We were all in their play, their writing and their casting. And we had to find out that we don't have to be in that play.
I love this definition. I love it because it is true of what happened when we were little, but I love it because it is exactly what is happening to us today, too. I have been thinking alot about shunning, and what that is and what it means and why it would happen and how it would be justified. I thought about the way the shunning family of origin seems to need to keep checking in a little, here and there, to wet their hands in heart's blood. (I have been officially shunned once before. For five years, and in that time many strange things happened. I am comparing the two, and all the strange little oddities that happen along the way ~ weird occurrences that fit nowhere. Abuser is star, everyone else, interchangeable. Pawns, to the Abuser's Queen.
A game, of black and of white mitered bishops
played on a Board, universally black....
It really is that way.
Huh.
It seems so stupidly cheap a thing to hurt so many for.
That theme rings through so much of the healing of this time.
How cheap was the thing for which we were sold. Enslaved Copa and Serenity, like Jacob. Remember when we read about Jacob and enslavement and freedom. I am going to go and find that thread, to learn what there is to be learned there now that we all have changed.
Leafy, you will benefit too, I think. That thread is from the time we came to understand we were imprisoned somehow, in something we could not see or name. Enslavement...but what is freedom. What does that mean, to be free?
***
I think about my mom probably still working away on the murder mystery she insists of making of my grandmother's life to destroy her to me, and to everyone who loved her, as she includes the story in the family geneology (probably with all kinds of hurtful things about me
and my children. There is no point in what she is doing, and yet, she is doing it.
That is the way abusive people do it. They destroy. They destroy every kindness, every graceful thing, every strength.
Roar.
For those reading along who missed it, there was a thread once about the President's State of the Union address. Someone wrote in with these words:
"We are a strong, tightly knit family coming through some very hard times."
That is the way to see what is happening with our kids.
And never to see them or ourselves through the greedy, filthy eyes of the abuser, again.
***
The more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw that shunning in place has always been a condition of life in the (or at least in my) dysfunctional family of origin. As I have healed and been able to look at it at all, I am seeing shunning and being shunned and the whole sickness of identification of who is the one shunned and who is the shunner and which is the power position in a situation so deadly pale as the nest of vipers thing it is. Everyone has to play, has to choose sides, for that system to work, for it to move and come real.
I am losing the shame of the shunning.
Once that is gone, I will be me, again. Humor will return, and I see and feel it, already. Generosity, and heart, too. Fear of it is a huge part of the control in shunning. It really does hurt; it is such a hurtful, shaming thing, to be shunned. Remember my posting about my mother drawing back her arm as though she were going to strike me when I was visiting her with two of my grands. I think about that alot, because of the incongruity in it.
I don't know how old she was then, but old. My father was already gone. Sometime within the past eight years, then.
So, she was really very old; but the power dynamic had shifted. With my father's death I chose to believe in my mother, again. A second chance. My mother blamed everything about what was wrong with us on my father.
On my dead father.
Isn't that something.
In any event, it did result in her being given heart access to me in a way I knew better than to allow. It did (my father's death) re-embroil me in my mother's machinations.
The shunning was the result.
***
Anyway, I think of that time she drew back as though to hit me, and of the stupidly contemptuous, self satisfied smug little grinning. Eyes on. Blue. And of the stupidity, and the shame and surprise in it. Of the swallowing anger and the trying to behave as though this were normal and, as my mother implied, funny.
A private joke.
I hide from the rage; hide the rage from me. There is the trauma: Rage
One cannot experience killing rage or the trauma required of cowardice and still carry a tune, to paraphrase Woody Allen.
***
She was reasserting dominance.
Over
me.
And beneath the anger in that realization is the sadness of why.
Like in Forrest Gump: "Why'd this have to happen, Forrest?"
"You got shot, Bubba."
***
So we see the whole play. We see all the roles; we see the nuances of gaslighting and there were and are nuances in it. And how real it seems to us ~ real enough that a grandmother like me can have been tossed into...wonder what state that was, that I was tossed into. It has to do with the shunning that then occurred. It has everything to do with obeying the abuser's unspoken contention that the only reality that matters here is hers.
My grief and shame at the shunning, or at the way my rotten family behaved when the family
D H and I had created faced its challenges so beautifully (and that is the other thing that is changing for me, you guys ~ I see the strength and the beauty and courage and bravery in us, now. That I could not see them before was, also, an artifact of abuse. Think about the way we think about what has happened with our kids.
Artifacts of abusive interpretation of self, courtesy of our stupidly grandiosity-fixated abusers. Who see, in the pain of our losses, vulnerability and grandiosity for themselves.
We are targeted.
All that stuff about the sisters fixating on us is real.
Our mothers fixate on us too.
Because here is the other thing, the other and maybe, the bitterest thing, that happened when our daughter was placed in treatment that first time and my mother said: "Well, I guess you weren't such a good mother after all, were you?" Or whatever it was she said. As I heal, I am losing the echoing, shockey state that keeps the traumatic thing accurate.
The point is that my mother's comment switched my attention from an adult who loved her daughter and was determined to help her to the status of a savagely abused child who is, once again and forever, fixated on the freaking stupidly destructive #@%$& abuser.
On her eyes, watching me to see it hit.
That is what my mother's comment did.
I wish some therapist had been able to know and tell me that.
Roar.
How everything is changing in the way that I see, now.
Kaleidoscope, again.
Cedar
There is too much shame, at first, even to admit that we are being shunned ~
this should immediately have been a clue for us that shunning was always a weapon, and was used routinely, and that shunning can occur as a matter of degree)
And we needed to learn too, that we were more than the role they required us to be. That is where so much of the pain for us is, I think. As we realized we were forced into a role and try to leave it behind us, the old conflicts ~ guilt, shame, the absolute conviction of: "Who do you think you are." "Just don't think" "Don't you dare" ~ all of it, everything they did to enforce those roles, for us and for everyone in their lives ~ comes roaring back to real. And we forget, for a little while, which was the true thing and which, the lie the abuser enforced belief in.
That is why we need one another, and Brene Brown, too.
To help us stand right up in the face of it and walk away from the role and into real.
Here is something else that is occurring to me just lately. We feel rudderless as we come real because our abusers enforced the parameters of our realities. We were taught it was wrong to think, that we were somehow intrinsically stupid, or that thinking and choosing hurt or enraged our abusers, and was a betrayal.
I cannot have been the only one this happened to.
That is part of what we are recovering, here. It isn't only about reinterpreting traumatic self identity. It is about reclaiming our brains and brain power and right to make mistakes and not be afraid to try because we may not be so perfect that the abuser cannot destroy what we have taken our courage in both hands to create.
I have been thinking about Leafy's poetry, and about my own, and about the abuser's responses to children so creative they bubble with it and cannot choose not to have it.
Like, in brilliant, blazing circles that leave sunspots. And we are like, poetry drunk.
Who could know whether that is good thinking or bad thinking.
The problem our abusers had with it is that it
was thinking. A piece of the spirit they had not contained.
Ha!
It must have driven them crazy, to have us as witness.
Think about that.
A conscious witness, never quite dominated. Our attention always wandering; poetry drunk.
How cool is this, you guys?
Each of us writes beautifully, powerfully, gracefully. We are similar in that way.
That had to be the difference, the thing that drove our abusers nuts.
Poetry drunk, making meaning or seeing stars where nothing ever grew, before.
Good for us, then.
We will write beautiful things after this time together. And probably, will never forget it.