goes.

That is the thing that does us in.

That feeling.

The abuser's grandiose certainty that they are king and we are not. And when we are broken in the face of any challenge ~ any challenge ~ we break again into that other, deeper layer. Not because we couldn't find another way, or search through many conclusions and try something else but because we believe the grandiose abuser was correct in her assessment of us and that wrongness in us that she hurt and reviled and hated us for is the truth; is the real reason these things are happening to us, and to our people we love.

That is what we keep, in the bottle. (Which is described later.)

That true thing and all the proofs of it.

That is what we keep trying to find and fix. Whatever it was she saw with such certainty that she was willing to destroy us for. That failure in us.

And we are talking mortal terror; the primal fear of abandonment.

We come to believe we failed. Not that our kids are in trouble and need help, not that we need and will surely find a way to work through it, but that we failed as a result of some intrinsic wrongness in us, for me, about something wrong in the way that I think.

When the truth is that the way that we think is what got us through then and is firing and fueling our recovery, now.

That is the core of the breakage in us, today when our kids suffer and we do not know how to help them.

That is the thing in the bottle.

That our abusers were so sure; so contemptuous. So certain of their own value and of our flawed value. We are expected to fail; never to dare create the good for ourselves because the abuser's grandiosity will not have it.

But...those are our mothers. Or lovers. Or sisters or brothers.

That is the feeling of fraud. That is why the woman could not look up, could not confront breakfast boy. In her brokenness, she believes him. Until she takes the courage to claim that bottle and everything in it, she cannot face grandiosity mom and will never marshal the strength to confront Breakfast Boy.

We are supposed to lose. When we go on to accomplish what we do accomplish, it seems not legitimately ours. That is the abuser's truth, echoing through us.

...hellish thunder, resounding
in a theater of stone


The thing we need to understand about our childhoods and about our abusers is that grandiose mom was only who she insisted we believe her to be in the reality created in the abuser's tightly closed circle.

When we escape, and of course we do, grandiose mom will tear down and destroy, will hold in contempt, every good thing that we have or that we are or that we aspire to be.

Remember the story of "rich man's hostas".

Always and forever in service to her first choice, to her choice, every time: Self aggrandizement. Even if she has to rip at the roots of the hostas, when all she was invited for was dinner.

Two birds.

One undeniable stone.

I am not very clear on this, I know. But this is the core of the thing, I just know it. If we can see it in all its ramifications in our lives, we will be free.

So, the rest of this post is just this morning's thinking.

But I like it.

:O)

Your great suffering, I think, is that you have not decided. If you decide to decide, you will be spared the great suffering of having to re-decide every memory, every day. Decide this. To decide for yourself, each time doubt arises.

D H says something like that, Copa.

He says: It's like there is an old bottle, hidden in the heart of you. Hidden beneath a thick layer of dust, the bottle is sealed with waxed cork. It is filled with poison. Every time you open the bottle, the poison in it ~ just the toxic fumes rising from it ~ makes you sick; weakens and hurts you, and all of us.

It is very hard to get the cork back in the bottle.

You believe you can do this; that one day you will uncork it, that old, old bottle you fear. And that its putrid contents will have been transformed, will have been transmuted into gold.

It is a bottle of poison.

It is what it is.

Don't open the bottle.

But in this time, here with you both, I see that while we cannot change the toxicity of what was, we can come to a place of compassion for those children we were.

And that change in perspective changes everything.

We come clean. We are beautiful to ourselves.

We see our abusers abusing us through our eyes, not theirs. We name them for who and what they are; we see the names they have chosen, for us, and for themselves. As we heal, we see both them and ourselves through our own eyes and never through theirs, again.

Once that happens, our memories no longer retraumatize us.

Sacred ground.

This is where we were formed; a fiery furnace of epic proportions and yet, there we stand, the ropes and chains binding us burnt away.

Familiar territory, now.

There is nothing to fear, anymore, from the secrets the bottle holds.

We repossess the territory of the heart.

Where before we self victimized, now we see the choice in that. We have come slowly to see the betrayal in what was done to us; we are learning the ways and colors of self-betrayal. We are learning the ways we revictimize ourselves.

Whenever I go deeply enough, I feel I am betraying secret things. Those are the secrets that will shame us back to a kind of fearsome, horrified awe of that corked bottle. We know it is there. That is what D H does not understand. It isn't like I can proceed as though these things did not happen or are not happening now.

They are happening now. I have no sister; my mother will die without me there at her side. My own mother. And the time lost now, in these years and in all the years when whatever happens in my family of origin happens and happens again...I can never have this time of choice back. I am choosing now and it hurts and confuses and enrages me that a choice needs to be made.

Be who we say; accept who we are. Play by our rules. Or don't play: Ostracization. The primal fear of abandonment that it calls, that it tastes of. We have always hated you. Who do you think you are. We have always hated you; we pray rings of fire around you and we hurt and revile your children.
(And the secret is: And all children. Except the Golden Child. Who is golden by the grandiose mother's say so. To shame the rest, there must be a Golden.)

So...how can I just leave the bottle corked?

I will not.

roar

I will have myself, now.


And never be ashamed for the abuser's sake, anymore.

***

It isn't about condemning parents or sibs, but it is about having an honest look. We can be wrong in any of a thousand ways about how we remember and what we remember...but as you posted for us Copa repetition is indicative of trauma; we have been traumatized and that is what we are healing. It isn't about calling names or naming a guilty party or making accusations. It is about healing. We will do what is necessary for us to heal.

If we elevate these people to prized specimens we depreciate ourselves to victims.

Yes that's true Copa and that is a great description of the power over, of the sickness running through our families of origin.

Someone turned into a victim so the others, in this very closed circle, feel like winners; like champions.

That is why we run alone now, breathing easily and well from a place beyond fear. (That is part of a quote.)

"F you, mom." Cedar whispers, furiously adding a beautifully draped lace border to the needlepoint in her saddlebag.

It is a beautiful thing, the needlepoint.

Silk.

So that is why I cannot leave the bottle corked.

My heart.

My rules.

Up with this I will not put: F you, mom.

:overreactsmiley:

This little emoticon is very right. None of this should have happened to any of us. But it did.

This is how to heal from it. What we do here.

:sorrowsmiley2:

I am addressing my own guilt, here. It feels awful to be the person who sees what I see about my own people that I love...but they don't seem to love me very much, do they.

Or they would not do what they do.

The question today is whether I believe them, or me.

Copa, you are right.

You wrote it with spare simplicity.

Thank you.

I seem to like to work it around so I can post "F you, mom."

:O)

I am questioning if it is correct to post on threads where I do not know the details.

Oh, yes Copa. We all need one another, here. We need never to be hardened into rigidity, we need to be flexible and we need to be honest and we need to care enough to tell our truths. That is how trust is built.

Are you thinking about P.E. post, Copa?

You were not here when the other parents were so at the end of their patience with me Copa. I just could not get it. That is why they remember me, now. Out of all those parents, I stuck out like a sore thumb.

I just could not get it.

I posted honestly about my feelings anyway.

You must claim that right too, Copa.

We need you.

You are elegant; spare and regal, honest and kind.

Does D H understand that you built a lifetime around the wish to deny this? And that it takes work to weed it out? Because it is twisted and hidden in everything we are?

It is, Copa and Serenity. Twisted into everything. And I want them out.

I am sounding like a bigshot again this morning, but I will have it as I want it.

Maybe.

I will have those good and strengthening things, or I will have nothing.

Maybe.

Which, when you think about it, is all I do have.

Nothing.

:9-07tears:

But it is better to know.

They never had the right to do what they have done. Not to me, and not to one another.

And never to my children.

When his sister took the parents' house he felt very bad and betrayed. I think he feels sad still. But he does not agonize about it. He does not revisit it over and over again, like we do. That is because he was not traumatized.

Repetition is a symptom of past trauma. The disbelief. Being stunned. Questioning oneself. Looking at it from every angle.

:vacuumsm:

Setting things to rights.

Boy, I'm so mad, this morning.

roar

Do you suppose the anger has been under here all this time?

:919Mad:

Just think how carefully we have avoided knowing how very angry we are and have been. Me. For sure, this is the bald truth about me. So afraid of an anger that would call the truths grandiose mom hurt into me. Those shameful things that made legitimate anger impossible to sustain. As long as the corked bottle exists, as long as those shaming secrets seethe and spiral like some live thing through that bottle, I will never be sure I did not deserve what they do, what was done.

That is a key for us.

It unlocks self betrayal.

That is why we self betray. We believe them; believe in them. We believe that if there were just some way we could all come together and not do what we do, what lives in that bottle would not matter. We believe, as I do with that dinner I am always posting about, that if there were no scarcity, if all things were provided from a sense of secure abundance, we could do it. We could come together with them; we could see one another and welcome one another. This, I so desperately want to do. It has to have been some horrible mistake that this happened to all of us.

But I collide with their choice. Flat up against what was done; against how things were and are handled. Against how I was seen and interpreted as a child, as a little girl, as a young woman; as a mother.

Tin.

Tinny sounds.

A toast with empty soup cans around a hobo's quick fire.

That is my family.

Daughter can breeze into and out of the hobo's reality at will. This is true. Daughter has zero fear of her grandmother and to this day, an open heart for her aunt. Son harbors the hurt of it; they are so much part of the reason he hates, demands proof.

The dinner, the white linen turned into molten gold, crystal flashing in candlelight. The wine deeply scarlet...afraid of it; afraid of what will be revealed about that bottle, if we claim that.

Yet there it is; the truth.


Little frogs. Toxic pond; thunder of life.

I reclaim my son.

From their ugly eyes I reclaim my son.

My son.

***

Okay. So, it got a little weird for a time, there. At the end of it, I see where the shame of what happened to my children has its freaking genesis. And it is in my mother's contempt. For me. Her certainty that I could never legitimately be who I am. In her reality, our losses and suffering are validation of the rightness of the abuser's grandiosity.

We need to stop believing that.

That is self betrayal.

That is how everything got so twisted. On some level, we believe our abuser's contemptuous certainty when she took from us anything that we had, any smallest thing we believed was good in us, was correct.

It is not.

What feels correct to us is the feel of the grandiosity addicted mother's illness.

That's what is in the corked bottle.

A lie.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
I feel shame because I keep coming down on the wrong side. I want to explain myself.

Copa, there is no wrong side. We are all trying to make sense of how to see and how to feel about what we find and how to respond. Your positions are absolutely valid, Copa. No shame. How could there be? We are trying and it matters and we always need to be very sure we are staying open, staying flexible. Here are other good things I see: I do see flexibility; I see honesty; maturity; respect for each of us and for yourself and for all of our children.

We need you, Copa. We have all come together here from all the different ways we have lived our lives, to heal, and to find healing for our kids.

We have to be honest.

I don't like being called codependent. I don't know that I believe in codependent. Nonetheless, that is how I am seen. I don't like to see parents celebrating freedom from the hellishness it is to love a troubled child. I don't understand it. It could be that, like so many other things have turned out to be, one day I will feel the same.

And they don't like that I am not seeing from their positions.

But I still say so, anyway because I am seeing from mine and I can only see from mine.

It is very, very hard for me not to shelter my children from their choices. I try to remember, every day, that if I do that, the day will come when I reap the whirlwind and worse yet, so will they.

So, I stand up. Pretty shaky, most days.

I believe our children are our children not our enemies.

I believe while we must declare and insist upon correct behavior for them and toward us, as parents we bear a greater responsibility to sustain and to recover relationships with our errant children.

I believe that as long as we live we will miss and need our children.

This does not mean that we should submit ourselves to abuse to be with them or to overlook their very real transgressions.

You are correct, Copa. Please Copa, know that if the words I have chosen left you feeling uncertain, that was never my intent. I sincerely apologize Copa but more, I wish never to hurt you.

I cherish you, Copa. I find your posts intelligent and always worth considering at length.

Always.

Every post.

***

The differences a parent faces when a child is nearing forty have to do with needing to acknowledge that what we are doing hasn't helped our children. There are parents of younger children who take actions I would not take, if my children were younger. I don't know how they reach those conclusions, but I do know that sometimes, putting responsibility for his choices squarely on the child works.

I do know that if I were to welcome my son and his family home it would be really hard to know where to put them because there would be eight other people already here. That would be daughter and her family.

Plus D H and me, except that D H would leave me.

That is a true thing.

We helped our kids every time. And somehow, they never took the reins of their own lives. And part of that was the ugliness of enabling. Part of enabling is believing the kids need us to bail them out to the point that the kids believe they need us and that they can't make it without us and that they deserve it (haven't we always bailed them out before?) and resent us for it never being enough because it is never enough when drugs are involved. It gets all ugly and naked and it doesn't work. Here is an example. When daughter was mandated into treatment the last time, we paid her credit card ($500 month) just to keep it current; just to protect her credit rating. We paid rent and damages and I don't really know what else through those months. And she left treatment AMA and the things you all know about happened.

So her credit rating and everything else, including her children and her life itself were endangered.

And she wouldn't stop, Copa.

And when she was homeless and refused to come home, D H saw to it that she had money, every week...and we learned she was being beat for the money.

And it just goes on like that, Copa, when the kids are near forty.

They are adults. They need to see themselves as adults, or they will never, ever be strong enough, or believe in themselves enough, to come through their situations.

It was from that perspective Copa, from the perspective of the parent of two troubled kids both nearing forty that I posted to that mother of a son, nearing forty. The hardest thing is to stop helping, Copa. It tears us apart, and we literally cannot do it alone. Again, I wonder where the parents of younger children, or where parents who feel justified in turning away from their children at any age ~ I don't know how they do that.

But I think I know that is what must happen, for a child nearing forty. It isn't a reclamation of my own life as it is a ~ I don't know. Like, a parental directive that the kids reclaim theirs; that reclamation is the right thing, is the best thing for them.

We have to reclaim our legitimacy before we can require the kids to reclaim theirs. Our languaging is the first step in that requirement that our children rewrite who we are in their minds. Unless they respect us ~ though they may never come through it, though they may never come to admire us for it ~ they cannot respect themselves.

That is where it begins, for a verbally abusive son nearing forty.

Respect for his mother, and for his father or at the least, with his understanding that his parents will tolerate nothing less.

It's an important piece I think Copa, for a verbally abusive child to hear.

It isn't our kids who are speaking to us this way, Copa. It is their addictions. It is that their addictions have shredded integrity, empathy, compassion, maybe even the capacity to love.

For those of us with troubled forty year olds, these last desperate measures are the only things left to us, and even, to our kids. It begins, because it is the only thing, the only lever we have, with demanding respect. With forcing the kids to hear what we say and who we are and who they have allowed themselves to become.

They weren't raised to think of us or of themselves in the ways that they do, Copa. The parent of a forty year old has to pull that out of them. "We hope to have relationship with you too. When you have learned; when you have changed. Do this for me. Do this for you. See where you are and understand you were raised better. You are better than this." In essence, "I believe in you."

There is no way you could know, Copa. Your child is not forty. He is young, he is ill, he is hurting and so are you. We must always do what is in our hearts to do because we must meet our own eyes in the mirror and the consequences of addiction cut both ways.

I feel badly that you felt badly. I admire your requiring clarification, both for yourself, and for me.

I feel like, important.

Thank you, Copabanana.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
I feel sadness because my mother while she tried in her last years to make and sustain relationships with her children (who were difficult, but not that difficult) for many years did not fight for a relationship with me.

She acted like the wounded party. She wanted her terms. She wanted me to overlook really wrong things she did. She ignored the elephant in the room. I could not.

I think we cannot have it both ways. My Mother was the mother. I was not. She had the greater responsibility to act as the mother should. Think about the story Run Away Bunny.

We are still those mothers to our children. No matter how much they have become men and women who act in whatever way they act.

We were never our mothers, Copa. We loved our children from full hearts. Our mothers loved us with what was left. My mother was angry and spiteful regarding the last time they left me. She did whatever it is that she does and worked it all up into: "If Cedar does not want to be part of this family...."

And she did the same when my father was considering divorce.

I have never once felt that way, as angry or as flummoxed as I have ever been by the things my kids did or do. I want them. I want to see them and touch their beautiful faces and hear their voices on the phone. When son goes off in a huff, I keep contact on Facebook whether he answers or not. The last time? I posted that I had seen that he had seen my comment.

He was a little stung.

He did not know I would know he was looking.

So, we had to laugh about that one, then.

But I would never hate the way my mom did and does and neither would you, Copa.

We are not our mothers.

Our mothers had serious problems. Maybe they cannot help what they do, either. In time, we will address compassion for our families of origin. But until we are no longer afraid of them, or of ourselves because in some unlit corner of self we still believe in them, we will try really hard to see through our own eyes, and not theirs.

You love your child, Copa.

It shines through every word you post.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
I think it is a interesting that our mothers all blamed us. WE were the baaaaaaaaaad ones. They are good people. (I don't think my mother helped a soul in her life.)

I don't think my mother liked herself very much. In her gut, I think I looked and behaved too much like her (minus abusing my kids) and she picked me out partly because of that. I don't think she had any self-esteem at all. That I threatened her by standing up to her may be that she thought standing up for myself was abusive.

I think you have explained something key to our moms views of us, Serenity.

Could it be that they identified strongly with their first daughters? Could it be that self hatred we felt was how they felt about themselves, and why they were so determined to focus the way they felt about themselves onto us?

Onto us in particular, I mean?

Maybe, we are not the only ones who cannot separate my mother/myself.

I look like my mom, too. I have my father's eyes. I "feel" more like my father than like my mother. My mom told me that she cried, to know her baby would have to go through labor and childbirth.

Probably, she hoped for a boy, and not a red headed female child, at all.

I am sure this is a piece of what happened to all of us ~ to our moms, too. And they were so much more alone than we were. My mother was estranged from her mother too, much of the time. She was brought to the place my father grew up, and that is where she had her children. It was my father's mother who would have been her mentoring mother, and not her own mom.

That has to play into all of this, given the way my mom feels about my father's mother (and me) to this day.

Cedar

I was just thinking about that WalMart "whore" experience. That feeling that my mom would be surprised at me. Almost as though what she saw with her eyes was not corresponding to the woman I had become.

Could part of that be because I was not her, after all?

?
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
Could it be that they identified strongly with their first daughters? Could it be that self hatred we felt was how they felt about themselves, and why they were so determined to focus the way they felt about themselves onto us?

I looked like her and was tempermental. She was beyond tempermental and overwhelming to a differently wired child who needed calmness and stability. That was not going to happen. I am not sure it happens with all scapegoated children, but all of my therapists seem to agree that my mother saw something in me that bothered her about herself so she decided to make me the one she blamed for everything.

Again, I am amazed at how little even acknowledging this affects me. I have to thank you two again for letting me "talk" about it n detail, hurtful detail at times. It seems that I have cleansed myself with my words and have been able to validate my memories by your beliefs in me. This barely even bothered me to write at all.

My FOO is fading...fading...fading...back to Kansas where they live, in some alternate reality apart from me. And it feels different to no longer care. I think I'm all loved out on anyone dysfunctional. I loved them all so much for so long and it just wore out as I typed and typed for hours and days about what my reality with them really looked like.

It still boggles my mind to think, "I will only see them once more and won't speak with them again. Ever."

It is a new and pleasant surprise every time I have it. I no longer mourn them. I don't want them. I don't give a rats if they want me or not. Or what they think.

Keep doing two things, ladies.
1/ Keep writing about it until your fingers hurt because it is so much more real when you write about it then can go back and read it for a reminder.

2/ Try to practice low to no contact with your tormentors. It is not the wrong thing to do. It is done in self-defense. These are soul killers. We can't allow anyone, dead or alive, to kill our spirits. I feel myself coming alive in a very new way, lighter, sweeter, happier, sure that they can never touch me again, physicallly or emotionally.

My contact, when the dreaded funeral comes, will be brief. A drive up with family, a drive back with family. I doubt I will sit next to them, regardless of what relatives that I barely know may say when we are forever gone from their lives.

I can't wait to start the classes that will allow me to become a certified Peer Counselor.

You both can get here too. You just need to let go of the ties that bind and put yourself first. What is best for you? Alive or dead, is is better for you or worse for you to hang onto a relationship? I think we know t he answers in our hearts.

We are not who our abusers said or say we are. We are who we KNOW we are.

Let's keep marching on, ladies. The only people we need to listen to is our own knowledge.

The only people we need to interact with are those who are kind to us.

Not my circus; not my monkeys. I actually bought a shirt that says this. Very cute with monkies on it. I get compliments on it and people ask me what it means. I just say, "To me it means peace...no longer worrying about the world."

Close enough.
 
Last edited:

Copabanana

Well-Known Member
grandiosity
I knew from the beginning that my son's love and my love for him were the antidote to my past. He had redeemed me. When our relationship fell apart, after a point, I did too. I know it was a narcissistic wound: The person he reflected back to me was a failed person. It was as if all of the nurturing balm of loving him had afforded me had turned into an acid bath.
And when we are broken in the face of any challenge ~ any challenge ~ we break again into that other, deeper layer.
Because in our love with our children we had peeled back that part against we defended. And then when their love for us seemed to sour it felt like we had curdled too. A reconfirmation of the dreadful past.
because we believe the grandiose abuser was correct in her assessment of us and that wrongness in us that she hurt and reviled and hated us for is the truth; is the real reason these things are happening to us, and to our people we love.
My experience was different. I do not remember my mother as making me wrong. Nor do I remember that she hate me.

My mother was mad and hateful. She was caustic and sarcastic. She was shaming and explosive. I felt it was me.
That failure in us.
My failure.
we failed as a result of some intrinsic wrongness
That was the assumption. And in order to make sense of our worlds, we built an identity upon it.
grandiose mom will tear down and destroy, will hold in contempt, every good thing that we have or that we are or that we aspire to be.
Here again, my experience feels different. I did not have support for anything I wanted to be. Just for what she needed me to be.
As long as the corked bottle exists, as long as those shaming secrets seethe and spiral like some live thing through that bottle, I will never be sure I did not deserve what they do, what was done.
I think I see this as part of our life force is in that bottle. There is an antidote. Loving attention and care.
 

Copabanana

Well-Known Member
Please Copa, know that if the words I have chosen left you feeling uncertain, that was never my intent. I sincerely apologize Copa but more, I wish never to hurt you.
I was not responding from anything you wrote, Cedar. I was the first poster on that initial thread. I was directing my response to the initial post.

I only posted about my self-doubt on this thread because I feel safe and known here. I trusted you and SWOT and Insane and Nerf (where are you Nerf?) would give me the benefit of the doubt and do the work to understand where I was coming from.

In no way Cedar have I ever questioned your choices with respect to your children. If I had, I would have said so, and never held back, as you honor me in telling me your truth with respect to my own child. Nor do I recall anything but mild defensiveness in response to any of your posts, which I have either commented upon or worked through in my responses.

I am grateful for your honesty and I respect it. As I do that of SWOT.

SWOT has been a ferocious protector of adult children. Including my own. She taught me that I needed to be careful to not reject my child...when I was rejecting the pain.
I don't like to see parents celebrating freedom from the hellishness it is to love a troubled child.
And they don't like that I am not seeing from their positions.
I was speaking to what I assumed to be a yearning for connection that I believe exists in all of us...for our children. That exists no matter and despite all of the ugliness that overlays it.

Like the toxic bottle that you are posting about, Cedar, I believe we protect a locket of pure love for our adult children that we will carry with us as we die.

I question how it is that we can accept degradation, disrespect and undermining from our parents or our FOO or our spouse but have such a hard line with children. Of course, we feel rage and fear for our adult children. But some of us maintain relationships with FOO members, almost unquestioningly, that may be equally toxic. Our relationships with our children are the only ones for which we are irrevocably responsible.

This is a question. Not a judgment. Because I am suspect, as well.

My rage at my son was off the charts.

And I never, ever in my life raised my voice to my mother or said one disrespectful thing to her, to my father or to my sister.

And that I find interesting...and regrettable. I think the two sets of facts could be related.

In the situation where I posted, I came from the position that when there is a communication with my child...I need to be ready for both an attack and a reapprochement.

I need to be cognizant that I tend to repeat the same thing over and over again. And it begins to feel like a blow, to my son. An undermining. A taking of advantage. There comes to be a time when a defense comes to feel aggressive. I need to take responsibility for this.

That there is a choice possible in these times. A choice that the parent can take to risk something. Not by letting barriers down. Not to accept less than respect. But a choice to not keep piling on...

If we choose to keep laying on...we are voting against reconciliation.

How many times had that poster said that line to her child? How many more times does she need to say it, if each time she says it it deepens the rift? Are we not responsible for our parts in these ugly dances?

I understand that past 30 or past 40 the likelihood that maturity will bring about riveting change in our children, lessens. But it happens. I have seen it when drugs are stopped.

And even when there are drugs in the picture do we not have the responsibility to not offend unnecessarily? And by offend I mean from the point of view of the child.

To say that our children are responsible does not mean that we are not too.

That was where I was coming from.

Nobody else on that thread sees it that way. There seems to be the desire to support each other in being strong, but not necessarily in being wise.

Yesterday M revealed that he had gone and apologized to the evil sister (who stole the parents' house and kicked out another nice sister who was helping her parents.) While he hated doing it, he apologized for his mother. And for that, he was treated disrespectfully by the evil one.

Another nice sister longs to repair the relationship with her evil sister. She justifies this by saying....we all know who she has always been and who she is.

When my mother died, I learned that lesson. I loved her because she was mine.

Not for what she was or was not. It is the same with our children.
 
Last edited:

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
Yesterday M revealed that he had gone and apologized to the evil sister (who stole the parents' house and kicked out another nice sister who was helping her parents.) While he hated doing it, he apologized for his mother. And for that, he was treated disrespectfully by the evil one.
This is why, Copa, I think trying to expose ourselves, our hurts, and our vulnerabilities to a user/abuser is useless. It makes things worse.

Honestly, the only thing that has ever worked for me with these people, as my good intentions were always turned on me, is no contact. I actually started out being against no contact as being cowardly or giving up or turning one's back on a close relation. But with the last explosion with Sis, and her claiming SHE went no contact, no me (and who cares who did it?) I am finally able to see that when you can not sit down, talk about it, lay it on the table, and come to an agreement rather than a brawl, it is the only sensible solution. We can love people from afar that we never see, but the pain does get better with time. I have even recently let go of my mother. I will probably never forget what she did to form my ideas about myself, I just let the thoughts come and float away, as we are told to do in meditation. It no longer makes me angry.

I am g oing to be 62 in a few weeks. It is about time I decide I'm going to have a blast and times full of NO DRAMA in these golden years. Instead of being about my past hurts, I insist they be about my family, especially the grands, my job, my writing, my exercising, becoming a Peer Specialist and helping others (both people and animals).

I feel that is why I was put on earth this time, not to brood forever over my FOO. My father is 91. I could have a long time left and I don't want to waste it on people who have no care or had no care for me. In a very logical way, it is the right thing for me to do both for myself and those who do love me in the right way.

It is our own choice how we live our last, hard earned years. I am choosing living rather than brooding.
 

Copabanana

Well-Known Member
This is why, Copa, I think trying to expose ourselves, our hurts, and our vulnerabilities to a user/abuser is useless. It makes things worse.
Thank you, SWOT, for responding.

M did it for his mother. Because she raised the family to value unity above all else. As long as she is alive M as much as he can will subordinate his needs to his mother.

It does not cost him that much to extend his hand to the sister because he was well-mothered. His mother gave everything equally to all of her children. It worked with some of them, with others, no. But those for whom it worked, want to follow the example she gave.
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
M's mom is not abusive. HIs family believes in family. Then it can work. It SHOULD work to make amends.

But with dysfunctional people, in general, tryiing to make amends is turned against us. Our intentions are twisted by the person and made to be BAD intentions. I have learned that what people say bout themselves should be listened to and heeded.

"I'm really a jerk." Believe it. Take it to heart.

And what they believe about us is their true feelings as well. "You're a jerk. You're bad. You caused my problems."

They believe this. Take it to heart. Don't try to change their minds. You can't.

It is better to just leave. I tried both. The first, trying to make it right, is hard and heartbreaking. And it doesn't work. If they feel that horribly about us, nothing can change their minds.

As long as they are in our lives, whether REALLY in our lives or renting space in our heads, they are disrupting us.

I am no longer willing to let them do that to me. And it's working. I never tried walking away emotionally and physically before. Never. I don't know why not. But I didn't. Not completely. I paid for sticking around or trying to make it better.

Just leaving...well, it is the only thing that has made my mind free and calm.

I am not sure it is possible to be a sensitive person and have a relationship with a dysfunctional person and ever be serene. Above all else, I want peace and serenity. I am putting me first. Nobody is worth messing with my peace of mind.

Since seeing that my sister can not post meanly on her site again, if ever again, I have just left her. I don't even care if she does, although the mod clearly said s he can not. So I will just let myself think she isn't and leave it at that. Honestly, I don't even care anymore.

Validation means so much to us...we have been slapped down so often...we NEED to know that others actually do see things as we know they are. We are so used to being gas-lighted.


I think the total letting go of a memory of a person or a live person is the only way FOR ME (maybe not everyone) to feel good about myself. I am too sensitive about what they say about me. Now I won't know or care.
 
Last edited:
Top