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Inclusion vs. Exclusion- blog draft concerning families
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<blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 675419" data-attributes="member: 17461"><p>That the mother <em>could</em> reject Copa ~ that tells the tale, right there.</p><p></p><p>You are a mother. For you to even begin to accept detachment theory parenting where your child was concerned, you had to work very, very hard. I know this to be true Copa because I was here. You were (and continue to be) so proud of him, Copa. You post about his facility with languages, about his appearance and intelligence and height. You blamed not him, but yourself, when he began following a wrong path. And you did everything, everything and more, to help him change that path he was determined to take. </p><p></p><p>I was no more able to stop helping either of my children than you were ~ than any of us here on CD are able to easily understand how we need to parent our difficult kids <em>for their own sakes</em>.</p><p></p><p>It does not make intuitive sense.</p><p></p><p>We learn it for their sakes, out of desperation. It nearly does us in, to say no; to turn them away. We do it because we see that detachment parenting helps the children of our peers on this site.</p><p></p><p>So we take that leap of faith because nothing else has helped our kids.</p><p></p><p>This is true of every parent here on Conduct Disorders. </p><p></p><p>So...what was the deal with our mothers, Copa?</p><p></p><p>Or...our sisters? Why are our sisters not suffering for our sakes as we are, for theirs? Why do the sisters do things as stupidly, pointlessly hurtful as the things the mother does?</p><p></p><p>My answer is that, whether through some genetic shortcoming, or through having been twisted into weird shapes by their experiences in our wicked families of origin, our sisters, like our mothers, are also grandiosity addicted.</p><p></p><p>At least they have an excuse.</p><p></p><p>I think they hate us, Copa. </p><p></p><p>Passionately, and without surcease or insight.</p><p></p><p>Typically, they blame us for the unreasoning hatred they bear us.</p><p></p><p>Go figure. That is why there is no communication; everything gets twisted in the ugliest ways to justify the way they already feel. I suppose it has to do with hating us so they don't have to hate themselves or something.</p><p></p><p>It isn't about empathy. I am not sure what to call the thing that makes them different. In my family of origin, empathy is a given. It is used in a weird way, though. Like, where we might employ empathy to build a little bridge across a broken place for someone, they use it to lay a trap very few people are foolish enough to fall into.</p><p></p><p>Then, they feel they have been victimized because they did not get to victimize the person they laid the trap for. They don't even see that no one else thinks like they do or values what they value or needs what they need.</p><p></p><p>Which means, for both the mothers and the sisters, that they don't even do what they do on purpose. They do what they do with determined intent, but without purpose because their win is a meaningless thing, at the end of the day.</p><p></p><p>WTF, right? It also means they do not have the capacity to change.</p><p></p><p>Back to the mothers. </p><p></p><p>It also means they will have allied, initially, with our own fathers against the children to accomplish a skewed value system which, to their minds, guaranteed control of their primary relationship to the father <em>whom they assume to be grandiosity addicted, too</em>. To them, control of the mate's grandiosity supply was the perfect tool. </p><p></p><p>That is a dynamic in our families of origin that we have not had a look at, yet.</p><p></p><p>The fathers (or the mothers, if the father was the grandiosity addict) will have been twisted into grotesque parodies of themselves <em>because </em>they loved their children. And that made them vulnerable to mates they may long since have found morally repulsive.</p><p></p><p>So says me, but I am just a person on the internet.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>In a healthy relationship Copa, the mother does not believe herself to be so above her child that no "criticism" is tolerated. D H and his mother say ~ and sometimes, yell ~ the strangest things to one another. Neither is afraid to do that. No one threatens to exclude. Each actually means what they say when they say it and so, they do not make empty or outrageous threats.</p><p></p><p>They don't apologize, because they mean what they say. They don't say things they don't mean in the first place...<em>and that is respect for self and other.</em></p><p></p><p>That is telling the truth.</p><p></p><p>Exclusion is never an issue ~ not in any smallest way. Things that are wrong are just things that are wrong. They are discussed openly, and so is anger displayed openly. </p><p></p><p>In D H family, grands who cannot be there on any given holiday call home to wherever the family is having dinner. It is expected. It is expected that the family will be busy with dinner preparations, but that it will matter that the missing members will have called, no matter how inconvenient the timing. Sterling conversation on world events (which is encouraged, in my family of origin) is discouraged, in D H family conversations. "Hello, I love you, what's for dinner, how did the sauce come out" ~ those kinds of things are appropriate. </p><p></p><p>It would be considered rude and hurtful not to call home ~ "home" being where the mother is.</p><p></p><p>Our families were and are nothing like that, Copa. Our families ~ mine for sure ~ deal in the currency of exclusion. It is a multi-faceted thing, subtle and outrageously overt at the same time...but we are blind to it.</p><p></p><p><em>A blind and savaged Child recall</em></p><p><em>its first and bitter tears</em></p><p><em>Nostalgic</em></p><p><em>copper colored fears....</em></p><p></p><p>Remember Dickens' character ~ the little boy who was made to steal? In one scene, he is so hungry, and the master of the house is having soft boiled eggs for breakfast. The little boy watches the man cut the tops of the eggs, salivating like crazy because sometimes, the man tosses the tops of the egg to the little boy. And if he does, there might be just a little yolk. The boy is utterly powerless, not only due to his position in life, but to his own desperate hunger, Copa. </p><p></p><p>He needs what he needs; needs what he must have, to live.</p><p></p><p>That's how it was, for us.</p><p></p><p>And it is criminal that this was so.</p><p></p><p>We were little girls (or, little boys) made to believe our own appetites, our own need for protein or survival or to love and be loved, were wrong.</p><p></p><p>How awful, for us.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>As we heal, as we tear off the scab covering shame and, going deeper into our psyches toward places that are so terribly painful that shame turns out to have been nothing more than a cover a thousand times more survivable than the truth, that is the thing we begin to see and understand differently. That though we were hurt, none of it had anything to do with us. We were made powerless in every sense, and that is the battle for us, now: To reclaim our senses of efficacy. To reclaim and rely on and believe in, internal locus of control.</p><p></p><p>To understand that our abusers were not only not able to think better than we were, but that they were sub-normal thinkers in many ways. Focused somehow on hatred, but I don't understand the importance of that piece, yet. Why hatred? Yet, there it is.</p><p></p><p>Like a live thing.</p><p></p><p>Once we get those pieces, we will never see ourselves through their grandiosity-addict eyes, again. It really is like we have been enchanted in some land without water (love) or air (the capacity to create, and to think). The work we do, here in FOO Chronicles is like breaking a spell, in that sense. </p><p></p><p>The Sleeping Beauty kiss, Copa.</p><p></p><p>That beginning, over and over and over again, until the Rose is saved, thorns and all, from the stupidly marauding sheep who could as easily have eaten the grass all around them as the Rose, with her thorns.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>Our childhoods were mismanaged things and yet, here we are, strong enough and brave enough to reclaim ourselves. </p><p></p><p>And we should reclaim ourselves. In a way, it is not something we should go about timidly. We should roar with it. The hurt done us was illegitimate, the win for the abuser a stupidly worthless and <em>outside the families the grandiosity addict will have created, </em>an utterly meaningless thing.</p><p></p><p>And yet, we have lost so much that is meaningful in life ~ and not even for their sakes, which is what we tell ourselves, at first ~ but for the sake of something so patently ridiculous as a grandiosity addiction.</p><p></p><p>We saw it, we sort of knew it, all along...but we could not believe our own parent was that morally bankrupt a human being.</p><p></p><p>This is for me, Copa. I do not know your mother or sister, of course.</p><p></p><p>But we do know that my sister "walks with the Lord". </p><p></p><p>As so many of the sisters do.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>The win in the chains of behaviors, in the cascades of behaviors (in the sense of one thing needing to happen to mandate the next, worse or better thing ~ that kind of cascade) all the pain and twistedness created in our families of origin <em>and costing us our relationships to our siblings to this day</em> were come of the pointless, stupidly wrong reasoning processes of the grandiosity addict. Accidentally tumbled into a position of potential power-over when they became parents, they fed like gluttons and then, refused to give it up when their children became adults and left them.</p><p></p><p>Shunning. Exclusion.</p><p></p><p>It's disgusting, Copa.</p><p></p><p>That is what we have been hiding away from ourselves.</p><p></p><p>We feel broken all over again to admit what it was that happened, in our families of origin. We feel we should have been able to do better <em>and that tells the truth of it ~ all of it ~ right there. We were children when it began. Even as adults, we could not break the mother's insistence on maintaining her grandiosity feed at the expense of the sibling relationships we all should have had and should be relishing, today.</em></p><p></p><p>Their grandiosity fix cost us plenty, Copa.</p><p></p><p><em>It cost our sisters more. They actively hate us. Their hearts are blackened with it and they cannot think beyond it because their hatred for us protects them from hating themselves and their mothers.</em></p><p></p><p>Please, stop blaming yourself. You are the sufferer, here. Your sister is the sufferer, here.</p><p></p><p>So is mine.</p><p></p><p>I see no path that could ever lead back to where I tried or felt generosity toward my family of origin. This feels very safe to me, now. I will be alone and that will be better, for me. It comforts me that I did the best I knew to do. I would not do it in the same way, again. These were choices my mother and my sister made, Copa, to have things as they are. </p><p></p><p>Not my fault.</p><p></p><p>Once we see that, we see all of it.</p><p></p><p>I think we do not unsee it, again.</p><p></p><p>It isn't all that sad, Copa. Not once we get our true situations. It just is what it is and it is better to know.</p><p></p><p>You may be alone too Copa, for a time or by choice. And you will do very, very well.</p><p></p><p>The difference will be that you will no longer believe "alone" means "shunned".</p><p></p><p>And that is huge. That means everything, to see in that different way.</p><p></p><p>That is how we will know we are healing or healed. We will see shunning for what it is. No sting. No burn. No point.</p><p></p><p>Alone can mean blessed and strong and clear headed and sane, instead of a headful of chittering that, in the end, means nothing more than that the sister walks with G-d and therefore, to commit the evil that shunning, in all its multiple facets, is, is somehow legitimized.</p><p></p><p>Neat trick.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>It truly was nothing we did, Copa. It was nothing we were or are. It was never that we were not perfect enough, though that is what we believed. It was never that there would come some magical moment when we would somehow feel loved without feeling we had cheated, that we had taken those good feelings from some exculded sibling.</p><p></p><p>That is why we excluded ourselves, Copa. </p><p></p><p>And that is why we are excluded, today. </p><p></p><p>Even as children, we refused to play the game. If there is a difference between our sisters and ourselves, that is it. The sisters do hate us. They do see us as threats to whatever small supply of mother love there was. </p><p></p><p>Our families were dysfunctional.</p><p></p><p>That is the cost.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>How stupidly mean, to buy and sell and bargain with the sibling relationships of your own children; to continue even after they are adults, using love and money and family identity to do it.</p><p></p><p>Yuck.</p><p></p><p>I suppose what we are supposed to feel (and what the younger sibs may have felt toward us) was that we were safe if the other guy was the excluded one ~ and remember that, for a child, to have been excluded meant shunning in place ~ meant no protection in our very homes where we lived our childhood lives and where we should have been safe but were not.</p><p></p><p>The very sibs we protected learned to ally with the grandiosity addict mother to get what they so desperately needed, too.</p><p></p><p>Like Oliver and the tops of the fat man's eggs.</p><p></p><p>Ours is an ugly story.</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 675419, member: 17461"] That the mother [I]could[/I] reject Copa ~ that tells the tale, right there. You are a mother. For you to even begin to accept detachment theory parenting where your child was concerned, you had to work very, very hard. I know this to be true Copa because I was here. You were (and continue to be) so proud of him, Copa. You post about his facility with languages, about his appearance and intelligence and height. You blamed not him, but yourself, when he began following a wrong path. And you did everything, everything and more, to help him change that path he was determined to take. I was no more able to stop helping either of my children than you were ~ than any of us here on CD are able to easily understand how we need to parent our difficult kids [I]for their own sakes[/I]. It does not make intuitive sense. We learn it for their sakes, out of desperation. It nearly does us in, to say no; to turn them away. We do it because we see that detachment parenting helps the children of our peers on this site. So we take that leap of faith because nothing else has helped our kids. This is true of every parent here on Conduct Disorders. So...what was the deal with our mothers, Copa? Or...our sisters? Why are our sisters not suffering for our sakes as we are, for theirs? Why do the sisters do things as stupidly, pointlessly hurtful as the things the mother does? My answer is that, whether through some genetic shortcoming, or through having been twisted into weird shapes by their experiences in our wicked families of origin, our sisters, like our mothers, are also grandiosity addicted. At least they have an excuse. I think they hate us, Copa. Passionately, and without surcease or insight. Typically, they blame us for the unreasoning hatred they bear us. Go figure. That is why there is no communication; everything gets twisted in the ugliest ways to justify the way they already feel. I suppose it has to do with hating us so they don't have to hate themselves or something. It isn't about empathy. I am not sure what to call the thing that makes them different. In my family of origin, empathy is a given. It is used in a weird way, though. Like, where we might employ empathy to build a little bridge across a broken place for someone, they use it to lay a trap very few people are foolish enough to fall into. Then, they feel they have been victimized because they did not get to victimize the person they laid the trap for. They don't even see that no one else thinks like they do or values what they value or needs what they need. Which means, for both the mothers and the sisters, that they don't even do what they do on purpose. They do what they do with determined intent, but without purpose because their win is a meaningless thing, at the end of the day. WTF, right? It also means they do not have the capacity to change. Back to the mothers. It also means they will have allied, initially, with our own fathers against the children to accomplish a skewed value system which, to their minds, guaranteed control of their primary relationship to the father [I]whom they assume to be grandiosity addicted, too[/I]. To them, control of the mate's grandiosity supply was the perfect tool. That is a dynamic in our families of origin that we have not had a look at, yet. The fathers (or the mothers, if the father was the grandiosity addict) will have been twisted into grotesque parodies of themselves [I]because [/I]they loved their children. And that made them vulnerable to mates they may long since have found morally repulsive. So says me, but I am just a person on the internet. *** In a healthy relationship Copa, the mother does not believe herself to be so above her child that no "criticism" is tolerated. D H and his mother say ~ and sometimes, yell ~ the strangest things to one another. Neither is afraid to do that. No one threatens to exclude. Each actually means what they say when they say it and so, they do not make empty or outrageous threats. They don't apologize, because they mean what they say. They don't say things they don't mean in the first place...[I]and that is respect for self and other.[/I] That is telling the truth. Exclusion is never an issue ~ not in any smallest way. Things that are wrong are just things that are wrong. They are discussed openly, and so is anger displayed openly. In D H family, grands who cannot be there on any given holiday call home to wherever the family is having dinner. It is expected. It is expected that the family will be busy with dinner preparations, but that it will matter that the missing members will have called, no matter how inconvenient the timing. Sterling conversation on world events (which is encouraged, in my family of origin) is discouraged, in D H family conversations. "Hello, I love you, what's for dinner, how did the sauce come out" ~ those kinds of things are appropriate. It would be considered rude and hurtful not to call home ~ "home" being where the mother is. Our families were and are nothing like that, Copa. Our families ~ mine for sure ~ deal in the currency of exclusion. It is a multi-faceted thing, subtle and outrageously overt at the same time...but we are blind to it. [I]A blind and savaged Child recall its first and bitter tears Nostalgic copper colored fears....[/I] Remember Dickens' character ~ the little boy who was made to steal? In one scene, he is so hungry, and the master of the house is having soft boiled eggs for breakfast. The little boy watches the man cut the tops of the eggs, salivating like crazy because sometimes, the man tosses the tops of the egg to the little boy. And if he does, there might be just a little yolk. The boy is utterly powerless, not only due to his position in life, but to his own desperate hunger, Copa. He needs what he needs; needs what he must have, to live. That's how it was, for us. And it is criminal that this was so. We were little girls (or, little boys) made to believe our own appetites, our own need for protein or survival or to love and be loved, were wrong. How awful, for us. *** As we heal, as we tear off the scab covering shame and, going deeper into our psyches toward places that are so terribly painful that shame turns out to have been nothing more than a cover a thousand times more survivable than the truth, that is the thing we begin to see and understand differently. That though we were hurt, none of it had anything to do with us. We were made powerless in every sense, and that is the battle for us, now: To reclaim our senses of efficacy. To reclaim and rely on and believe in, internal locus of control. To understand that our abusers were not only not able to think better than we were, but that they were sub-normal thinkers in many ways. Focused somehow on hatred, but I don't understand the importance of that piece, yet. Why hatred? Yet, there it is. Like a live thing. Once we get those pieces, we will never see ourselves through their grandiosity-addict eyes, again. It really is like we have been enchanted in some land without water (love) or air (the capacity to create, and to think). The work we do, here in FOO Chronicles is like breaking a spell, in that sense. The Sleeping Beauty kiss, Copa. That beginning, over and over and over again, until the Rose is saved, thorns and all, from the stupidly marauding sheep who could as easily have eaten the grass all around them as the Rose, with her thorns. *** Our childhoods were mismanaged things and yet, here we are, strong enough and brave enough to reclaim ourselves. And we should reclaim ourselves. In a way, it is not something we should go about timidly. We should roar with it. The hurt done us was illegitimate, the win for the abuser a stupidly worthless and [I]outside the families the grandiosity addict will have created, [/I]an utterly meaningless thing. And yet, we have lost so much that is meaningful in life ~ and not even for their sakes, which is what we tell ourselves, at first ~ but for the sake of something so patently ridiculous as a grandiosity addiction. We saw it, we sort of knew it, all along...but we could not believe our own parent was that morally bankrupt a human being. This is for me, Copa. I do not know your mother or sister, of course. But we do know that my sister "walks with the Lord". As so many of the sisters do. *** The win in the chains of behaviors, in the cascades of behaviors (in the sense of one thing needing to happen to mandate the next, worse or better thing ~ that kind of cascade) all the pain and twistedness created in our families of origin [I]and costing us our relationships to our siblings to this day[/I] were come of the pointless, stupidly wrong reasoning processes of the grandiosity addict. Accidentally tumbled into a position of potential power-over when they became parents, they fed like gluttons and then, refused to give it up when their children became adults and left them. Shunning. Exclusion. It's disgusting, Copa. That is what we have been hiding away from ourselves. We feel broken all over again to admit what it was that happened, in our families of origin. We feel we should have been able to do better [I]and that tells the truth of it ~ all of it ~ right there. We were children when it began. Even as adults, we could not break the mother's insistence on maintaining her grandiosity feed at the expense of the sibling relationships we all should have had and should be relishing, today.[/I] Their grandiosity fix cost us plenty, Copa. [I]It cost our sisters more. They actively hate us. Their hearts are blackened with it and they cannot think beyond it because their hatred for us protects them from hating themselves and their mothers.[/I] Please, stop blaming yourself. You are the sufferer, here. Your sister is the sufferer, here. So is mine. I see no path that could ever lead back to where I tried or felt generosity toward my family of origin. This feels very safe to me, now. I will be alone and that will be better, for me. It comforts me that I did the best I knew to do. I would not do it in the same way, again. These were choices my mother and my sister made, Copa, to have things as they are. Not my fault. Once we see that, we see all of it. I think we do not unsee it, again. It isn't all that sad, Copa. Not once we get our true situations. It just is what it is and it is better to know. You may be alone too Copa, for a time or by choice. And you will do very, very well. The difference will be that you will no longer believe "alone" means "shunned". And that is huge. That means everything, to see in that different way. That is how we will know we are healing or healed. We will see shunning for what it is. No sting. No burn. No point. Alone can mean blessed and strong and clear headed and sane, instead of a headful of chittering that, in the end, means nothing more than that the sister walks with G-d and therefore, to commit the evil that shunning, in all its multiple facets, is, is somehow legitimized. Neat trick. *** It truly was nothing we did, Copa. It was nothing we were or are. It was never that we were not perfect enough, though that is what we believed. It was never that there would come some magical moment when we would somehow feel loved without feeling we had cheated, that we had taken those good feelings from some exculded sibling. That is why we excluded ourselves, Copa. And that is why we are excluded, today. Even as children, we refused to play the game. If there is a difference between our sisters and ourselves, that is it. The sisters do hate us. They do see us as threats to whatever small supply of mother love there was. Our families were dysfunctional. That is the cost. *** How stupidly mean, to buy and sell and bargain with the sibling relationships of your own children; to continue even after they are adults, using love and money and family identity to do it. Yuck. I suppose what we are supposed to feel (and what the younger sibs may have felt toward us) was that we were safe if the other guy was the excluded one ~ and remember that, for a child, to have been excluded meant shunning in place ~ meant no protection in our very homes where we lived our childhood lives and where we should have been safe but were not. The very sibs we protected learned to ally with the grandiosity addict mother to get what they so desperately needed, too. Like Oliver and the tops of the fat man's eggs. Ours is an ugly story. Cedar [/QUOTE]
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