If you look at it this way: Our parents' lack of effective use of guilt, shame and anxiety about their parenting...which was blocked by their narcissism is what led to their unwillingness, or inability to check themselves when they parented poorly.
Because they projected all guilt and shame into us. And that is what has impaired our own sisters' self-development, too. The same thing. They too project their own guilt and shame, into us. Or try to. They are victims, of themselves. Because they are frozen in time.
That is why they try so hard to get us back under control. Because they need us defined as the guilty, shameful and mistaken one, in order to control their own anxiety. It is very, very sad for the sisters.
Yes.
Their paths may be more frightening than our own. In the sense that they are driven by something we don't understand. And somehow, no matter what they do, we won't stay destroyed. Or even acknowledge that we've been destroyed. So whatever it is that drives them can never be put to rest. How many times have we asked: What is the win for them ~ what did they gain through the hurtfulness and disrespect that is betrayal of the sibling bond.
That is a very big betrayal.
I had never seen it that way. That I have been deeply betrayed by my own people.
Well. No wonder I am running around wondering how all this ugliness happened.
***
Grandiosity ~ the circle that makes grandiosity, which is comprised of shame and guilt and ascension generated through relieving both tormenting emotions ~ is in there, too. Having been brought up in it, those were questions I confronted, though I did not know then what it was I'd confronted, early on. I have posted about those incidents somewhere. The need to compare themselves to us (because we have had the misfortune to have been connected to them in any way ~ if it hadn't been us, it would have been someone else) and come out on top seems to be what fuels the sisters. Not love.
How sad for us, that this is so.
We have each posted some version of that one, too. "But...I thought you loved me."
I have read this is often how victims of narcissistic relationship feel as they come to the end of it. They (we) realize they never did love us, after all.
It's unbelievable.
***
Though we are not functioning from the same mindset and do not interpret reality through the same set of perceptions, it could be that to the sisters, we function as a kind of marker ~ as depersonalized things to be superceeded and destroyed. It could be that they have been forever comparing themselves to us. Because we are there, because we lived where they lived, we came to represent for them all they feel they are not. And all we are doing is trying to live a life when our upbringings were so woefully inadequate.
But how fortunate for all of us to have finally come to understand the meaning behind that term: woefully inadequate.
Once we do, we can provide those things for ourselves. Mostly, that would come down to internal, versus external, locus of control. Which, I am coming to realize, involves sitting with the feelings. Just accepting the feelings and watching how much of our lives we have spent fearing those we believed loved us.
I am thinking this morning of Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Women Who Run With the Wolves. Remember the story about the old woman who gathered the bones and sang them back to fully formed, shiny-coated life.
We are Singing the Bones.
***
And somehow, we came out of that mess that was our childhood feeling we were supposed to protect the other sibs. Instead of demanding from them (or from anyone else in our lives either, really) decency and responsible, ethical behaviors. Pseudo mom cannot instruct the sibs in moral behavior. Pseudo mom is like the housekeeper in that way.
Again, how sad, for us.
This may have been the line crossed that justifies scapegoating. Because what the real mother is doing is undeniably wrong and she knows it. I always believed she did not know. That it was a matter of hot temper or it never would have happened. That my parent did the best she knew. But that isn't true.
I see that, now.
She did know.
That is why I can hold her responsible for what she did, and for what she does, and for who she is.
For my sister, the same.
I cannot seem to remember how hurt and puzzled we were, at the beginning of this decision to heal. These people have done what they have done. How is it we questioned ourselves.
Huh.
In any case, everybody knows it, eventually. That what the mother is doing (or the sister, we are including her now in my story of healing) is wrong. Disrespectful, hurtful, nasty people. Now, why would they do those things.
What is the win.
And they know that we know.
And maybe that is why they are forever forming alliances against us. To give weight to the lie.
And once again, the sisters are tin echoes.
***
Again: We are after our own healing, here. This is not about calling names or relating sad stories. (Though I have said bad things about my sister, twice. And loved doing it.) I do feel like she is a tin echo. And whatever that other bad thing was that I said, about her being clack and clatter. I do see her that way.
Bad Cedar.
So Copa you were right. I protected my sister as much from myself as I ever protected her from my mother. But here is the thing, you guys. It's all coming unraveled, now.
Like always, once we unravel it, we find ~ how did we describe it? The banality of evil.
I mean, think about it. If I had really loved my sister (or my mom) I would have demanded more of them. Which would have required the courage to stand upright while they destroy me or not. Which they did anyway, though I was very nice to them about everything except the exclusion of my brother and his grands.
Which was pretty much a core issue for them.
So...maybe there is no way to have relationship with people like my mom and my sister. And in this light, the shunning takes on a whole other meaning: protection, for them. Not necessarily from me, but from risking that the lies they insist we all live as though they were valid things might be shown up as the twisted things they are.
The banality of evil.
***
This is about learning what really happened to us and setting ourselves on stronger ground. I know it isn't right to post bad things about my sister.
But I am doing it anyway.
Here again, just as we learned to do with our abusive mothers, contrasting the relationships we do have with our sibs with the relationships we should have had will teach us what we need to know. And will show us either where we need to heal or where we need to forgive. Or, need to ask for forgiveness. I know we need to forgive ourselves for believing what we have believed about them, and about ourselves. This is an important part of our healing, and is a signpost for us when we reach it. We cannot really hold ourselves with compassion until are able to stop believing we are who they told us we were. That is the essence of "fraud".
That we are not who they told us we were and we know it but accept their truths for our realities anyway. Probably because they were so certain. They lie and willfully believe their own lies that they know are lies.
Isn't that something.
***
That is where the loss is most keenly felt. In comparing what we have lived with to the template of healthy relationship.
Still, I shouldn't have called my sister clack and clatter.
Or tin echo either, I suppose.
But seeing from this perspective, I should never have called her sister, either.
***
Once they have achieved whatever it was about us that left them feeling less than, then they slide us to the opposite pole of the circle of awe / patronization. There is no longer a feeling of abject awe (shame, externalized as a spectator sport), but instead, one of contemptuous patronization (grandiosity).
How that connects with their having destroyed us ~ our reputations, our achievements, I don't know. But that does seem to be what happens. I read this about jealousy, once: For someone who is healthy, jealousy tells them where they are going next ~ tells them what they want for themselves, too. For people who are not healthy, jealousy becomes like a twisted, sick thing at the heart of them, and the person is hated.
Maybe, it is something like that.
And they hate us for having shamed them when really, all we were doing was trying to figure out how to live our lives, given the deficits in the crazy families we grew up in.
This is the genesis of the feeling of Whore.
We are role to them, and not real.
They are where we learned we were not real. That is the ultimate thing I was feeling shopping with my mother in WalMart that day. The feeling of spending time with someone who is looking for the place you sell yourself out and can be made a private fool of.
Whore.
How strange.
So, that means (maybe) that this is where my mother found a place of vulnerability in me when I was a young girl. Adolescence is a time when we all are so uncertain about self image and self respect and about self, altogether. That must have been an irresistible mix, for a differently wired mother.
***
We may as well not even be there. They do not see a sister. They do not see a daughter. They see someone, not only to superceed, as though life were a contest, but someone to see destroyed by their ascension. So they can stop being tormented by our existences. Some time back, I posted a thread in which I discussed coming into possession of my life as beautiful, as something precious to me.
That fits in here.
Those feelings are a phase, a signpost of our healing.
Until we pass through them, we are tormented by our existences too
because we were taught that was appropriate.
***
They cannot help the way their brains are wired. No one would do what they do if they could do something else. Anyway, once they see themselves as having achieved what we already have, we cease to be a threat to them. We become nothing at all.
How strange.
When we come again onto their radar, the whole thing will begin again because that is who they are. We would not be on their radar, otherwise. That is why they attack our reputations even with extended family. It has nothing in the world to do with us. They want us not only gone, but utterly discredited.
I read that this is typical of narcissistic relationship, too. They will destroy everything they can access.
Once we are destroyed, discredited, fired from our jobs and detested by our families (or at least shunned) then we become the nothing they require us to be. We become someone they are better than. (And for heaven's sake we thought they loved us. All these years. Roar. Ho hum. Whatever.) It's like we have been in a contest all of our lives, or in a game we would never consent to play so they went ahead and played without us. Which made it way easier for them to cheat.
So they win by default and we lose. And we get it that we've lost...something. But we don't exactly get what it is.
My sister even said something like that to me once. She said she knew what she was doing, but that she couldn't help it.
Huh.
***
Which is all well and good, until they hurt our children. And here is another little twist about that piece: If we were real to them, they would love us. And they would never hurt our children.
What they wanted, all along, was to feel superior. It never was about creating relationship or healing.
Even when it comes to our kids. Because here is a piece I just thought of, about the way my sister is forever parading her children or now, her grand: My children were there at those dinners too, of course. My grand was at my mother's that day we had to hear mys sister's grand recite and then, name the President's from cards and then, watch my sister whoop and run and play with her to the point that she tossed the grand onto the husband, who was actually having a conversation with us. (I was visiting with Baklava Grand, who was like, nineteen then.)
***
So it is true that what we lost, we never had to begin with. We had something worse. It's like in the movie Armaggedon. When the actor asks what kind of environment to expect on the asteroid. And says: "Okay. Worst environment imaginable."
That's where we grew up.
Imagine that, you guys.
***
Like Cinderella or Hansel and Gretal or Snow White. Like the pretty red-tailed Fox, tricked by the Scorpion into carrying her across the River. And once she is safely across, the Scorpion stings the Fox. "But why?" the dying Fox gasps.
"You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me across the River." the Scorpion hissed, stinging the Fox again.
That is what the mothers and the sisters say, too: "I told you who I was." But, superimposing that Hallmark card Family Dinner imagery over everything we know, we allow vulnerability.
And because we are dying anyway, they sting us, again. Just for the hell of it.
***
The mothers and, for some of us, the sisters too, are differently wired people. The question really is why we believed their words when their actions were so obviously not matching up with their words.
And we are back to the question: Who is the Liar, here.
That is an important question, as it turns out.
Cedar
