Jail, Rehab

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
my mother hated my husband too.

D H would say: "Hate is the only emotion your mother allows." But D H had this like, perfect, angry, eating too much, cooking all the time, Italian mother. Hate bounces off him the way water sizzles in a really hot pan on a stove. Little droplets, not even together in one piece of intent anymore, running all over in the pan before they turn into steam.

That's how you do this thing.

Cedar
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
How cool is that?
Oh, it is awesome :)

I loved your post about finding mothers and sisters in the outside world. Oprah has always been a hero of mine and she is exactly my age. Twins? Nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...lol. She is much smarter than me, but I do tend to think a lot like she does.

My mother is deceased. She was my first husband's mother and somewhere she is an angel, a shining star who babysat for Bart when he was a baby when I had a medical emergency and E. wouldn't do it. This wonderful woman was beloved by all and taught me so much. I looked to her for guidance.

To the end of her life she never stopped sometimes shaking her head that my own birthmother would not watch my infant son when I was bleeding internally. That shows how little E. cared for me even when I wa as young as 24 which is when I gave birth to Bart.
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
D H would say: "Hate is the only emotion your mother allows." But D H had this like, perfect, angry, eating too much, cooking all the time, Italian mother. Hate bounces off him the way water sizzles in a really hot pan on a stove. Little droplets, not even together in one piece of intent anymore, running all over in the pan before they turn into steam.

That's how you do this thing.
Talking about it with you and others, Cedar, is getting all the years of keeping it inside out of me and making me free. Thank you for this great gift. I am starting to be able to do what your husband does and I'm sure my skills will improve.

Smart man you married ;)
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
So beautiful, that place where we mourn the loss of sacred things. The thing that is lost? Is that we need to keep believing in our mothers or our families of origin. It is a sadness, to lose them, to leave them behind.
Cedar, it was hard at one time. So hard that I put up with years of an on-again/off-again sister and I chased after an obviously contemptuous, unforgiving mother. But I stopped longing for that years ago. After E's death, I knew the truth. And I got immune to Thing 2's here today/gone tomorrow. Honestly, I have no drama in my life when she isn't in it, if only hearing about HER drama and wondering how somebody her age can make such horrible choices both for herself and for those she uses to make her feel good...ugh.

This is the easy part now.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Like she had a right to call my son and call him a liar.

Here is a weird and an eerie similarity: So, my mother was visiting. She had just come from her own sisters, who live in another state. They told her she was a liar over some things I know nothing about and that do not matter to this story. At our own table, on our own lanai, in front of my own D H and in the hearing of our own neighbors ~ whom she had met, and about whom she had been told many of the same stories I tell here, about the nature of our neighborhood there ~ she...screamed would be too strong a word. She hollered, then. She hollered, loud and mean and nasty as could be, that I was a liar. Note: Not that I was lying, but that I was a liar. There is a difference, and it's a big one. We had been discussing...religion, a place where, in a rational discussion both parties have agreed to have, no one knows the answer absolutely and so, cannot possibly be lying about what they believe.

Isn't that something.

Prior to my mother hollering those words: "You are a liar.", the discussion had been pleasant, not loud, not intrusive to the neighbors. The only thing they could know then, was that my own mother, who was visiting, had found occasion to name me "Liar".

Fortunately, our neighborhood there is what it is. At some later date, long after my mother's visit was over and probably, a year later, the neighbors were gathered for Thanksgiving. We were talking about mothers. One of our neighbors had a mom who loved him. His now husband's mother was ~ I don't know how to describe her. She was like your mom, and like mine, SWOT. (And maybe, like yours too, Copa.) And the well-mothered person said: "When you have been raised well enough, your mother loves you all of your life and so, you can let her go. When you have had a difficult time of it because your mother was selfish and self-centered and hurt you, you carry that guilt."

Well, I can't remember, exactly what he said. D H said (I just asked him) that the neighbor said: If your mom was bad, you feel guilty. If your mom was a good enough mom, you are independent of her, a separate person from her. And you love her, but it is a casual, decent, sincere kind of thing. Not a thing like his partner had with his mother, or I had, with mine. That is how we know it was wrong, what happened to us, SWOT.

We bear the scars.

People whose moms were good enough moms? Exist in a whole other sphere of reality.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Wendy23, please accept my apologies that these issues are being discussed on a thread you posted for support regarding your child. If I try to respond on a different thread, I will not be able to respond from the heart, because I will lose the emotional recollection of the hurt of it.

Wendy began this thread for help working through an intensity of issues regarding her son, and herself, and her heart.

How is your son Wendy, and how are you holding up?

Cedar
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
"When you have been raised well enough, your mother loves you all of your life and so, you can let her go. When you have had a difficult time of it because your mother was selfish and self-centered and hurt you, you carry that guilt."
Wow...this is CLASSIC and true. It's why Thing 1 and 2 don't get it...why I've hung on for so long. And my normal life, honest, does not include thinking of her. Here is where I let my mind wander to "why." This makes so much sense too.

The only difference is that I don't feel guilty. She made me feel small and like a nobody and like a baaaaaaaad person and unloved. It's amazing I still dream about her in vivid colored nightmares. But if she had been good to me, I would have left her rest in peace in my own mind and know that she would want me to go on with my life. She'd loved me. That she did not has caused a lot of problems for me, if only with self-esteem. But it is contagious and the rest of your family sides with the bully. Almost always. I'm so glad I don't have auns or uncles or any more FOO kin...it is easier when there are but two.

And when they hurt us, it is on purpose. They have probably been hurt too so they know how it eats at you. But they do it anyway. Meanness is the motive.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Wow, I've been on this site for about 10 minutes and I must say, just knowing that others are thinking and going through what I am going through has lifted a 100 pounds off of my heart...
I thought I was the only person in the world who understood my feelings; I feel as though maybe there is hope after all.

I am glad about that, momofthreeboys. I am happy you are here, happy that you found us.

There is hope. We do recover from what happens, from what is happening right this minute, to our families. But the recovery part looks so different than anything we could have known on our own. When we are stronger, when we respond to our kids from that new place of strength we learn here from one another, their responses change, too.

It isn't only hope, momofthreeboys. We really do learn how to accept that the horrible things really are happening, and we really do learn how to live, how to choose to live and to celebrate our children and our families and our lives.

It took me such a long time.

I wish for you that you recover yourself much sooner than I was able to.

Welcome to the site, momofthreeboys. I am very glad you found us.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Could it not be, SWOT, that our mothers loved us but could not bear the idea that it was their fault...that they had harmed us...and it was that horrible idea that they were rejecting...not us?

Not my mom. She liked to watch me bleed. I am serious. She would go all quiet and intense so she could watch me break. She is curious about me like that. I mean, she is curious about me in other ways, too...but like when we build a house or buy something sweet on a lake? She hates me, and doesn't want to know about those things. She likes to twist me around regarding my appearance, too. Like that is the only thing that matters to her about me or something.

Maybe that is true.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
I knew at the end that she loved me the best she could. It was not everything I needed...but at the end...it was enough.

Right. But this is not about our mothers, or what they needed, or what they were or were not able to give us to stand up to the challenges of living a life. What we are doing here, I think, is getting it that those weaknesses our mothers instilled in those same places where other moms and dads are intact are hurting our children. I need to be strong enough, need to be healed and whole enough, not to break in the face of my child's suffering. I need not to be a shame based mother because my child needs me to be strong enough now to see what is for what it is.

That is the only way I can help them.

I was a good enough mom, and I think everyone who loves their child enough to find this site, was a good enough mom for children whose challenges would have been just the day to day stuff we all deal with in living a life. But our children are addicted or emotionally ill or some weird combination of both. They need stronger mothers than I have been able to be.

They need mothers strong enough to believe they can do this thing; mothers strong enough to call them on it, and to turn away from them, when they are intentionally and determinedly going a wrong way.

This site, learning and teaching and sharing the really crummy and destructive parts of me, is working for me. I feel badly that we are here on Wendy23's thread when she needs us to be strong for her in the way she needs our combined strength, but here I am anyway.

Please excuse that, Wendy23.

I can't really apologize for it, because I keep doing it, keep posting my stuff on your thread. If you can hold faith with us for a little while here, we will be back on Watercooler, and not here, where you came for the assistance you require to learn how to be stronger enough for the sakes of your own children.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
My Mother could never tell me to my face that she was sorry. But she was.

There is a difference between sorrow, which is an empathic response having to do with another person's pain, and regret. Regret has to do with ourselves. Regret is where we say, "You were not enough to reflect well on me." In my mother's case, regret was a weird little celebration, a kind of validation that she had been right about me, that she had lived her life correctly as regards her children and the things she had done to them. Because we were flawed, hated and destroyed a thousand times over and the proof of it was what happened to our children. Or, to our marriages. Or, to our economic lives.

I know. Bad Cedar.

Yes.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Copa, she did not want me in her life. My mother developed a brain tumor in her late 60's and told the entire family not to tell me. She didn't want me there. She even told my dad and he kept her confidence, as he should have, but the point is, she didn't like HIM either and was horrible to him during their marriage (he was no peach, but she was ...I know see...the family dictator.

Cedar's take: Your mother's brain tumor may have been responsible for the difference in her, for the toxicity and etc. It may have. What our mothers were thinking is less the issue than what we taught ourselves about ourselves from the ways our mothers were thinking. We need to figure out whether any of it was valid, and we need to hunt down and eradicate those things that are weakening us in our lives, now. So: It was not that she did not want you, personally, there with her then, SWOT. My mother did this same thing to me regarding my father's bypass surgery. It was not that she did not want me there.

She wanted to exclude me from a place I had a right, and an obligation, to be.

She wanted my father to believe all good things came only through her ~ and she wanted me to accede to that reality, forevermore. It was a lesson I had refused and stood up to and defied her in all of my life. I continued to cherish my sibs, whether embroiled in guilt and cowardice because I had not been able to protect them or not. I continued to believe in my sister's sincerity, and in my mother's basic goodness, no matter what.

And that is what she hates about me. She doesn't see me, except for how she hates what I am.

So this trauma she dealt you, SWOT, was calculated to leave you in exactly the position you are in now, regarding rejection.

Lurch will begin unplugging your mother's batteries as soon as he finishes unplugging all the places my mother's toxicity still functions, in me. Oh, wait, SWOT. All the butlers look like Lurch. There is more than one Lurch in my saddlebag. Those we invented for you are already unplugging the toxic mother in your emotional makeup.

:O)

Cedar

Bye, mom.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
She even told my dad and he kept her confidence, as he should have

Over the past few days, when I have been posting and posting on the Watercooler thread but not actually posting it, I have come to see that my father was afraid of my mother. She hurt him, demasculated him, tortured and taunted and destroyed his strength, too.

NO. You had a right, and an obligation, to be there with your seriously ill mother.

Another game, SWOT. Another really mean thing your mother did to you, to your father, and to your family, who should have been able to come together, who should have been able to circle the wagons, who should have been able to create and to celebrate the strength and loving, the sense of identity and sincerity and decency and hope that are what a family is.

She also had this grandiose feeling that he was absolutely brilliant...she felt this way about her brother too.

There is a circle, and it goes like this: To those "better" than us: a groveling awe. To those "beneath" us: contempt.

The circle goes nowhere. It is what it is, consuming and recycling itself, as all things having to do with hatred instead of love, instead of believing, with all our hearts, that we can do better, do.

She tended to focus on her GoldenGrandchild while I yawned and paid little attention.

My mother did this to my brother. I have posted about this here before, and about the punishment she enacted when he stood up to her.

Another game. Another deceitful, hurtful game.

I am so sorry, SWOT. This happened in my FOO, too. It is happening, to this day. My brother still sees my mother, still takes care of her house in the Winter. My sister and her family will be there, this summer. My brother and his family will not be welcome. There will be a birthday party for all the great-grandchildren on the day of the Golden Grandchild's birthday. My brother and his family will be invited to celebrate their children's (otherwise unacknowledged) birthdays then, too. Prior to my sister's recent elevation? She was the black sheep, the one whose children were nothing. So, victims are interchangeable in this game our mothers were so brilliantly talented at arranging, and winning.

Here is the question: If every evil mom plays the same, exact games, then how are those so hurtful games, or the self images we learned and our own beloved children learned at their hands...how are they true or relevant or meaningful in any way?

Our mothers were destructive people, SWOT. Not just to us. Not just to their other children. Not just to their husbands. Not just to their husband's business partners and businesses. Not just to their own mothers and fathers.

We never need take them seriously, again.

They lied.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
We are going to visit D H mother today. Actually, D H whole family is coming from all their faraway places they live, and we are taking D H mom to pizza buffet together. D H mom is coping with an ongoing paralysis related to arthritic changes in her spine. She will need to be taken to the restaurant in a medical transport van. That is how she will need to be returned to the beautiful facility where she lives now, because she can no longer live independently.

We are all going to do this, together, for one another, and for her, once a month from now on.

THAT is how you do family.

So anyway, I need to go shower up, now.

More later, or maybe not until tomorrow.

Keep the faith, guys. We are definitely doing this thing.

Cedar
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
The only difference is that I don't feel guilty. She made me feel small and like a nobody and like a baaaaaaaad person and unloved. It's amazing I still dream about her in vivid colored nightmares

And that was no accident.

The nightmares are giving you what you need to heal. Yay!!! You were meant to be whole and healthy and strong, SWOT.

She isn't real anymore. There is only the poison, now.

Drink it up.

Survive it.

Snip.

But if she had been good to me, I would have left her rest in peace in my own mind and know that she would want me to go on with my life. She'd loved me

Well, what would that have looked like. If, every time you were hurt, you had been well-mothered instead...how would that feel, looking back on that, today.

That is what I mean when I say we need to re-mother ourselves. We need to see where they hurt us. Why doesn't matter. And then, we need to cherish and befriend and stand for that little girl, or that young woman, or that new mom.

Cherished, SWOT. That is how we would feel.

We were hated, instead. So...what kind of mother does that? The kind you may choose not to believe in, if you like. Any time you like, you can choose not to believe her, and not to believe in her.

Snip.

That she did not has caused a lot of problems for me, if only with self-esteem.

Cherish. That is the word we are looking for, here. You merited cherishing, SWOT. Remember the thread? "Hey, baby. I've waited so long to learn who and how you would be. Welcome to our beautiful life! There will be the sun, and rainy days, and oonlight and stars and your father's face and ~ oh so many things to show you."

I added some stuff.

And when they hurt us, it is on purpose. They have probably been hurt too so they know how it eats at you. But they do it anyway. Meanness is the motive.

When they hurt us it was absolutely on purpose. Unless there are some of us who accidentally repeatedly abuse our own babies all their lives and somehow, manage to believe that was nothing more than a string of oops moments.

They have no clue how it eats at us because they are the only real thing in their worlds.

We were their possessions.

Mirrors, for grandiosity.

Looks like I know everything again, today.

Hmmm....

:O)

Cedar
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
Thanks for yet another healing post. I'm so tired now so no long responses tonight.

I remember when my grandmother passed away too. It was awful for me and I fell apart, but pulled myself back together and have easily let her rest in peace in my mind. So many wonderful memories of our daily calls and our laughing over soap operas every afternoon and her interest, true interest, in what I did and her confiding in me and our friendship. I don't have nightmares about her. Those dreams are always sweet.

You are so right that you can let go with peace and love if the person who left until next time (my own belief system) was loving and caring toward you. She may have caused grief for some, but I was special to her and I needed it. And she knew I needed it and that's why I was special. And nobody could talk her out of it. Unfortunately, she had no idea how far I'd go to stop her from her divide and conquer tactic at t he end of her life, but I am sure she is one of my guardian angels and I am sure that she now realizes it was wrong and is very sorry.

You don't hang on to people who are gone if they have been good to you. You miss them, but you don't obsess about them...the way you think about an abuser who got the last laugh from the grave. Obsess is a bad word for what I mean too. It's more like you don't have to think about why they hated you. You just know that the person loved you and that makes you smile. Love is simple. Hate is complicated...and hurtful.
 

Copabanana

Well-Known Member
I am moving some of my responding to the new thread SWOT started on Watercolor but these few thoughts I will put here.
There is a difference between sorrow, which is an empathic response having to do with another person's pain, and regret.
I think my mother felt "sorry", because of:

1. Guilt--suffering of her daughters
2. Bad results--one or both of her daughters was estranged from her nearly all of their adult lives.

I am using the word sorry in the colloquial sense, like one spills something on somebody's clothes. It's my fault and I acknowledge it. That is how my mother felt sorry for the damage she did to her daughters.

My mother was a paradox. She was among the warmest women I have known, really beloved by people who did not know her well: neighbors, cleaning ladies, salesladies. She had social skills of a duchess...outside the house.

I think my relationship in the last 20 years of her life was largely a phone relationship because this arrangement created a distance, and she behaved better. I was kind of a glorified neighbor, who she happened to love.

I still do not understand how somebody as compassionate as was my mother could be so selfish. More than selfish. Cruel, cold-blooded and self-serving. How can somebody be cold-blooded and warm depending upon the context?

I guess the answer is once again, my Mother was warm if it didn't cost her and cold-blooded if her interests were at stake.

There is the business of my grandfather's will that I wrote about in another post. Too tired to go into again now, but it was the seismic shift that broke our lives apart.

What we are doing here, I think, is getting it that those weaknesses our mothers instilled in those same places where other moms and dads are intact are hurting our children.
I have a greater understanding these past few days why grieving my Mom has been so complicated.

I have felt responsible for protecting my mother from her bad choices. The only image that comes to mind is the impulse a mother has to kiss away the pain of a child to make it all better.

That a daughter would have this impulse for a mother, is a bit regrettable, to be sure.

But it crosses into pathology when the child takes on the guilt and suffering for the harms that my mother did to me. On purpose.

I have grieved that my mother suffered because she did bad, bad things. I suffer more for her than for me.

Clearly, I must have been groomed to assume this posture. And understanding this, it is apparent why I had to distance myself from her in order to live an adult life. I cannot say normal, because it was not.

I get too well that this same need to take responsibility for all of the hurt that accrued to my mother, is at play with my son.

Imagine my despair as what afflicts my son morphs to ever more concerning and less fixable conditions.
 
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BusynMember

Well-Known Member
But it crosses into pathology when the child takes on the guilt and suffering for the harms that my mother did to me. On purpose.
I agree.
Have you heard of the book "Codependent No More" by Melody Beattie? I think you'd like it and benefit from it. It is extreme for somebody who was abused and mistreated to feel sorry for the person who did it to them. Well...maybe it's not unusual, but it does show a certain level of guilt, which many who are abused feel. "Was it our fault she was bad? If I was just better, she would have been swell..."
It indicates that you feel you deserved it in some way or could have stopped her if you had been a better daughter. Explore what that really means. Doing everything she asked of you? Being her dream of you instead of who you are?
I can not wrap my mind around grieving for somebody who did bad things. I can see grieving for the mother you wished you'd had who wasn't your mother. But it's almost like you want to put her bad choices on your shoulders. And immortalize her as somebody who mistreated you most of you life, yet you miss...why? To see if she would finally love you the way most mothers love their children?
Like your son, your mother did what she wanted to do, not because of YOU, but because of HER. And, in her case, maybe near the end of her life she was sorry because...who knows why? But what she did, she owns.
We only own what WE do and we also own how we let others make us feel.
Hugs and hope you have a peaceful, serene and marvelous day, free of the sins of others that you had no hand in.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
But it crosses into pathology when the child takes on the guilt and suffering for the harms that my mother did to me. On purpose.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land where time and distance had lost all meaning, there were born to the peasantry a generation of female children whose task and whose talent it would be to unravel the tangled skeins of deceit, viciousness, and trickery that bound the hearts, the souls, and the bloodlines of those families into which each would be born.


I wrote the story that begins with these words something like thirty years ago.

Turns out it was a true thing; and not fiction, after all.

***

I was posting on a different thread. I wrote that I could not afford compassion for my mother. Not yet, not now, not when I was vulnerable to the feelings I was reclaiming. Not when I was vulnerable to the shame of those namings. I wrote that we would go back for our mothers (and our sisters and brothers and children (?), as it turns out ~ but I did not know that, then); that we would find compassion for them, later, when we were stronger enough.

So, thank you SWOT, Copa, Albatross, Trish, ISC, Confused, Lil, pasa, jabber ~ everyone who has been reading or posting. (I am thinking about the other thread, too ~ the To Tell the Truth thread.) Recovering Enabler, thank you, especially. COM of course, and Echo.

Child of Mine, for the Highchair Tyrants thread, and for Richard Rohr, and for the suffering of the Mary.

Wendy23, whose thread we usurped...I guess what I am trying to say is that this may not have been possible without all of us, every one of us. Going North, you too, with your beautifully recovered and recovering cats. Susiestar and Captain, as well. Coming back, coming live again, cherished and welcomed home to be celebrated and to celebrate. Just like me, coming back to myself all battered and time worn and able now, to be celebrated and cherished.

Donna, with her avatar of her dog, who is missing an eye.

On we go.

You know who you are.

***

That is happening, now. The compassion piece. Except once we get there, there is no real compassion or the need of it. There is just a kind of singing.

:choir:

Like that, maybe. Only there would be choirs on choirs on choirs. A little like when people describe Heaven, maybe.

Or the breaking of a magic spell.

:angel3:

And I never once saw it coming in this way.

So here is the working through of it.

***
In response to Copa, as noted at the beginning of this post:

It does. And what we need to look for is whether we are witnessing what happened from our abusers' points of view, or whether we are present now, watching the abuser. That is locus of control. That is where the real self lives; that is where the damage happened. In the core of us as we took on the emotional flavors of the abusers valance, or aura, as the abuse was occurring. As surely as the mother mirrors positive grandiosity for her beautiful, perfect child, so our damaged mothers reflected to us what they carried; reflections from a darker mirror.

And that is what she loosed, on me. The horror of what had been done to her.


And that is where we are dancing now.

How to make sense of that, of having been named that, and of having recognized and encompassed it. And of having, in self defense, created a harrowing lust of vengeance
which we then had to protect her from because it was not real and if we called it, if we enact it, if we act on it, that will be exposed.

And we will be without protection, without even our vengeance.

Our ultimate vulnerability will be exposed, and we will die of the shame of it, and of the hatred in that naming, in those repeated namings.

A samurai warrior refuses to live, can see no value in his life or in his living, can taste no pleasure, cannot claim legitimacy after having been shamed without taking vengeance.

So we are in good company, here.

And you know there is pain in hari kiri, and that it is said it is the pain which cleanses and changes the legitimacy of having been shamed.

So shame is the thing. It is a really big thing, something humans have dealt with in a myriad of ways, forever.

But we were not able to access that level of real; not when we were little girls (or little boys). So, we enclosed and protected that thing that never was, that capacity to take vengeance, and we protected our abusers from that thing they loosed on us.

And we held strong.

And it must have been an ethical choice, because now we are choosing to change and see and name and set it free as nothing more than what it never was.

Because once we can know beyond a doubt that what they did to their babies was either wrong or was fated, then we can acknowledge how truly at their nonexistent mercy we were, and we can let that go.

It is what it is. Now is time to have and to honor what was for what it was and for the sadness that it was nothing more, and to heal it.

To heal the trauma of self desertion, we need to witness for ourselves, not protect our abusers. We need to see it and know it for what it was, that circle comprised of vengeance and shame and grandiosity and terror and hope and responsibility and shame and shame and shame.

Kaliedescope.

We have all already survived it.


Which is the doorway to the circle: To protect our abusers / to protect our abusers from what they have done ~ which is a secret though imaginary source of power in us, and is the only way to survive that kind of abuse intact; to split it off, that trauma, and protect the abuser from a vengeance we could never have enacted ~ not when we were little, and so utterly in their power and control. That is the nature of the damage that was done us; that is the thing we need to undo. That is the glass eyed witch, that is the hurt and the vengeance and the pretense and the necessity and the hope and the fraud of it.

That is the circle.

That is the thing we cherish and conceal and protect, that hidden core of us.

/ from ourselves / lose that too/circle; we need to regain locus of control. We need to stop joining with our abusers / to protect them from ourselves / to protect us from becoming what they saw (this is the essential insult) / to protect them from the rage / to deny they saw what they saw when they saw us / to protect both them and ourselves from what they saw and we believed and what we believed we could destroy them with to threaten them with, to have any where at all to stand, to mount a life from.

Yet, we were born. We are here.

We are doing this thing.

There is the circle of it.

There is such heat, there.

Have nothing to fear; nothing to protect.

That is the core of it.

So perhaps that is true, then: To be free is to have nothing to fear, to have nothing to fear is to have nothing to protect.

Trust; perfect trust that it is as it was meant to be. How many times have we all said that here, as we have tried so hard to find meaning in what is happening to our children.

We are fortunate in that we have both the trauma and the answer, and in that we can witness for ourselves even now, even after so much time has passed.

I remember quoting something like that, once. Something about that at the touch of Eternity, so they say, we will know.

My mother was a paradox. She was among the warmest women I have known, really beloved by people who did not know her well: neighbors, cleaning ladies, salesladies. She had social skills of a duchess...outside the house.

My mom is like that, too. Plus, she is very beautiful. I would not ever say warm though, because I am very sure that part is not real. Eye rolling afterword: that is very real. Going behind their backs to destroy anyone who trusts her, that is real. I have seen it for myself.

I have grieved that my mother suffered because she did bad, bad things. I suffer more for her than for me.

I held that position for most of my life. It is this that I am letting go of. I seem to be breaking through the place I thought I had changed rage into compassion and am finding that it was myself I had imprisoned, there.

So, I am having the incidents, and the rage, and making them mine.

I am freeing myself; I am naming what happened for what it was. It seems to involve seeing from a different perspective. Not stretching to understand the abuser and at some level, to side with her against myself, but to be right there through the whole thing, beginning to end, to the place where self desertion occurred.

She had no right to do that, of course.

To hurt me to that degree. I can feel her watching, pouncing on the break.

Hatred, killing rage, dying to myself time and again.

Changing locus of control and witnessing for myself has not made me hate my mother / sister / brothers / extended FOO. But it has changed my understanding of the victim role where my mother is concerned. She does not merit my protection from me. And so, there is the whole magical vengeance thing going on. And that is why I hate her. She had no right to screw me up to that degree ~ to the degree that my sanity, my sane response, was unbalanced.

That is where I am most angered; that is where I feel shame.

That she messed with my essential self.

So, that eyeless rage I feel, right there ~ that is what I have been protecting my mother from.

Me.

Bigger than her.

Which was never true until today when she is frail. And when I am bigger than her? I protect and cherish and give time and wish well.

So, there you go.

There was never anything to protect my mother from. Just like there was never anyone to protect my babies from. Or my therapist from. But I have been afraid of that place all of my life and it was never real.

I should never have been hurt to that degree.

I have to witness for me, not hold strong for her ~ not when my children are concerned. I want access to that energy. Whatever it was that happened to my mother, I should not have been hurt to the degree that I had to hide my own lust for vengeance from myself. And pretend it was a real thing when I knew better than to believe in it because she (my mother, my abuser) kept hurting and hurting and hurting me to every degree that was available to her.

To the isolation happening, today.

SWOT posted once about the sister who punishes by repeatedly separating SWOT from the family fold and then, stalking SWOT to see what that looks like, to see who she is when she is the one hurt, maybe.

That is what it feels like in my FOO, too.

So, one more time: If these things are happening to others they cannot possibly be particular, be targeted with intent and malice aforethought, to me, to that core place where I

***

Well, how do you like this.

I was so concerned that I would lose the post unless I posted it that, after not posting it once, I posted it when I came back without reading it thorough. I did not want to edit the honesty of chain of consciousness, in case one of us needed to see exactly how I got to the place where I could choose to see and heal it.

Now it is gone.

But you get the drift.

All the stuff I am embarrassed to admit to is here, I think.
 
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