Reading this thread brought me to look for this. And there it was. I just had to ask the question in the right way.
http://susanbiali.com/how-to-stop-believing-lies-others-told-you-about-you/
Thank u for making me realize the truth. It is kind of sad but also a huge relief. Stop telling secrets to yourself and don't lie to yourself. That causes a false life.
"Stop telling secrets to yourself...."
That's perfect, SWOT. That is how to clear the shame that keeps us hooked into FOO issues.
Where we feel shame or disbelief regarding our families of origin, that is where we go to work; that is where the root of the trauma is.
I have been thinking about this through the weekend. About family, I mean. Whether Family of Origin or the family D H and I created, I have been thinking about family, and about relationship, and about enabling.
You posted on another thread SWOT that you would not go no contact with your sister or brother. Essentially, that is what I have done. With them, and with my mom, too. But I don't exactly see it like I did that. The game has become so obviously mean and purposely hurtful, since my mom and my sister have been together in the winter months. But when my mom was with me for only one month in the winter, she hurt my D H. I was still only able to see "That is just my mom. That's how she is." But looking back...well, that's the thing. I can't see the wrongnesses as wrong, so I am at a disadvantage where my mom is concerned.
Have I posted this? I think not. So I will now. One time, I was at my mother's
with my granddaughters. And my mom drew her arm back and pretended she was going to hit me. Like it was a joke.
And we both thought that was really funny, except for me.
***
I wonder whether I am wrong in that ~ in turning away from that whole mess this family of origin thing has become since my mom has been spending those winter months with my sister. And then, I remember particular things that happened. I am seeing from a different perspective now. I vacillate between believing I should contact at my mother, and knowing full well that I am not real to her. It is a strange little dance, the one between justification and the redemption that lives in what it looks like. That it would look like (to me) I had done or am doing, the right thing.
So the question becomes, what is the right thing? What is the nature of the right thing? As it is with my kids, the right thing has to be outcome based. Whether I am codependent or enabling or any of those bad things, I had the courage to step away when I believed that was the thing that would work.
(With my kids, I mean.)
I don't hold...I don't know what I a trying to accomplish. Maybe, nothing.
But that doesn't feel right, either.
I mean, don't we have to try?
***
I do not ever see myself disconnecting emotionally from my children. I don't want to. Where we go in the Winter, there are three houses. One is the mother's, one is one son's, and one is another son's. When that family goes North, they go to a neighborhood there where they have...three houses.
There is a daughter there, too. Perhaps then they have four houses.
And they are all such nice people, and that is what I wish I had, too.
Such a charmed life!
:O)
So, I am just going to tuck that little piece of comfort away somewhere next to my heart, and one day, you never do know.
On the other hand, wait a minute. None of that mother's kids are...er, you know. Differently wired! That's it. None of that mother's children are differently wired.
So maybe I should count my lucky stars and make a wish for healing and relish the blessing of life as it is.
***
Back to my rotten FOO.
I would see them intermittently until I could not function through the sick of it
or until I was vulnerable, until I had already been brought low and distracted, and they could hurt me. And they invariably do. And those like them invariably do.
And that is key.
And when we see the patterns in our lives, the abusers we seem to draw, the way we refuse to believe that it is what it looks like, we do feel like dreamers, or like romantics (that is how my mother describes me). Like someone who just doesn't think right.
Like I can't see the forest for the trees...which might be true, darn it.
But I just know we can change, any of us, all of us. We are all looking for a way to do this, to live our lives and create societies and face our mortalities the best, kindest way we know
or there would not be art.
So anyway, there we are in our lives, trying to make it work. I love that I did that. I love myself for having done that, for having tried. And yes, it fell right into enabling and that is an ugly, twisted version of love.
So I've decided to love my kids and hate my FOO.
Heh.
Good for me.
On we go: We just can't make sense of life as it seems to be from the perspective of our abusive parent. It doesn't make sense to us that this is how things should work. It feels like we must be missing something crucially important.
Until we figure it out.
Abuse works because it
doesn't make sense. We are the normal ones.
That is why, in an abusive situation, we cannot make any sense of what happens.
So...when we feel trauma now, in our adult lives.
That is an echo of the original trauma.
When we are with someone who does something bad that surprises us, something we had no clue was coming and yet, pretty much always knew was coming:
It is okay to explore, there. Like in Dr. Seuss: We can go any direction we choose. We will call and recall mini-trauma that echoes the major traumatic themes in our lives, to heal ourselves.
That is the meaning of courage.
Stand up.
(Thinking of Copa and the lunch lady who surprised her.) The thing that happens with us is we feel we need to protect ourselves when the truth is
we called this as surely as the other person did, and we both needed whatever the experience was. That is why it is wrong to turn away from friends or family, maybe. Because then there are no further lessons. So, when we declare an ending, we are saying we need time to assimilate and heal from the trauma recalled thus far.
Well for heaven's sake. I am chatty this morning. I should take a site break more often.
:O)
The danger, for us, is that we may slip into trying to bring everything into balance.
Our job is simply to observe our feelings and heal the initial trauma through exploring trust and betrayal and figuring out how to cherish ourselves and one another through it.
I am sure this is true, but I don't have a clue how to do it.
I would rather hate my FOO for right now, and have a temper tantrum for a little while.
Adulthood is so over-rated. I am tired of being an adult, just for today.
F you mom.
The thing is that when we are trying to do our exploring of relationship to see what is real, we can't believe our FOO is actually lying to us about who and how we are on purpose, to twist the power thing in their own direction.
The only thing we can conclude then, if we are honest, is that they must be correct.
There are more of them.
So it would be a majority rules thing.
We call echoes of the original trauma into our lives to heal it. Not in a mystical way. We just can't believe what happens, so we keep going back to be sure that's what happened.
Sure enough.
Huh.
When we are still so new to our healing, to our looking and seeing what is for what it is,
our natural tendency is to believe they meant whatever they said or did personally, to us. They didn't. To the degree that each of us is unhealed, we will stop. We see things that aren't there and begin to justify our own interpretations. For us, that would mean that though we aren't seeing what the other guy is, we must be wrong.
In fact, we are very right.
Confusion is where we get to choose a different interpretation of self and other.
But what we feel, in these traumatic re-enactments we call and cannot turn away from, are the same feelings that created the trauma in the first place. If those lessons were beat into us, so much the worse for us as we try to determine what is real and whether that matters.
And that is what we need to see.
That the abusers interpretation was a universally wrong thing, whoever its victim was this time.
So when these things happen in our adult lives that we cannot understand, we believe the other guy must have a valid point
because we were usually the wrong ones when we were little and in abusive relationships with our own parents. When these things happen to us as adults, we believe, just as we did when we were little, that we must have gotten it wrong. We believe it was our thinking problem again ~ that somehow, we did not see what we saw and we never heard what we heard. Something wrong with our perceptors.
That is what happened with that first therapist, too. What could it mean, to betray the trust of someone who is paying you to stand up for them until they are strong enough, until they can believe in themselves enough, to stand on their own?
And what could it possibly mean to accuse a patient of being a manipulator when that is what I am there to do? Manipulate him into believing ~ whatever it was I was trying to do.
So, huh.
As it is with every instance of abuse...nothing personal.
An oops.
The miracle is that we tried, and that we keep trying.
Humans are amazing.
Animals will come back from abuse, too. Animals are amazing. I am thinking of Going North and the story of her big cat that she rescued. Now, what was his name.... Squeaky is the quiet one and...well, his name will come to me. Not Gryphon. That was her other big cat. But the point is, he is beginning to be himself, again. And though it can be irritating to live with a recovered, and therefore, willful cat, we rejoice in it. (Susie Star and Captain Morgan. Captain is recovering himself and making his presence felt as he does
and there is joy there, for his healthy human.)
So maybe that is how we need to see the messes in our families, too.
Or with our friends, as Copa is doing with the lunch lady, who may be so much like a less-evolved version of who Copa was herself, once.
We are figuring out the truth of things.
And that, for us, turns out to be an ever-changing thing.
Kaliedoscope.
If I am going to continue to use that word so much, I am going to have to check the spelling. That is why there is so much kaliedescopic imagery for me then, maybe.
Good, then.
***
Anyway, the danger for us, or the challenge, depending on how you see it, is that, until we are healed, it will be our tendency to believe that what they (FOO) taught us about ourselves must be true.
I don't know why I find it so hard to believe they lied to me on purpose, given all the other things they have done. I mean, you don't accidentally hit and kick and beat your own children routinely without suspecting that makes you a jerk.
Unless you are one.
A jerk, I mean.
So, for anyone still with me, here:
We work so hard at trying to figure out the why of it. Then, one fine day, we figure out that it was the initial belief system that was the lie ~ all of it. That is what abusers do.
Why doesn't matter.
I have to keep saying that, because otherwise I will not believe myself about how this could actually be what it looks like. It makes no sense to me.
It doesn't have to.
Just like it is with everything else in our lives, when we know better, we do better.
Simple as that.
That is the only thing I know for sure.
We all are doing the best we know.
Except for people who are like, jerks.
:O)
***
And certainly, for me, that vulnerability, that thing that might have made my FOO right about me after all, was losing my own family. For another of us, it might be divorce. Or any of ten thousand other vulnerabilities we have been coached to believe are the only things that matter about us ~ or that we have taught ourselves could matter, could make a difference, could save us. That is why hearing the things every one of our difficult child kids says to each of us here on the site, almost verbatim, however they were raised, keeps coming back to me.
How could these words that hit the heart of me be true, be particular to me, if your children are saying the same things?
More on that, later.
***
Because we were set up for it by our original abusers, any challenge we face will echo the trauma of those same, first lies we believed were true about us.
The trauma feeling, the shame feeling, the FOG ~ at the end of our abilities to know what to do next, there is the truth we were taught to believe
Here is me, with my babies. Either baby.
http://www.lolriot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Funny-Otter-I-made-this-Baby-Otter.jpg
That is all of us, with our babies.
"I made this."
What an incredible thing. And how awful to know that our baby is not safe, and that helping them is not going to help them, that the trouble this time is not something we can fix.
It isn't that we are wrong in trying to help. It is that this trouble is too big for us to fix.
Ouch, forever. If that makes me codependent (Here is comes. Wait for it...
I have been a fool for lesser things.)
***
But what we do not see is that we were not the ones who did not keep our children safe. Against our advice and against our will and even, against their own wills, there is addiction. Or there is a proclivity toward emotional illness and that is exacerbated by addiction.
I was stronger, when it first started happening. But I listened, when "they" said I had parented this into existence. I was the mom. There was a time when homosexuality was blamed on the relationship to the mother, too. We believed things like that, things come of a pervasive societal mysogyny we still don't want to acknowledge ~ we believed that, back then.
But what I really know is that I was a screwed up but good enough mom.
I did not do what was done to me.
I could not give what I had not been given, but I could, and I did, learn all I could about how to do that.
I had D H mom.
I was a good enough mom.
I am a good enough person.
:O)
They lie. The lies are interchangeable, and they will use whatever works. No integrity.
And of course they are happy with the results, because that was their sole objective from the beginning.
So I don't even get to be: "I told you so."
That is where the hurt is for you I think, SWOT. Here it turned out never to have been true,
and they don't want to hear it! It's like this earth-shattering thing, and they don't want to know the truth of it.
Because they want what they have done with all their hearts.
Their blackened, shriveled little tiny hearts.
Maybe they are afraid they will lose what little they have. And in the Bible, it says that they will ~ that we all will, lose whatever we have, if what we have is not enough and if we do not have courage.
Huh.
***
That sounds like a cop out, I know, but it isn't. It seemed pretty clear at the time. I didn't want to duplicate with my own children what had been created in my FOO.
Pretty straightforward and simple.
I would not believe people would choose to relive the toxicity ~ I mean, to re-enact the whole, ugly thing.
But they were doing it all along because that is what they picked the first time around, too.
It never was that they didn't know any better, or had not had the same benefit I have had to see how to do this, how to live a life and be a family, in a better, more rewarding and strengthening way.
But just like that Tom Petty song about not having to live like a refugee, we can choose something different. We can choose to see. Everyone always thinks they are awake, that they see more than me. Remember what the Buddha said about that? "I am awake.", some seeker said.
"So you believe.", was the Buddha's response.
So, we just have to keep trying. Maybe the key is to address the feelings of shame or trauma and let the namings or accusations just sit there.
Nothing personal.
***
But you are right about not telling ourselves lies, SWOT. What we need to do is dig into and confront what we are ashamed of because we secretly believe the lies we grew up with. And it is that set of beliefs that keeps us a mess, that keeps us trying to make sense of things, to this day. It is beginning to come clear for me. (
Oh oh. I am awake. So you believe.) I imagine that we could not see the dysfunction until we were healthy enough, when we go back in our rememberings, to name the dysfunction as dysfunction.
Though we all say: "Oh, that is just how so and so is." That isn't true.
It was toxic.
So and so chooses toxic for his or her reality so he or she can come out on top in a game that looks, to us, like a kaliedescope. (See? I should have looked that word up. Then, I would know.) Instead, I have to not be perfect one. more. time.
F you mom
***
Instead of trying to be better than whatever that bad thing that happened was, instead of continuing to interact with those determined to keep us where we were
or who have an impersonal vendetta of punishment and revenge to mete out, we really do have to distance ourselves from them. From our perspective of "We can do better." But I think that, just like it is with enabling or with any self destructive thing we somehow stumble into, even that choice to be kind that later turned into something that may have been cowardice and functioning behind something that somehow became a persona ~ I don't think it started out that way. I think the persona hardens with continued abuse over time. Maybe that is where "What kind of person...." questions come in. That could be the persona, the person I wish I were, having a look at situations in which I should have just given up and gone home.
Except that it was my heart that had been hurt, and I carry that with me, of course.
I acknowledge the shame in how messed up everything was and is. It just isn't my shame, any more.
People do the damndest things. We are so forever blind regarding our own motivations. That is why we need to tell ourselves the truth, to find out what lives beneath the shame and clear it.
Life is quite complex.
Like a kalidescope, the patterns never holding still.
But maybe we are the lucky ones, who can grow through it. And maybe, when we think we are done is when we have hit that brick wall and begin to wrap ourselves up and refuse to see further.
Which is okay, too.
We come out of it, after awhile. And it takes the tie it takes, and that is a fine thing.
So, faith, then.
***
I can remember listening for hours to my mother spew poison about my dead grandmother when I came home to be with her after my father's death. That is what she chose to do with my time, and her own. And I had come from more than a thousand miles away to be with her. And I left the house we were building with just the contractor to choose for me, and that was okay but the house would have been different, had we been there to see and decide. I can remember believing that if I could listen sympathetically long enough, the bitterness would be cleansed and she would be able to heal.
That was not true.
As of the last time I saw her and from what my sister said the last time I talked to her, my mother is still vehemently hate filled regarding anything to do with my grandmother.
This is the grandmother I am forever talking about, the one who made the difference in all of our lives.
And my sister was vehemently hateful about the man who wanted to marry my mother, and take her away, after my father died.
So people don't change.
Abusive people don't change? What am I doing here all the time, posting my face off at my age, if not for change.
:O)
Cedar
Here is another thing I posted yesterday and decided was too yucky to post.
I don't want you guys to know everything about me. I would like to be seen as this really together person and so on.
Looks like I will have to pretend to be that somewhere else!!!
Anyway: There is a part of me who believes I do not have the capacity to think right. I don't think like everyone else. I never was able to do that. My mother: "Just don't think, Cedar."
She said that alot. It was part of the abuse thing, part of the breaking of my spirit, I suppose.
My father would just say things like: "I've never seen a kid like you."
So, I don't know what is beneath that, but I brought it up here, and I can remember bringing it up in FOO group therapy, too.
It could be that those are good differences.
Or it could be that kaliedoscope thing.
Cedar