Another layer of the onion

[Gaining Strength]

I am late.  I was due somewhere 12 minutes ago and still I come here to write.  I have been watching myself slip deeper in layers of dysfunction over the past couple of months.  The more determined I am to break free the more dysfunctional I become.  and then POP - a realization breaks through - I am dealing with yet another layer of the onion. I have a wound, deeply embedded from long ago that wants to break out.  And then I know what all this dysfunction is about.

I love to come here to process it.  Here I feel the compassion but more importantly the understanding that has been missing and the absense of which is part of that gaping wound that has festered all along these many years.

Now that I have unburdened myself of this, I can move on.  but I will return to write more.  It is in the writing here that the name of this layer will become clear.  For now I can only see it hazily and know that it has to do with being responsible for everyone else even while (as a child) noone was responsible for me. (And hidden in that parental responsibility was caring.  In others words noone (neither mother nor father) cared about me except in regards to what my existence did to benefit them.


This is a very, very deep pain.

[Nonameanymore]

Dear GS,

I feel exactly the same - only you are brave enough to say it's about you and not what people around you are doing.

Hang in there

P

[Ami]

(((((GS )))))       ((((P))))                               x o x o   Ami

[Gaining Strength]

Persephone - I can only own  my role when I am in the healing process - otherwise the pain from the wound is far too great, the shame and fear and expectation of rejection simply overwhelming - thrusting me into a protective, defensive denial/denier of responsibility.  Ironically, it is only when I own some responsibility that I can actually shift out of victimhood into healing/healer.

I am not responsible for the original woundings, nor am I responsible for the reactions as a child that were necessary for psychological (and quite possibly physical) survival.  I am not sure where or when responsibility for my reaction to the painful, chronic wounding actually adheres to me. Is it age of majority??? Is it when I am strong enough psychologically??? I don't know even though I think it a significant question.  But I do know that it is required for me to heal  - that I must own my portion before I can change the dysfunctional behavior.  But I cannot own it if I am still vulnerable.  And there are few places in this world that I know of that are safe enough to do this kind of work.  This is the only safe place I have discovered and even here I am not fully safe.  Perhaps such a place does not exist.

[Gaining Strength]

Ami - yesterday I sent you a (((Ami))) but I got that irritating note - You Have Posted within 60 seconds and must Wait.  So here is my (((Ami))) to you.  Thanks for yours - GS

[Gaining Strength]

This is always a painful process but I find sitting out the process and just "being" to be intolerably, chronically painful without hope of truly functioning the way my heart longs to function in this life.

I have been looking forward to going through this process again but it will not be rushed.  The "issue" or "issues" that must be addressed refuse to present themselves on demand.  So even though I have know about these issues and even written about them here over the recent years - even still I did not have access to them until now.

My parents had children because it was "the thing to do" not because they wanted children nor did they love us once we were born.  They held us, me with indifference unless I, as a dependent needed something from them - love, comfort, teaching.  I was remembering an inventory of times I turned to my mother to learn things it seems every mother guides her daughter through: times of adolescence and puberty, times when dating,  times when I left their home and married, times when I divorced.  My mother turned her shoulder with nothing to offer me - no counsel, no advice only contempt.  I took on that contempt to mean that I was not worthy of even the most basic mothering but now I understand that it was not about me, it was that SHE felt unworthy and out of her own weakness she chose throughout my life to project her own inadequacies onto me and sadly for far too long, I accepted them.  Now comes the hard work of undoing all of that damage.

But that is only a very small piece of what I am struggling with today.  I am still not fully certain but I believe that the next piece which is far more convoluted and far more damaging is also more difficult to describe and bring into the light where it can be processed and seen for what it really is.  It is a small trifling rather than the large monster it first appeared as a child.

[Gaining Strength]

My parents had a remarkable ability to take their shortcomings, particularly as parents, and turn them around and put the responsibility or blame on their children.  I recognize that projecting our weaknesses and shortcomings onto others seems to be almost a human trait but for most humans that projection is done onto "others", "outsiders", "the enemy" while only the best is seen of offspring.  But in my nuclear family it worked the other way around - the offspring were the targets for the vilest projects while friends and their children were trumpeted as accomplished and the models to aspire to.

Nothing about this has ever changed.

The worst part of this is not even that I group up in an environment when noone had my back.  And that is a horrendous part of my history, because I went out into the world and replicated it in my friendships and relationships at a great price.  But the worst part of it was that not only did neither my mother nor my father have my back but I was a target for projection of any and alll of their own shame.  That meant that any error I made, any wound that I had, any vulnerability they saw was an open target.  Any time I exposed a mistake or a struggle they both went for the jugular.  The consequence of that has been that where I am most vulnerable today, rather than being able to work through it to closure, I shut down and retreat armadillo like to a protective stance that is neither protective nor helpful but actually dnagerous and disabling.

[Gaining Strength]

I long to move out of this posture as it is crippling me and will have terrible results for my child.

In recent weeks, my ways of retreat have become more and more apparent.  I turn to a form of numbing that in and of itself is not negative.  I watch TV or research on the computer or read books.  None of this passive retreat is associated with the humiliating rejection and recriminations of my youth.  As long as I stayed out of their way I was not an object of their destructive humiliations.  That was piled on when I tried to do something for myself.

Much of what I did was followed by a form of "Who do you think you are?" I remember one time at about age 10, I asked my mother what we would be having for breakfast the next day.  My question so infuriated her that she said she would not be fixing breakfast but I would.  That was all the instruction I got.  No trip to the grocery store, no conversation about what was available and no information about how to cook.  I had never been allowed to cook in the kitchen.  She had a full time staff of three, 5 days a week and I was not allowed to "mess up her kitchen."  So that Sunday monrning I made soup and cooked cubed steak.  I used Campbell's soup but did not know to add water.  I cooked the steaks but had no idea how to cook them but even if I had they would not have been very good, cubed steak is very, very tough meat.  So without any experience and without any instruction my meal was a complete disaster.  And for decades, when the subject of my cooking came up the derogatory, shaming hilarity of my failed first meal was part and parcel of the conversation. It was intended to shame and humiliate and it usually accomplished it's goal. 

[Gaining Strength]

This type of humiliation was the norm for me.  It attached to anything that I set as a personal goal and it would eventually lead to a shutting down and failure and a withdrawal or "paralysis" when ever I got involved in activities of personal interest or in pursuit of lifetime goals - like career or homekeeping or other basic aspects of life.

I have been unconsciously subjected to that "retreat from humiliation" when I established a goal of self-betterment.  It has been a lifetime of repeated failure.  Whenever I set up a goal for change, improvement or personal desire I might make progress for a period but ultimately it would become derailed and I thought of myself as simply a complete failure.  And my family, if aware, would pile on the reminders that I was nothing but a failure and always had been and always would be.  I have been unaware that I unconsciously fully accepted and lived into this belief.

Now I must bring it all out into the open so that I might dispense with it, allow the light to destroy the power of the dark.

[Gaining Strength]

Repressed along with the understanding that they (parents and brothers) were not on my side, was the recognition that this string that tied the elephant could actually be broken.  The power of the humiliation in those formative years is so strong that I feel it even as I am typing at this moment. 

There is some need or/and expectation of humiliation.  There is an overwhelming sense of inadequacy that has a power which I believe is ripe for destroying.

The pain of sitting in retreat is less than the pain of opening up again and going through it, and I must go through it to get to the other side.  I have been through this process enough times to know that it is NOT as difficult as it seems from this side and still the fear and resistance that I am aware of is incredibly strong.  But I MUST break this chain.  My life depends upon it and so does my son's. 

My greatest fear is not the pain but failure.  I am ghastly afraid of failure, of proving them right.  That is my greatest fear.  Heaven help me find the strength.

[Hopalong]

Dear GS, brave woman:

Swamped to my eyeballs so this has to be short, but:
Nobody who can describe so well is a failure.

My greatest fear is not the pain but failure.  I am ghastly afraid of failure, of proving them right.  That is my greatest fear.

Destructive, inept and callous parents are very poor role models. Hence, what they would think "We were right" means is already severely distorted and skewed, so you wouldn't your value measured by THEIR yardstick anyway.

Our whole culture's definitions, and likewise a claustrophobic regional culture's, for what a "failure" is, are severely distorted and skewed. So you don't have to accept the TOWN's view of who's a "failure", either. You might as well weed that out too. They're likely pretty enmeshed.

You are weeding out the roots of THEIR values and judgments from your own, so you are no longer enmeshed with them. So you see yourself as an individual human being with inherent worth and dignity (no matter WHAT things "look like"), not something somebody shat on the linoleum. So, in fact, THEIR "right" is not your "right". It just isn't.

It's just not possible for them to be "right" in any way that's not distorted and skewed, so therefore it cannot possibly be a trustworthy or meaningful evaluation for you.

(This is the compassionate truth, imo. And your own values include compassion.)

love
Hops

[HeartofPilgrimage]

I've been there too, with a mom who bragged about being "too impatient to teach" me anything. She wore impatience as a badge of honor. Then putting me down for not knowing how to do stuff. Labelling me in a put-down kind of way because I was a normal kid who didn't do everything "her way" in the house. Calling me "too slow" or "too messy" to do things, when really she didn't want to share the work because it might not be done her way. Then being a martyr because "nobody ever helps me around the house." Everything was always somebody else's fault, wasn't it? And the little children that we were believed what they told us, that the problem was within us.

[Gaining Strength]

I had a very difficult time getting up this morning.  It wasn't about waking up.  I woke  up early but was struggling with a demon. In my struggle I saw the troika - rejection/exclusion;  sabotage of success; and fear of failure/lack or resources/you get what you deserve (nothing/the dredgs).

This is the way out - identify the demon or demons that have me trapped in paralysis at the moment and face them.  Overcome the entrenched habit of numbing out with food, conversation, shut down, reading, computer, tv, general "business".  Write down and FACE the positive action driven goals and face the demons that that emerge by merely naming the goals and desires before me.

[Gaining Strength]

" there's always a new "gem" to discover & it's all so very painful."

so very, very painful and therefore very, very difficult to look at that pain even though it is clear that doing so is the path out of the suffering.

Your watergate dream focuses on that extraordinarily difficult piece that, in some ways, keeps offspring of Ns isolated.  Much of the most potent psychological abuse was covert and invisible to outsiders and insiders alike.  It was denied and that denial had more power than the evidence.  I firmly believe that our US justice system based on documentable proof works against those of us who suffered covert, psychological denigration and humiliation.  We have internatlized the boundaries of that system as adhering to a greater, abstract form of justice and because we cannot "prove" what was done to us and win in a court of law or even a court of our peirs or a court of our family then we must be wrong.  NOT SO.  We must become our own advocates and this place is the best place I have found to do that.

[Gaining Strength]

Hops - thanks.  I believe that exposing the skewed TOWN's view of failure helps me see an alternative perspective.  I am so thankful for the blank space right here where I can paint the view I grew up with and then work with it, receive feedback like your wordlike gems that help me re-order my understanding.  I am painting and series of images, editing and revising with each new perspective.  The alteration from image to image is on a small, fine scale but ultimately the change will become significant and the outcome will be a new, more accurate vision about who I am without the blinders imposed on me by family inculturation.

Thank you for understanding.  And thank you for the compassion and kindness of taking your time to share view and encouragement with me.  You strengthen me.  I will overcome.  I will move into a place of flourishing.