Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Voicelessness and Emotional Survival => Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board => Topic started by: Iphi on May 02, 2008, 12:17:17 PM
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Usually these days I am free to live my current life and work on understanding my Nfather, my own issues, history and working for change - at my own pace and with lots of room, because I have moved 4 hours away and rarely communicate with anyone from my family. This happened gradually, but there was a sharp drop-off in communications after events around my sister's 2005 wedding when my dad and I had our last dysfunctional encounter which left me begging for 'no more.'
But the heat of the issues and dynamics is getting hotter and challenges are looming and stressing me out so badly.
My cousin (son of dad's younger brother) is getting married soon. Looks like I am not invited. My sister tipped me off to this because the couple sent out 'save the date' cards back in December. My sister lives near my uncle and visited over xmas, and happened to see them receiving my xmas card. My uncle claimed at that time that they didn't know my address and so they had not sent a save the date card, until of course, the xmas card arrived. When she told me this I said general nice things and changed the subject. I suspected at once the way this would play out, but then I felt maybe I was being too dark and cynical.
But it looks like dark and cynical in this case is probably accurate. This upsets me, though it shouldn't surprise me and I wish I had more emotional distance, especially because I know the vultures will seek to come to pick over my pain. So I feel stressed and apprehensive that my dad and sister are going to come poke at the wound and vaunt themselves. If I don't respond with total selfless positivity in wishing the happy couple well and disclaiming any personal feeling about not being invited to this wedding, they are going to be ON ME and they will be reporting back to the parents of the groom anything unworthy that I say, if I am stupid enough to let some pain show.
A big part of this current stress is how it repeats the pattern of our lives. My dad provokes me madly behind the scenes and then comes out and plays the sweet harmless person, while I look angry and grumpy and surly and on my last nerve. It has taken me a long time to go past the denial to see how much he actually engineers and manipulates this, how he plays me, in order to obtain supply as a martyr. His whole smear campaign on me, is all about him obtaining supply for himself. And without going on about it, he has a history of manipulating scenes in front of his relations, that goes back about 30 years at least. Here I have been trying to prove my good faith to my dad, and here he was using and manipulating. I am such a sucker.
Usually his relations have no way to reach out and smack me for my supposed evilness toward my sainted father. This is probably the only opportunity they will get to demonstrate how outraged they are by the hideous monster that is me. Unless one day if my dad passes and they come to the funeral with torches and pitchforks.
I have a lot of toxic feelings with history behind them, that include my uncle's family. None of them have ever been a support, ever reached out to help. Not even me individually - that's not what I mean. I mean to help me in helping my dad - never even a word of encouragement or support in that role. Always the suspicion and judgment. Yes, it makes me think my dad has always been working a smear campaign behind my back, but I hate feeling like that, but the evidence of their non-support is what it is. The evidence speaks for itself. But I have some anger toward them for never helping and then condemning.
That's one side of things. The other side is that it was recently my birthday. My dad sent a hearts and flowers hallmark card with a long message about taking time out of my busy life to realize how much I am loved and how special I am to my dad. Then there was a voicemail this weekend from my dad sounding his most innocent, harmless, and fluffy. He also sounded frail, and he may be frail - and that truly does make me feel for him and want to reach out - because for anyone unfamiliar with my backstory - he is in poor health and he struggles greatly - and it just intensifies everything.
I am feeling a toxic mix of conflicting stuff. Probably whatever action I take or words I speak will somehow twist to confirm my role in my family. They can't hear me and they have never heard me. They will never see me as a real person. It will always be about making me wrong. And my dad will always be doing his thing as long as he lives.
Thank god I don't live close anymore. At least there is that. I can't stand living between the toothy jaws of the beast anymore. It's just so horrible all the stuff that is stirred up. I look at my baby and think how very, very much I want to keep him clear of all of it.
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It hurts. How do you beat the bitterness?
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(((((((((((((Iphi))))))))))))))
I think the only way is to focus all your mind on releasing all hope of them being anything other than what they are.
Bitterness is hopes dashed, expectations unmet.
I think you can help yourself most by letting go of this family-centered hope.
And turning your hopes toward the amazing good things you CAN experience, with no effort or change on your part except to fully contemplate them, and fill your mind with them.
with love and gentleness,
Hops
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Thank you so much Hops. I hear what you are saying about bitterness and feel its truth. I feel that what has happened with me over this incident is that it has telescoped me back to the past and I am feeling it like a child, and as I did feel so many similar times when I was a child. Same people (dad and his relatives), same dynamics, same pattern.
It takes me to where the experience of burning rejection lives on in me. And I see the hold it has over me is the fear. These are the people who reject me and it is their rejection I always feared and tried to stave off. In a way, this gets it over with. lol!
But I think it is the fear that is the problem.
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Dear Iphi,
I had some life changing experiences. James helped me to see that the pain and rejection is locked in the brain. We have to do a type of "therapy" that releases it. Abuse is physical, as well as psychological.
I am studying Alice Miller. James let me cry and just stayed on my "side".He did not say,"Your parents could not help it " or some other "intellectual" explanation. . He had righteous indignation at how I was betrayed,hurt and abused and let me know that.
It is totally different than anything else I have ever done.
I "know" ,now, that this is the way to heal,IME. Love Ami
((((Iphi)))))))
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Thank you so much Ami. I think maybe today I am turning the corner on this. At first I felt everything just like I always used to feel it - helpless, subjected, mute, yearning, rebuffed, excluded, guilty, ready to abase myself, appease, feeling there must be something very wrong in me. That is how I often, often, very often felt for many years.
Then with the help of posting here and talking with my husband and reflecting on all I have learned about N-ism and families, and also reflecting on my history with my family and these relatives -- I think I can accept it more. I wish it was different, but it isn't.
I am very appreciative of how you and James have assisted each other and think it is such a good thing and important, to be a witness to the validity of your truth and to know and attest to the reality of it. We know exactly how we are overwhelmed with the story of others about how something about us (fill in the blank) means we are worthless and it is okay to mistreat us and dismiss our words, perspective, experience. Not to mention, how it is okay to condemn us for the smallest imperfection, whereas normal human beings are fallible and understood to learn and grow.
My H said he knows I am a good person and that I should feel strong in that knowledge within myself - rather than feeling judged by them, it is my assessment of their behavior that should matter to me. Also he sad it is truly their loss because it is good to know and love me. I said I wished I had a family that worked and he reminded me that I do, now.
Reflecting upon my uncle, who is definitely the author of my exclusion (not his son, my cousin who is getting married), he has his own history in my dad's family. I guess what I am understanding today, finally, is that they are not normal. Though he and his family are the most normal seeming people you could possibly imagine, they are not. They are impacted by the whole N-family system my dad is also a part of. Black/white thinking, self-involvement, entitlement, elitism, exceptionalism, perfectionism - all that stuff is alive and well with them.
When I was a little girl, with a crazy mom, and a dad with MS who parentified me visibly as his personal servant and factotum - they had nothing for me but judgment on my flaws. For many years I strived to please and appease and appeal and cater to them. I thought I had succeeded, but clearly they only tolerated me to my face. The people pleasing strategy is an incredible failure on all fronts. You can help people talk about themselves and do what they want to do all day long year in and year out and they will still smack you at their convenience and let you know how much they judge you.
The people pleasing came out of fear and I honestly don't know how I will face this fear.
But look what happened - all those years of serving soda and snacks and helping with the dishes and talking about their lives and admiring their interests and so on, motivated out of fear of outright exile and exclusion - and they still do it! It happens anyway!
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Wow Iphi
I can feel your pain and anguish. It is so, so, painful to go through what you did. I experienced such a releasing of pain that I know my healing lies in finding a therapist to help me release these deep feelings .
Look on the Alice Miller website ,Iphi. Love Ami
((((((((((Iphi)))))))))))
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Thank you for your empathy Ami. I have a lot of emotional agitation going on - lot of roiling stuff, but one thing is I feel a kind of freedom of the straightjacket of pleasing these relatives and being submissively/caretaking about them anymore. I can just let go of it now, and for the rest of my life.
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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.
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Ahh, Iphi.
This is so profoundly brave.
Heavy to hold, I know.
I swear, it will get lighter to bear.
Deep kudos to you for this courageous choice.
To free yourself by accepting reality, letting go of toxic hope.
You've made room for happiness.
It knows.
There's a seed planted, even if you can't feel it yet.
Your spring is coming, Iphi.
Hops
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I want to share a story from the past.
My paternal grandmother passed away suddenly in my senior year of college. After graduation, I was living at my dad's house, job-hunting and picking up all sort of odd jobs to make some money and of course doing his various biddings.
So my dad comes to me and asks if there is anything I would like of my grandmother's. I sensed danger. It was not an innocent question. Anyway, I felt it was up to him and my uncle to determine how they felt about keepsakes and what had meaning to them and what they might want the grandkids to have and so on, I thought. So I said nothing unless they had some things in mind. I didn't want to seem like I was insisting on something. Because in my family, if you say you want something in particular, that usually is construed in a really negative way. By my dad.
So he came back to me again and again prompting me to think of anything from my grandmother's house, anything at all, that I would want, because they had the problem of what to do with all the contents of the house. Finally, I said that as a new graduate I could probably use the microwave, down the road. Well, that was a really wrong answer and he raked me over the coals as unfeeling and uncaring for asking for the microwave - how selfish! So I said, sorry so sorry! I'm sorry I asked! It was wrong!
But still I guess dad and my uncle talked about the contents of the house and what to do with all the furniture. So my dad said my uncle was bringing some certain things down to him and was there anything. So I tried to think of something small and portable that would not be too much trouble and might not be considered to grasping and monstrous of me to ask for, and finally I said the bench from the front hall and a matching end table. Okay fine.
The day arrives and my uncle drives up in a big rented truck. Inside is full of all the large huge old furniture from the house. Sofas and chairs and all sorts of things. I have no idea what he and my dad managed to agree on as to anything specific, but I am almost 100% positive that they had no actual effective communication at all and all of those things that showed up were probably specifically not wanted by my dad. rofl! However, my uncle showed up and he was absolutely permeated with this air of 'look at all the huge work I have done bringing all these things to you.' And it was a huge job - all those enormous heavy pieces of furniture which he had martyred himself to bring unrequested. I helped unload everything into the garage.
But the day was incredibly dangerous for me, because the whole air of the two brothers was like - they really, really wanted to lash out on a 'wrong person.' It was like they had all this repressed strong emotion that they could not process or acknowledge, and there was this great desire to offload it. So here is this situation - a truck full of furniture that one has gone to great lengths to move, and the other does not want. But neither one can admit how absurd it all is. The one cannot acknowledge that he is pushing all this stuff on the other and the other cannot admit that he doesn't want any of it and didn't ask for it. However for ME it was a minefield because at any moment, one false move, and BOTH of them were ready to tell the story that I had insisted upon having ALL OF THAT STUFF and MADE them bring it.
Edited to add: In fact I specifically remember one of them or both of them implying that I wanted all the stuff and I laughed and said something about the last thing I would want as a new graduate was a bunch of heavy stuff I couldn't move into or out of apartments, as a girl. Close shave.
I can talk about this now straight out, but at the time - about 15 years ago - it was too dangerous to even think these thoughts. Incredibly, I got through the day by being humble and helpful and pretending for all I was worth that they had agreed upon all of this furniture, because neither could really deny it.
Interestingly, the bench and end table I had finally been pushed to name was not among all the other stuff. When I noticed it was missing, I almost said something, because it seemed the entire rest of the house was on the truck. lol! But luckily, my instincts warned me not to say anything.
Also interestingly, the microwave was on the truck. I also avoided mentioning that. THAT would have meant quite a verbal hiding. Oh my god, my dad would have just stripped my skin off with the rough side of his tongue had I mentioned that. Oh evil Iphi and her crazed desire for grandma's microwave.
When I moved out I did take the microwave and it came in very handy. In fact it was the only thing I had because in my family nobody helps you. Like when I moved out, it was all on my own dime (which is fair for a young adult) and dad didn't ask if I needed anything, had enough towels, was my roommate nice, anything! I borrowed a narrow fold-able mattress from a friend and slept on the floor and used a lawn chair. lol! In fact, he was absolutely furious that I was walking away from taking care of him: laundry, food, groceries, yardwork, snow shoveling, chores, and all additional requests - that I had to agree to because I wasn't allowed to say 'no' because I was under his roof. But then furious when I left (his clutches).
This recent stuff is calling to mind that really my family has always been the same way, only it seems that denial is plausible when there is enough distance to avoid reality.
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Ahh, Iphi.
This is so profoundly brave.
Heavy to hold, I know.
I swear, it will get lighter to bear.
Deep kudos to you for this courageous choice.
To free yourself by accepting reality, letting go of toxic hope.
You've made room for happiness.
It knows.
There's a seed planted, even if you can't feel it yet.
Your spring is coming, Iphi.
Hops
Aww thank you Hops for your inspiring and caring words and for being your kind and loving self. I am very encouraged by the image of having planted a seed for good things, having properly cleared the ground. Very evocative image, so beautifully expressed.
Are planning or working on any writing these days?
Indeed, one can shed a great weight of baggage by clearing out a whole extended dysfunctional family. :lol:
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((((((Iphi))))))))
YOU are the one who is writing, I hope.
I'm sort of staggering from day to day.
Too much to do and not enough energy or focus.
But happier since I have a close friendship now and get touched and held.
I did start telling my daughter I thought she would benefit from a blog, though, and realized I was probably wanting to do one myself. So I have a prototype. Just rambles, nothing polished, but it looks like fun. It's not "public" yet but I'll let you know.
You are an amazing storyteller. This was so evocative my shoulders were tense from maneuvering around them, not wanting to scratch their skins, like lighting a match. Wow.
love,
Hops
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Dear Iphi,
Your recounting of that incident with your F said it "all ." It showed the abandonment, betrayal, desires for love and pain of wanting love .It showed our own self, little and voiceless.
Thank you for sharing that. I think I will remember it for a long time, too long. Love Ami
((((Iphi)))))))
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Thank you Hops and Ami. Sometimes the phrase 'walking on eggshells' doesn't really capture it - it is walking through a minefield.
I want to underline that this was my normal life for many years and I did not know another. It is hard to explain that I did not imagine how different other families could be. It did not occur to me. However, without having anything specific in mind, many maany times I could see a better way, better more kind, mutual, reciprocal and loving that things could go (just daily things or life in general - like grocery shopping, or agreeing on keepsakes like above) and I spoke up about the better way too, and it was constantly always rejected and also was just the perfect excuse for my dad to tear into me. Then it's off to the dysfunction races - I cry and ask why he is so mean, he shouts because I am so selfish, I say he treats his kids unfairly - sooo many ugly interchanges that I am sick of and bored by.
It helps me so much to tell this story and to hear you respond that it really was a hard situation and it wasn't just me - because my whole family's story is that it is just me. There are lots more stories where that one came from.
During the furniture moving incident, I think that both brothers were unable to connect to their grieving for their mother and that made them extra especially dangerous. Their unconscious dysfunctional processes were running full tilt.
I forgot a punchline to this story. A few years later I conveyed my dad up north for a family wedding, that is another story of hellaciousness. We spent the night at my uncle's house where I once again saw that bench from grandma's front hallway and the matching end table. In fact these were the only two items of my grandmother's that my uncle seems to have claimed. The whole situation is rich with something so much more complicated than simple 'irony.' It makes me laugh.
As mentioned, I was not interested in those items but only selected them because of being pushed so hard. But even so my mind had trouble grasping what had happened. I thought 'did my dad never tell my uncle I was interested in them? Did he tell my uncle to make sure I didn't get those items? Did my uncle already want those items? Did my aunt? Did they want those items only because I asked for them?'
In a family like mine you can't even get the answers, because asking a question is a crime. Though, coming to grips with the reality of these people, probably my dad did tell my uncle and so my uncle probably determined I should never have those things. It may even be that my dad made my naming of those items sound unworthy in some way - I've heard him do that many times. Then my uncle probably insisted on having them, like these objects immediately gained value because someone else seemed to want them - someone with 'less claim,' but then I have no doubt he would be ready to make it seem like his wife insisted on having them, because he makes her the fall guy whenever he can.
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I'm really feeling the burning humiliation of exclusion and rejection today. Automatically my mind reviews our relationships and tries to find some reason for it. In a larger way, I know the reasons for it and they are not my problem - they are not anything I can do anything about, or ever could.
This is revisiting the original trauma of being forced into the scapegoat/black sheep role and nothing I could say or do could get me out of it.
I feel anger, desperation, anguish.
This is why I need so much distance from my dad in the first place.
It is so hard to live with someone who not only projects on you and constantly belittles and orders you about - not only the one-on-one relationship, but the way they trash you to all your other connections.
It's hard to believe I can just let go of it. That my life doesn't depend on convincing them to see me as a human.
There's a big part of me that feels that, unless I can get them to acknowledge me, to relent, to listen, to hear - that I cannot live successfully That anything I try to do will fail. Literally that I cannot survive. It's literally like I need permission from my family that they will never give.
It's at such a primitive, deep, primal level.
This experience is really giving me the opportunity to acknowledge this in all its aspects. This is my deepest fear, I think. This is what I have been running from, trying to fix.
Hope is really horrible, I think. Is hope a part of denial? For me, it has been.
I think that what I am feeling is the whole history of it that I have kept out, frozen out. Really, my relatives have always held me off. They have never been loving toward me. The denial and the hope have combined in me to make excuses for their lack of care or interest or even decency. In truth, their current actions are completely in character of who they really are, but I have made them out to be better people than that, by coming up for other possible (imaginary, better) reasons for the things they do or don't do.
I need to have a hurricane blow away the goo of these relationships in order to clear the decks for better.
I might need to reserve this space for more venting.
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Dear Iphi,
That sounds like a HUGE breakthrough. Those are the types of things I learned these last few weeks. Once you FEEL the pain behind the thoughts, you can heal, once and for all.
Have you been really feeling the feelings behind these thoughts? Ami
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Yeah - the feelings are coming first - they are very physical. It's like I have to translate them to words to find relief. Also I am physically feeling like a child. It's like phantom limb syndrome or something - feeling a body that is a child body. Also I am flashing back on my relationship with my uncle and the main feeling is fear of him and dread of his intense negativity and disapproval. All three brothers (one is deceased) had this intense negativity. They just seem to expect you to meet their expectations, or they throw you away.
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YOU are doing so,so well. Don't stop them . You are having like a very mini version of a "primal" experience, from what I know(not much and I could be wrong) James could help you when he gets back on.
Keep feeling them,Iphi. Your body and mind are trying to heal. Go with it, friend. You will find healing at the end,great healing(IME)
Keep me posted. love Ami
(((((((Iphi))))))))
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Iphi....I believe the hope you may be talking about is the false hope we develop neurotically in order to not experience as a child, the horror of what we were feeling back then. In that way it denies the truth, only then, was it serving as an effective protection. Not now. You can handle these early feelings because the old danger has passed. You did survive what happened already.......James
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Dear Iphi,
It IS very scary,but, as James said, we had it inside us poisoning us ,anyway. Also, it will never be worse than what we already felt as a child,but pushed down. Does that help? Ami
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Iphi, I have come late to this thread. You are doing some powerful work here. I cannot put all I want to in a comment here but I want to start and come back later.
I especially am deeply touched by your husband's reply when you said you wished you had a functional family, "Now you do." don't ever lose sight of that. I truly believe that you can use the comfort and support that you have there to propel you forward through your healing.
I have only read most of page 1 of your post. I have much more to read. It is so helpful to me to read your experiences because the way you describe them sounds so much like what I experience. It really helps to know that I am not alone - though truly I wish noone had ever experienced what we have.
Love to you,
Gaining Strength
Some more thoughts:
My dad provokes me madly behind the scenes and then comes out and plays the sweet harmless person, while I look angry and grumpy and surly and on my last nerve.
My mother does this to me to this day. She goes on to tell people that she must be careful and can’t say certain things to me because I will get angry.
it makes me think my dad has always been working a smear campaign behind my back,
My mother DOES run a smear campaign behind my back. In the past year 2 different people have finally told me so.
He also sounded frail, and he may be frail - and that truly does make me feel for him and want to reach out - because for anyone unfamiliar with my backstory - he is in poor health and he struggles greatly - and it just intensifies everything.
My mother has become quite frail in the past year. Broke her hip last Memorial Day.
The people pleasing came out of fear and I honestly don't know how I will face this fear.
You will be able to face it and overcome it. The love you experience from your husband will show you the way.
because my whole family's story is that it is just me.
OMG – what else can I say – me too. Now I have Lo who cannot believe her ears and eyes – cannot believe a mother would treat her own daughter with such contempt so different from the sons.
In a family like mine you can't even get the answers, because asking a question is a crime.
In my family wanting something was a crime. The sure way to NOT get something was to say I wanted it.
Then my uncle probably insisted on having them, like these objects immediately gained value because someone else seemed to want them
I know you are right!!!! I’ve lived it too.
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It's really really late but I am up because the baby needed lots of hugs tonight and then because my energies and emotions are still rolling and churning on this topic. I just had to get up and check in and want to thank everybody so much. Hope to post more tomorrow but I appreciate all of your insights and encouragements from the bottom of my heart. It means everything to me that I will go to sleep tonight knowing that others understand this as fellow humans and can see into this situation, not deny it/me and X me out.
I now understand the source of my phobia about being judged and condemned without being heard. And also the destabilizing, life paradigm feeling I sometimes have when it seems others might be discussing me behind my back. It's only from my family, not the whole world. Also, I see that my sister has unconscious toxicity and I need to bring awareness and insulation into that relationship, because she stirs the pot.
The denial was getting in the way of insight into these things and probably has a lot to do with the phobias coming into being.
This seems unrelated but is not - a decade ago I took the LSATs for law school and collected application forms to the schools I intended to apply to. When I tried to fill them out, I became completely paralyzed with fear and dread. I couldn't overcome the feeling that the apps would be judged and rejected, despite having high gpa and high lsat scores and work experience and recommendations - that they would be rejected because it was me. I was overcome with negative and fearful emotions and wept and experienced intense stomach aches. I literally could not fill out the applications. I could neither understand nor get past it. I tried to force through it, but could not.
The understanding I have gained here and through learning about N-ism and its impact on family - priceless. Those emotions and the fear and dread - displaced from their real time and place. A connection to the desperate child - who is hard for me to connect to - lot of layers of dissociation there.
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The understanding I have gained here and through learning about N-ism and its impact on family - priceless. Those emotions and the fear and dread - displaced from their real time and place. A connection to the desperate child - who is hard for me to connect to - lot of layers of dissociation there.
This is where I am, too, Iphi----Yuch! It hurts and feels lost and terrible!You are doing so, so well. Love Ami
((((((((((Iphi)))))))
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This seems unrelated but is not - a decade ago I took the LSATs for law school and collected application forms to the schools I intended to apply to. When I tried to fill them out, I became completely paralyzed with fear and dread. I couldn't overcome the feeling that the apps would be judged and rejected, despite having high gpa and high lsat scores and work experience and recommendations - that they would be rejected because it was me. I was overcome with negative and fearful emotions and wept and experienced intense stomach aches. I literally could not fill out the applications. I could neither understand nor get past it. I tried to force through it, but could not.
This is where I have lived. Paralyzed - mine spread to absolutely everything. When i came here I thought I would never find anyone who understood. It is very, very hard to climb out of the paralysis but I am thankful that I am doing it. I admire your work Iphi.
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Dear all - thank you again for your kind support and encouraging words.
I have something embarrassing that I initially considered too embarrassing to post. But it is an important aspect of this topic.
We received an invite to the wedding last night.
Yes after all my sturm and drang!
At first I felt that all that emotional upsurge that I experienced and shared above was completely invalid and that my perceptions on my uncle were completely off.
After the first wave passed, I realized there is a lot of learning in this experience, especially about what I own and is my responsibility to work on - my negativity. Which comes from fear. Which comes from the past.
And that I do have a negative view of my uncle and that side of the family which is partly based on past experience, and partly based on assumptions - assumptions which - as Amber said in her post of today - need to be recognized as assumptions (not Truth) and challenged.
Above I wrote about how I'm following those Oprah/Tolle classes and the concept of ego and the pain body. He says that when you experience that intense negative emotional energy upsurging, the thing to do is bring awareness to it of what it is, the pain body - past pain still existing in consciousness - and to completely accept it as your experience right now, because it lives on because it was not completely accepted and experienced in the past - it overwhelmed in past. Okay I'm not sure I've quite got that correct, but I am going to work with it and approach it that way.
It is so important to me to move from negativity and fear, which you see here me experiencing intensely and not necessarily part of outward reality, toward meaning, positivity, more accurate - cross-checked - reality based, accepting of subjective and objective experience, discerning - wiser - hey all that good stuff is what I want to progress toward.
Reading some posts this morning convinced me the better way was to admit what happened here - that the invitation came, though it is across the country and less than 2 months away - however, it is not atll and nothing like the shunning exile that is clearly one of my darkest fears.
I've got to own my stuff and accept what it is - to be where I really am and it isn't so pretty. lol!
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Iphi, your honesty and accountability is as lovely and clear as an early spring morning after rain.
love,
Hops
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You are a sweetheart Hops and I appreciate your kind presence.
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Oh, Iphi...
You based an expectation of behavior on past experience. And that triggered a whole bunch of still radioactive waste from the past... just makes you human, I guess. It happens to everyone, I think.
In any case, you had an opportunity to work through another layer of your feelings about all this. The universe provides opportunities for us to learn, all the time. Sometimes we see the opportunity; sometimes we miss it - sometimes it runs us down like a freight train.
James is right about the fact that you've already survived those intense feelings; you've lived beyond and through them. Nothing to fear there... but it can be useful to learn to be with the feelings until they change or pass. Look for what the feelings are telling you, you need. What you didn't have then, that would've made it different; better.
About letting go: sometimes things just float away unfelt; unnoticed until later - like a big white fluffy dandelion seed. Sometimes you have to pull things off forcefully, like a burr. Sometimes, things change mysteriously over the course of days... like how a wound heals: from inside - where you can't see the healing - to outside, where first there's a scab... then new skin grows and pushes the scab off.
You're really doing very well here - keep up the good work! Amazing!!
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(((Amber))) I appreciate your words very much. It just dawned on me that for me - posting this - is letting people see how much I messed up and how off my perceptions were - and surrendering to letting that be okay. That's a big thing too. That's scary just in itself! Weird how progress is made moving toward being less perfect. :lol: But okay with that.
Nothing to fear there... but it can be useful to learn to be with the feelings until they change or pass. Look for what the feelings are telling you, you need.
You know what is odd. That's how I quit smoking. I sat with the intensity of the craving each time. All the previous times I tried to quit, I tried to force through the craving - battle of wills style - never worked. The final time - I endured, like a pebble in a stream with the feelings just flowing on over me. And if the intensity plus temptation was too intense - I went to bed. Evenings were a real danger time and so I just would go to bed at 7. lol! Anyway, although you and I are going at things backwards as you bring your internal states experience toward your immediate goal of quitting smoking and it looks like i can bring my quitting smoking experience to help me with growing through awareness of internal states - kind of wild how that works out, eh??
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It is stranger than fiction, how we can come from two opposite ends of an issue to the center!
It is very scary, to find out that people AREN'T going to take you task for being totally absolutely perfect in every way - and that they still like you, on top of it! It's scary to realize that as awful as our FOOs are/were... that the rest of the world doesn't think like that. But after awhile, it starts to feel really, really good...
Thanks for the tip on sitting through the craving; I'm sure I'll have a chance to try it! :twisted:
But, I think this quit is going to be pretty easy; my body is already helping by developing a really strong aversion to smoking - or the smell of someone else smoking. The last one I smoked made as dizzy as if it were the first one. Something really powerful is at work; something as powerful as what has kept me from quitting, I think.
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((Iphi))
Your work on this thread is breathtaking.
Please share more, your voice is beautiful.
I feel the walls of lies crumbling down for you. love seasons
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((( Iphi )))
Yes, indeed, your voice is beautiful and clear on this thread, of which, as Seasons has so clearly expressed -- is breathtaking.
Love, Leah
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Dear Iphi
You mentioned that it was hard to show how imperfect you were. It is so funny, but you seem so much more "real", defined and 3D in this thread than I have ever seen. I noticed it after you said about the "imperfect" thing.
I need to see that I am trying to control my inside fears of shame and rejection by trying to be perfect.
It is such a deep, unconscious pattern when you have N parents.
You are so beautiful as an "imperfect "person, as we all are--bleh, but it is so hard to move in to "imperfection". of course. Perfectionsim is a lie, but the fear of letting"go",which is UNDER it, is very real. Love Ami
((((((((Iphi)))))))))
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I only know one person who is perfect.
His name is Jesus Christ.
The truth.
Love, Leah