At any rate, do you feel that you have any family? I don't mean FOO. Even just you and hub and your poochie is a family. There are large and small families. The love binds them, not the size.
"The love binds them, not the size."
I love this, Serenity.
I do feel that I have family ~ that my FOO is my family of origin. the difference now is that I get it that my people are intentionally, willfully, with malice aforethought hurtful people. I get it now, in a way I did not, before we began our healing here, that my people are hurtful in the ways they define everyone in their lives, not just me. Not just my kids. (And boy, could I hurt them back for that one. I am so angry about how they interpreted my children when my kids are in freaking trouble. Roar.)
Ahem.
For me, turning away out of anger or disgust did not work. I was still carrying the shame that colored everything about me. Just as, when our kids fell into the terrible things that kept happening to all of us, I could not even look outside what I must have done to hurt them. It isn't that people didn't come up with diagnoses or blah, blah, blah.
I didn't believe them.
The overriding concern for me was where had I gone wrong when I had been so careful not to do what had been done to me. Had it seeped out of me into them? I believed with all my heart that if I could just know what it was, if I could know where I'd gone wrong, I could fix it. I said that all the time, whatever therapist it was I was seeing. That began to change for me, and I have posted about this before, when Serenity posted that article on verbally abusive adult children.
There I was.
So, I stood up.
I could always stand up. That wasn't the hard part. It was seeing that standing up was the correct action.
That was the thing I could never believe in because in the core of me, I could not believe in myself.
What had I done to have made it impossible for my own children to live safe, happy lives? What that overwhelming certainty that I must have done something horrible that I didn't remember or that I was too stupid to see...that was the core of shame FOO hurt into me when I was just a little girl. Confronted, over time, with the terrible things that were happening to my kids, to my marriage, to everything I had created of my life, I was thrown into that core shame reality.
My fault. My failure. Something terrible, some defective truth about me that my children were being made to pay for.
That was not helpful. Could never have helped me or the kids or
D H. But it was all that I knew to be true, that felt so true, no matter how many therapists said the things therapists say. In the core of me, there was this kind of all encompassing shame. I went into therapy, not to heal it ~ I didn't know that was possible. I went into therapy to ferret out what I'd done.
And was betrayed, probably because of that core of vulnerability, that core of shame, by that dorky first therapist. He could do that because I had given him authority over me when I made the decision to trust him.
I needed to know what I'd done, so I could stop doing it and help my kids. I was ~ when he said I was a manipulator and that he would never trust the compliments of someone like that, I figured that must be it. I didn't know what that meant, exactly, but at least I had a professional's opinion to inform my search. I just needed to figure out what it was he meant, and how that would apply to what had happened to my kids, and to all of us.
Isn't that something.
We really do need to be careful, when we elect to unravel those core issues of shame and self hatred, and those other beliefs hurt into us when we were too little to make sense of things. If we have gone on to create our lives and our families successfully, those issues still haunt us, but they cannot destroy us. If we should have children who will challenge everything we know, we will be (I was) thrown right into the thick of all those old, toxic realities we grew up knowing were the truth about us, whatever else we had accomplished. I think it doesn't have to be a child in trouble. People who come into a great deal of money, or people who become very famous, seem to lose their bearings in life, too.
I believe that it is trauma over time ~ good things or bad things ~ that throws us back into our core belief systems as we try to pull ourselves together to incorporate whatever the change is. Good change or bad change, the change itself stresses the defenses we have learned to erect in order to function well in our lives.
That's what I think happened to me.
I am glad I chose to do this. I am grateful for this site, and for my witnesses, and for the fact that however shaming or ugly the things I needed to process were...you guys were there for me.
I see changes in the ways each of us think and see ourselves. This method is working for each of us and I just feel so ~ I don't know. Like, sacredly amazed, and fortunate, so fortunate to have been able to ~ well, I don't know. To do what we've done, I suppose.
We didn't know, in the beginning, that it would work. We didn't know, but we stayed with it, and we are doing it; we are healing.
:O)
Family. Yes, I have family. I know their names and faces, and I love them. I do. If I could choose to just turn that off, I would. But I have been frozen in so many areas of self all of my life. I don't want to be frozen, don't want there to be parts of myself that I cannot access for the fear of it. So, I do have family. I think of my mom, and of my sister pretty often still, but I see them differently, now. I am not afraid of them. I never knew I was afraid of them? Except that I did know.
And I was right to be afraid.
Denial is a wonderful thing in some ways. It enabled me to believe in them, and in myself, too. Over our time here, I confronted myself so many times with the same traumatic or weirdly hurtful things that I stopped being in denial. I think part of it was that I had to let go of needing my FOO to cherish and respect me. I had to let go of that. My FOO functions around a dynamic I cannot recognize the value in. They are never going to be who I needed them to be so badly that I found my doomed attempts at interaction with them heroic. It was heroic to try. I was scared. I covered the fear of betrayal through a kind of belief that they were worth it, that the end result, that dinner I was always posting about, was worth any hurt I sustained in trying to achieve it.
Until my sister hurt my child.
Until my mother hurt my D H.
Up with some s**t I will not put, right?
So the answer Serenity is yes. I have family. They are committed to family as it functions for them. I was only in there at all because of my belief in that dinner. I think that may have been a rationalization, but maybe not really. I kept forgiving or understanding or just numbing out to be with my family of origin. One of the things I remember posting about my sister is that I believe her now, but I no longer believe in her.
So she has no power over me.
She is not someone who needs my protection, understanding, or advice. My very own sister was manipulating me! It looks to me now that she hates me, that it was always a weird kind of hatred at the heart of all of it. I am still sort of surprised and hurt that this could be so.
But it is better to know.
So I have a family? It just turns out they are using my very own fantasy of family dinner to ~ I don't know what it is, really. There is a hierarchy of value, in dysfunctional families, where there should be safe harbor for all of us, instead.
Like one big, round table, not small card tables set up varying distances from the main players.
And that's all I know about that, this morning.
When my mother dies, or if my sister should die or one of my own people that I love should die...I think that is none of their business. My mother...I am still conflicted about hatred. Seeing as I see her now, what would I say, what would I see, at a funeral gathering.
I liked your idea, Serenity, of a private ceremony with a priest or a rabbi or pastor or some other trusted figure to mark the ending of the story as sacred without all the falseness that would be required to get through a wake.
Once we see, we cannot choose not to see.
Very manipulative, every single thing that goes on in my FOO.
Respect, or honor, or trust ~ just aren't there.
I don't know what will happen. I am okay with that. There was a time, and I posted about it here all the time, when knowing my mom will be gone one day could make me physically sick. Remorse, if I were wrong. I would imagine her feeling so badly that I had taken myself out of the picture. Man, I drove myself nuts with that one. Know what D H said?
"Cedar.
She hung up on you." And he would go on about what really happened, about what the time frame really was. About how this is how it had always been, and that I would not see it. And if I did see anything that I could not rationalize somehow, I blamed myself for having failed through some intrinsic defect, through some wrongness, in me.
And that was true. I would forget those true things, all the time, when I was in contact with FOO. It was all a question of my responsibility, of what was the right thing to do.
Isn't that something.
Now, I see there is no right thing.
That is how my FOO works. It's never going to change. I have no responsibility because the way it works is the way they want it to work. That's why I don't get the win in it for them.
Probably because to have it as I envisioned it would mean we all were healed, I wanted the dinner. They want the right to exclude from the dinner.
That is the difference.
So, I will just be making dinner for us, then.
Dinner is dinner. We can eat it alone or in company. The crucial thing is to know we merit being well-nourished, and to celebrate that, and that we are here, right here in our beautiful lives.
Here is another difference, now. Those kinds of things my FOO relishes will never be tolerated around me now because I know who they are. I took a look at them, and at me.
They can make their own dinner, and never come to my house for dinner, again.
I would give them a glass of water. No ice. In the driveway. Not even on the porch. And it isn't even a question of safety, anymore. I seem to have lost interest in them. I already know how it's going to come out. Their actions have always been transparent as glass. Now I see that none of it was a mistake. Every bit of it, from the beginning, was intended.
Huh.
Cedar
I just wanted to add that the glass would be plastic. Warped by the dishwasher plastic glass of water with no ice.
On the driveway.