Does anyone have this?

[Gabben]

Ami,

I think what you describing is called observing self? You and I talked about this once before, if I am not mistaken?  However, It was in the context of a desire to act out rather than stay with our feelings. It seems that this is progress. If you have ever read the book Healing the Child Within, there are charts that show recovery and growth, these charts are never a straight upwards graph - the work is always moving us in one direction but it seems that we go back and forth.

Perhaps again you are just growing more into that healthy observing stage?

Also, you said:

I was able to see "bad" traits such as selfishness, being judgemental, not  liking s/one(this was a VERY bad trait in my house) and I was able to observe then without judging myself as bad ..I just saw them float by. I reasoned that they were just "human feelings and thoughts'.

Perhaps you were picking up on something about this person(s), you antenna or radar gets clearer about who we can trust and who we can't trust as safe people as we grow. As a child, my moms telling me how I felt and how I didn't feel was always confusing my antenna and causing self-doubt. Now we are in touch!

A month ago, while I was on a retreat, there was a participant with whom I picked up on something negative, I only desired to interact with them from afar. I later asked one of the therapists on the retreat, in care and curiosity, if my perception was correct. She being a close and good friend, not my therapist, validated for me my intuition. She conveyed with care that they wear a thick mask and that their are acting, "yes your intuition was correct." 

Hope some of this helps,
(((((((((((((((AMI))))))))))))))))

Lise

[Ami]

Dear Lise,
That helps so very much.I think that I am pulling back and feeling "detachment" and it scared me b/ci it was new.  Love to you. Thanks for all your help.            Love   Ami

(((((((((((Lise)))))))))))))))))))

[Ami]

Dear Amber,
  I was "afraid "of it(detachment) b/c it was "new", although if I think back,I did have this quality in the times in my life that I was centered.
  What is really scary and upseting to me is how I don't trust myself.I used to. I used to feel like if I had an emotion, then it was 'human". I did not question myself :my feelings and thoughts as if they were "people that I couldn't trust". I had an "easy" relationship with them  If I had one wish ,it would be siimply to trust myself ,as my Aunt does. My Aunt simply says,'It is  human Ami ,dear."
 Lord--to be that "normal"
  I can see the pitifulness of my M. She was so insecure.I used to wonder,as a kid, why she couldn't just make up her mind without so much angst.
  Well here I am ,now-----needing reassurance for every 'ouch" or emotion.
  I hope that as I face it,it will be on it's way out--as is usually the case when I write about s/thing.
                        Love    Ami

[Iphi]

Whoa Ami I never thought of it this way before, but it hits home for me like a big blinding lightbulb!

With the N mother and the N(ish?) H --EVERYTHING is so you don't trust yourself. It is SO big to see this.

Ha ha ha ha no wonder I don't trust my own perceptions - DUH!  I'm cracking up laughing! Not an accident! All these years I angst about 'is my perception right? Could this be correct? This couldn't be right, not if I am noticing it?"  Oh my god! 

It's like you just turned on the light and dispelled the darkness of my ignorance and confusion.  I'm serious.

I've realized from something you wrote about how your M's target was your feelings, that my dad's target was my knowledge - my mind - my perceptions.  He disparaged these relentlessly since I was a tiny girl.  The details on that would be for another post, if I ever get some quiet time to actually post at length, but I want to say the work you are doing right now and posting is helping me hugely.  I will read your post and have to rush off but 24/7 these related insights and memories and understandings are coming up for me - it's the connections between it all especially that are being illuminated that I have never been able to make before.

Also, I read about meditation and intermittently try to practice it.  My understanding from readings is that we are not our thinking minds - all those thoughts and feelings.  Meditation is the practice of knowing ourselves as spiritual awareness, NOT the thinking mind.  So one observes the thinking mind as something that is happening within our still awareness.  I find some metaphors helpful that I have read, such as - think of the mind like a stream of water and all individual thoughts as leaves in the stream.  In meditation (and the goal is to be able to live this understanding all the time) we practice to watch the thoughts go by, not clutch them.  When we clutch them we mistakenly thing of the thought as Us, or mine.  Ego gets in and confuses things, brings in guilt and anxiety.  All people have mind and thoughts floating constantly through like leaves in a stream.  Hmm don't know if I expressed that fully or well.  Like Lise posted, it's about being in witness consciousness which has many different names - stillness, the cloud of unknowing, beingness, witness, presence, awareness.  Understanding ourselves as a consciousness, not a form but beyond forms.  Physical things are forms, but thoughts are forms too. 

One idea that helps me is that the mind is like a tool of consciousness.  It's a powerful tool, but we are not our tools - we are spirit and have minds.  That's the idea I guess.  I've been trying to get some detachment for a long time but for some reason these concepts I've been describing above take a really really long time to sink in for me.

Back to the topic of your B - I feel so badly for him without even knowing the details.  I see what you mean about complaining about the dinner when he's basically a victim of outrageous crimes.  And I'm sure the dinner is M's idea and the unspoken thing is that what she chooses to do - make the dinner - is somehow tacit recompense for all the other crimes.  Because she makes a birthday dinner and your B eats it, then because he ate it he must never bring up the REAL stuff that is huge and has gone on for god knows how many decades.  It's like those stories where you travel to the underworld or the fairy world and you accidentally eat something small and can NEVER go home or get out of the deal you didn't know you agreed to. 

Ah got to run. 

[Hopalong]

Iphi, thank you for understanding things so well that you illumine my understanding too.

Brilliant, inspiring post...

My mind thanks you and my heart feels good and my spirit is just there, peace...

xo
Hops

[Iphi]

 Hops - glad that was expressed in an effective way for you.  I have read lots of stuff on these lines and tried meditating this away and that away and mostly it was like the guy said in the link you posted "my butt itches.  Can I stop now.  I've been here forever.  How much longer - I've only been here for 20 seconds? What?!  In and out goes the breath and... so what?"  Anyway, didn't get it and didn't get it and then after some years started to gradually get it - and it's not complicated but, I don't know - it was just really hard for me to understand.   

I have really got to recommend the Power of Now in this context.  It's just such a good book about extricating yourself from identifying your total being as just your mind/body/emotions.  It's really good. 

[Ami]

Dear Iphi,
  You said it ( about my B) so much better than I did. Thank you.I called my F and told him essentially what you said. He is really cute. He said,"I will have to think about that." . His whole "life"(perceptions ) are falling down around him and he says,"I will have to think about that.'
  ( The "worse" thing that ever happened to my M was when my F started going to Al Anon,13 years ago. He started walking out of her prison.)
  Iphi,I am so glad that my healing is helping you.I have always related to you ..I think that we think alike in many ways and have similar emotional patterns.
  This weekend ,it was very hard for me to share,but it reaped great rewards ,as I shed old ideas that were held together with shame.
   Iphi, This is really interesting.I have wanted to share it with you for a long time. Your F was your 'main" parent and my M was my "main 'parent.
  I read that the D's of N's CAN develop their intellect,but NOT their emotions. I wondered if your F would not let you develop your intellect ,as I could not develop my emotions.
  I do not feel blocked in the intellect.
   My emotions are another story. I feel like I am emotionally ill or mentally ill for "most " emotions. I have to ask people,"Am I O.K.(normal) .This is so painful for me that I can't tell you.I have a dear friend (who i I have been driving crazy with,'Am I normal?")
   I so badly just want to feel a feeling and think a thought and just "be" with it without being "petrified' that I am "losing my mind"
   I guess that sharing is the first step. This was the arena in which my N M just denuded me.
   You,on the board,give me courage to go on b/c I am not alone, anymore           Love   Ami

((((((((((((((((Iphi))))))))))))))
                             

[Iphi]

Ami - Yes I think you expressed it so well Ami.  For me it is the intellect that is all crushed.  If you could see me, so much is in body language and expression.  I was in a group therapy last year and they pointed out that if I express something (such as an observation) I almost 'take it back' again with body language.  I undercut it by laughing at what a silly thing I just said or wave it away with my hands (or both), hunch my shoulders.  I don't even know all the ways that I say "don't take this seriously. Don't listen to me" because to me - that is when the big attacks happened.

The T in the group pointed out to me "you seem unable to take yourself seriously." and she was right about that and I had never seen that piece of it.   It is in this realm that I have been relentlessly savaged over the course of decades.  This is where the big damage is and enormous anxiety, so much that I cannot function.  Also I am paralyzed and when someone is aggressive to me in exactly this way - I am unable to defend myself at all.

So even if the specifc things are different - like I was never mocked just for enjoying a simple pleasure like painting fingernails like you were, it's the same mechanics with a different spin - yes?  For me it would be something like - I took art classes for many years and my dad would tear down the drawings and paintings, tear down art as an interest, talk about how I would starve on the street, how naive I was, how uninformed, how completely unsuited to the real world on and on and on.  Not just about art, but about everything all the time in every area.  The patronizing the mischaracterizing, the inability to validate or even recognize any actual attributes, efforts or accomplishments, and always the lies.  Well, you guys know.  The anxiety is so bad if I move toward intellect - things that spark the PTSD - that I seize up - paralyzed - beyond panic stricken - it is throughout my whole being.  I feel safe using my intellect in areas my dad knows nothing about - as long as I only keep it all safe within myself and do NOT try to express anything into the world. 

I can easily see how that would damage you in just the feeling of being at ease in your own self and understand how the locus of the damage is in your emotions and relationship with this part of you.  I relate to your experience very much too, even though there's an apples and oranges kind of difference about our respective experiences with a cerebral N mom v. a dad.

Ami you are way brave to press forward and be 'out there' with your journey.  And also you take the fight to the 'enemy' so to speak by speaking up with your F and not letting him get himself swallowed back up.  Personally, I believe the trajectory we carry in our lives has implications beyond just this life, not that I personally know what those implications are.  But for example if I kept smoking it would have some sort of implication beyond what I know.  Given that belief, it is really good for your dad beyond the situation we are familiar with (current life married to an N) that he is slowly but surely freeing himself and walking out of it.  However long it takes and however far he gets, he is surely moving in the right direction, the way I see it. 

[Hopalong]

I feel save using my intellect in areas my dad knows nothing about - as long as I only keep it all safe within myself and do NOT try to express anything into the world. 

Damn, Iphi. That makes me MAD.

What is the (((()))) opposite typographical indication for N-strangling? Okay, pretend these are barbed-wire. Note direction of barbs. So I am using that to encase Iphi's "male parent".


}}}}}}}}}him{{{{{{{{{{{   


Hops

[Ami]

Dear Iphi,
  That post was so validating to me----Thank you so much. My F is a very special person. He always has been. He THANKS me for helping him get out of denial. He tells me how proud he is of me for changing .. He has always been a kind ,loving person. He just would not stand up. Also, the lie he told me that my M was O.K. pushed me over the edge. However, he has given me a true apology and it is over.
  It is amazing the difference between a true apology and an N apology(night and day)
  For me, my current struggle is to accept my feelings and thoughts. I did not have criricsm in intellectual or artistic pursuits. They were encouraged . I was never put down for them. Whatever I wanted to study or learn,my parents provided the way and the means, happily. Now,I am free in these areas. It is amazing what conditioning will do.I can study an instrument or a subject and enjoy it in freedom.
  However,if I have a "smidgeon" of a "feeling,I think that I am "mentally ill"----oy.
   Just wanted to share HOW much conditioning determines our outlook. I think that we can let it go by facing it and expressing it. That always has helped me so far.             Love   Ami


(((((((((((((Iphi))))))))))))

[Gabben]

I feel like I am emotionally ill or mentally ill for "most " emotions. I have to ask people,"Am I O.K.(normal) .This is so painful for me that I can't tell you.


(((Ami))),

You said the above and my heart went out to you -- I know this needing of affirmation that we are OK. Children of N's have an affirmation deficit. I once heard someone say that God uses people to bless us and that a blessing from someone is like the wind on a sail that helps it to move. With N parents there was not enough wind or love.

Only Lord know how many times I need to hear the I am OK blessing.  I still need to hear that from my T. It is like my M's negative and critical voice are still in me - PTSD, I can call my T and ask her in the middle of the day, am I OK?

For a while I was calling her everyday at noon for about 5 minutes of perspective because my head was so full of the past and my negative perseptions of myself. Now this the support from this message board helps.

Lise