I have not read your last post yet PR.
I have something that I need to get down before I take in your wisdom.
I want to write about two things this morning.
The first is this process, how it works and where I think I am in it.
The second is about what small tidbits more I am gleening about my relationship with my mother.
Understanding the process is important for me because it is a kind of a road map. As I understand it, I gain hope in the midst of the journey.
I have felt as though I have been going backwards for a couple of weeks. That is always a terrible experience where hopelessness peeks his miserable head in everynow and then and recovery takes longer each time. Keeping hope is essential to staying on the journey no matter how lost I seem. So last night, amidst a spot of hopelessness, I saw a repetition of something that I remember from other healing experiences. First of all the journey is long. The high energy and expectation when the work first begins always wains and discouragement sets in somewhere along the way. That is where I have been - lost. But last night I remembered that this is good news, that it always gets worse before it gets better, that it is darkest before the light and I found renewed hope and renewed determination.
The pain, loss, wounding that I am working on now is huge and primary. It is peeling back the layers of repression of things I never wanted to know. It is uncovering the lack of love, the lack of support, the antagonism that befell me from my father and mother, the very humans who should have encouraged and loved and planned for. And as always when the emotional knowledge follows head knowledge the pain is acutely severe.
I am digging at that place where I uncover the source of my shutdown - the anticipatory anxiety that I have snippets of from ages 5 on through 10 when I both longed to be with and be noticed by my father and feared the extreme rejection and humilation. It happened in this process that love and longing and humiliation became joined and intertwined in my life. Now I am lost in a wilderness as I try to extricate love from retaliation.
All of this has been repressed for so long and the pain so severe. I am connecting these dots of longing to be heard, to be understood, to be included with the certainty of being slashed, eviscerated and punished for trying only to get back up and try again and fall into a wretched pattern where rejection and belittlement were part of the process of fighting for inclusion and support, fighting for my right to be. But the default for me was always humiliation and rejection. THAT is what I have been writing of. It is the cycle of survival that for years I have described as having a wheel stuck in the mud, where the harder I tried to get out, the harder I pressed the accelerator, the deeper I became stuck. Insanely the harder I have tried to get out of a difficulty the deeper into the mire I have gone. This is why bringing this stuff out into the open is a critical, key step in releasing it. It is a form of shining a light on the string holding the elephant captive. It involves reexperiencing the pain that I have for so long repressed as a means of survival. Reexperiencing the full force feels like it will kill me. Though I know it must be in order to be free.
My father flourished on humiliating me and he always finished with "I'm doing this for your own good." As obvious as that would be to dismiss as an adult, as a child, dependant on this man for life, thought it angered me, it became a part of my "truth" and has lived a life of its own in my unconscious for lo these many years, reaking havoc along the way.
Here is one example from my earliest years when a sadness and need of compassion earned punishment and rejection. I have written about this before but it ellustrates what I am writing about so well.
One Sunday evening when I was about 4 our family gathered around the television to watch Disney. This evening it was Dumbo. When it came time that Dumbo was taken away from his mother, I began to cry. My father told me to stop crying or leave the room. But I was four and it was a terrible scene and only know do I understand that the punishment added to my tears which then began to flow harder. I was sent to my room - dismissed, rejected, isolated and alone. I stayed in the hallway in view of the TV but out of their sight and I watched and I cried and cried utterly in silence. My mother never once comforting me in the moment or later that night or next day. I have memory after memory of similar experiences. For years i could not write of them because I feared that they would either be dismissed or that I would be told that his was just punishment.
The rejection and isolation were institutionalized in my family with the phrase, "No, you are too young and you are a girl." that phrase was enough to cut me out of most family activities. I could go on and on with such stories of isolation and rejection but I know what a scar they have had on my soul and this story is enough to evoke the memory of many.
My father made it clear that what good I received was by the kindness of his heart. I deserved nothing that was not bestowed on me by his generousity. This sounds like a small issue but in truth I now know that I have waited all of my life to have the things I wanted most to be bestowed on me rather than earned. There was no earning in my childhood and this was a process that was repeated over and over and over again so deep inside, down into the recesses of my being I saw that my struggles to earn were yet more opportunities to snatch success out of my hands. The "not deserving" is the next place to go. I am working on it simultaneously with the "rejection." But the pain and loss of "not deserving" is even greater than the rejction and humiliation of being punished for wanting to belong.
I can go deeper and deeper into this but I am going to switch to the small things that have been coming up in terms of my mother.
I took my little boy to visit with her for a couple of hours yesterday. When it came time to go we needed to scurry to get to my son's guitar lesson. There are always several things that must be done on our way out. My son has without exception ditched his shoes who knows where, gotten food and drink without cleaning up, left a light or TV on upstairs, etc., etc. So we have to get cleaned up and out of the door. As I am hustling to corral my son and get him to follow up she comes toddling in on her walker and wants to talk about planting a rose outside in the front of her house. I am scrambling to keep my son on task, hurrying and getting irritated. The suddenly the picture gets clear - this is an incredible pattern with her - when we leave she then - for the first time in the visit - tries to engage me. It is a very subtle and complicated dynamic.
1) She not only never helps me but she passively, regularly competes for my attention and my help with my son. As a person with ZERO reserves and few, few resources this passive agressive behavior always takes a toll. More is being demanded of me than I have to give. It is small and subtle but it has in the past engendered an explosive reaction. Yesterday I finally saw why. She in her N trait way, looks for points of stress to pile on more. She also has a way of choosing to not notice when I am fully capacitated. When my arms are full or my personal gas tank empty or I am dealing with a intractable child she always pounces with something utterly inconsequential and yet the straw that breaks her daughter's back. And this past week when I was loading my crippled dog in the back of the car, trying to get my son to come and get to the next stop she came to the door and began again. It was in that moment that I saw the whole dynamic. She has no interest, no concern about my being, my struggle, my self. She is clueless and utterly unconcerned. That little flash was a lightening strike. It made it clear that she does these things in order to overload me, to test me, to exert her power. She occassionally says things that make it sound as if she cares but she really operates only on perfunctory use of language that she has learned but has no emotive meaning to her. She is a soulless automoton wreaking havoc on my emotions simply to test her manipulative power. I think this insight will give me even more freedom from emotional engagement with her and i have already gained quite a bit.
