Thank you, Stormy, for all you have posted on triangulation. Today is the day that it finally sunk in and answered a big question from my childhood. This idea of parents each choosing a child to stand in for the other parent and having the result be constant fighting and bickering between the children is exactly what was going on for my entire childhood.
I just want to cry when I think of all the terrible, violent fighting that went on between my sister and me. And my parents blaming their terrible lot in life on that constant fighting. Every painful and dysfunctional event in my childhood can be traced back to this.
And no wonder I was the neighborhood scapegoat so often. Actually my sister was, too, in a lightening rod kind of way. She almost demanded being treated like a scapegoat or martyr. In our family, both children were trained in different ways to stand in for someone who must be punished. The perfect recipe for being a general scapegoat. My sister received all the punishment my father couldn't dole out to his wife. I received all the rejection, resentment, and disdain my mother couldn't dole out to her husband. After all, he was a man, a husband. No higher calling in life for a woman than to be married. So all that venom had to go somewhere. How about the stand-in? Yes, this ugly redhead will do.
They were both martyrs to the sibling rivalry, yet they fed it. Then used it as an excuse for every little thing in life they were reluctant to do or try or spend money on. We can't take vacations, you guys ruined our trip to Florida by fighting all the way down there. We can't visit people because you kids would ruin it by fighting. People can't come over because you kids would ruin it by fighting. On and on and on.
Yet, they did everything possible to subtly encourage the fighting. It became our identity. It was a real attention getter in many ways. It required special treatment in certain situations. Every summer when we went to Y camp, my mother enclosed a note with our applications requesting that "these sisters be kept separated". All kinds of stuff like that. We were actually kind of well-known for fighting all the time. And disliked, partly because of all that fighting.
Even realizing that in real families kids do fight--ours was something on a whole other level. And it was because of the triangulation. This gives a whole new meaning to me of parentified child. We each had to actually become a particular parent psychologically. That seems really sick to me.
I almost emailed the excerpt to my sister thinking she might find the insight useful. Then I remembered her Nishness. It occurred to me that she or my mother could use the insight as ammunition on some level. I am not responsible for her journey through the mess of our childhoods. If she is N, then my "help" won't cure her because nothing will. If I was a stand-in for my father and she was a stand-in for my mother--well, who are we now? Does that dynamic still hold true somewhere in the background? I think it might since nobody has actually had any insight about it up until now. And it has taken me a year of study to be ready to learn this.
I think I am just blown away. Click, click, click, click, click. So many answers slipping into place all in one day.
I have a feeling this also happened to my husband. There are five siblings. One of his sisters, the one he is closest to, was an especial target of his father. Terrible, frightening verbal and physical abuse. And my husband was always treated differently by his mother. He had to wait on her all the time and be a little man yet she often forgot about him and treated him like he was different from all the other children, like she had no idea what to make of him. Stories about him, that she thinks are funny, I think are tragic coming from someone's mother.
Maybe this is why we "recognized" each other at 17.
This insight is going to be so valuable. Stormy, I don't think I can properly convey what this means to me. This is the key and I don't think I ever would have discovered it on my own. Thank God I didn't get called in to work today. Absolutely amazing.
Pennyplant
