Can a person come out of denial in stages? Like coming out of brainwashing piece by piece?
One of the main things I struggle with in many areas of life is this dread of rejection when I fail to please, and yet feeling like harsh judges will reject me for the slightest failure. For a long time, I lived like the whole world is this way, but it was because my whole family is this way. lol! They can judge and throw you away because -- they don't care about you! Also, because they want you to wear a black hat so they can have a 'bad guy' in their narrative. A scape goat.
I've been reading the Eckhart Tolle books and listening to the podcast of the Oprah series of classes with Tolle. He says that if someone is very unconscious, then the ego operates in them without check. The ego insists on its own rightness, and superiority, always, and insists that other people be wrong, and more inferior, always. Also he talks a lot about how, in the unconsciousness of our minds, there is a part of the unconscious that is like a ghost of accumulated pain, and it can sort of 'take over the wheel' when you are in unconsciousness (which I would maybe call a sort of 'being on automatic pilot') and when that pain takes over your wheel - it seeks to feel pain and to provoke the feeling of pain in others, usually those closest to you like a partner or your kids. When the pain is on the prowl it seeks to drag the individual into deeper unconsciousness (into patterns of dysfunction, of survival, of reactivity), and also anyone else nearby. He calls it the 'pain body' and he says it always acts pretty much the same and the person acting under the influence of it will usually smear you behind your back and tell tales about your badness. Mmm ego combined with pain seeking to cause pain - an unpalatable combination.
Right now these are helpful concepts for me to contemplate, though I don't feel all they way like I 'get it' or have got it. It seems I recognize the dynamics operating within my family and within myself. And, oh my goodness, I would like to be free of it - it's like a tar pit! Thinking about it (ego and pain body) as a process that affects humanity in general, like flu or other illnesses that happen, helps me feel detached from feeling pain from my family, but not in a dissociated way. More like as if the pain was the size of a small itch in a large body, instead of feeling uncomfortable all over. But in the past, when actions in my family felt really excruciating (the lack of caring or love, the lashing out to engender pain) and I could not react to it - then I would go to a remote place of a sort of dreaminess. Also I have always retreated heavily into books. I read a loooot of books. However, books were safe places to live, and vicariously in stories I experienced interchanges of love and caring through the characters. In the world of stories I was not me, stuck in the role of scapegoat, the wrong person.
Thinking of the pain always doing what it does, too, helps me find more acceptance of the way my dad trashes me to third parties as a big disappointment, an unfilial offspring and so on, so that he can reap supply as a victim. This process of his is another way I feel very voiceless and is a big part of why I was always slaving for him, to prove my good faith, which always was unacknowledged. Like a bad investment, always sucking more energy.
I was asking myself how would a functional family act differently than, say, the one I actually have? It seems to me that if someone triangulated an individual and carried tales, the functional family members would reserve the benefit of the doubt. Also they would direct the person to address their issues directly with the individual they have the issue with, and not lend their energy to a big drama. Also, I imagine that a healthier family would encourage members to work out differences and express positive encouragements. Additionally, in a healthy family I would imagine that extended family would express support and encouragement if they saw members struggling under burdens of life. In our case, I mean that we kids were struggling because our mom was absent and we were parentified to take care of my dad. I have to assume that my dad's FOO offered him individual support, but no one ever offered support to us kids.
But they are not at all like a healthy family, at least toward me. If they are healthy toward others, then that is nice. My sister likes to assure me that everyone is fine, except for me. It is only recently that it has dawned on me that my sister is a gaslighter, because it advances her ego in being more right, more better and more special. I have known caring and compassionate people and you know they never say things to let you know that you are personally defective so people mistreat you.
I was holding on to a myth that mistreatment and uncaring, spurning and negative dramas were just accidental and occasional in my family, but it isn't so. They have some great points. I've seen them accomplish some good things in life. But I have never, not ever, known them to be emotionally available, or have personal courage or strength or compassion, or honesty.
