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Another development, another update. Oy.
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<blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 616105" data-attributes="member: 17461"><p>Thank you, each of you, and especially you, Recovering. I am doing better, today. We both are. Here is a good thing that happened: husband ran into Winn Dixie for something, and found a 30# bag of oysters for $10.99. Figuring what the heck, he bought a bag. They were beautiful. So, back to Winn Dixie husband went, today. </p><p></p><p>Today?</p><p></p><p>The oysters are marked correctly, at $50.</p><p></p><p>He is happily downstairs right now, shucking away and congratulating himself on his cleverness.</p><p></p><p>*****************</p><p></p><p>Recovering? You are right. I did try to do my best. What I have learned going through this part is how much anger I carry for all those times I did my best and, almost every time, this kind of shocking upheaval was the outcome. I have never been angry for myself in these repetitive, ad nauseum occurrences.</p><p></p><p>I have been guilty.</p><p></p><p>Though it feels wrong to respond with anger when someone has been hurt or is in trouble, and doubly wrong to whine on about my right to something better when the kids I was responsible for raising are in pain of one kind or another...this anger was a triumph for me, Recovering. </p><p></p><p>I am still smoking around the edges a little, but I seem to have come back to myself. </p><p></p><p>The battle was between my right to be angry about the losses we've sustained and the guilt I feel for my responsibility for the losses we have sustained. All of us. The kids, too ~ all the things that should be good and right in their lives, and that are not. That endless question about what I did or did not do, what I should or should not have done...this is the upper slope of the "evil" question.</p><p></p><p>So, it turns out the question was never about whether I was secretly evil for having survived against my mother's wishes. Neither was the question one of survivor's guilt or even, guilt that I survived, at all. </p><p></p><p>Those questions about the validity and nature of my survival were my justification for why I could not claim the right, the undeniable right, to my life for my own sake. In taking on the role of mother (a role my grandmother, who loved me, admired and claimed for herself as admirable), I was both justifying my own existence and burying myself alive. To lay claim to the anger I feel was to have broken through, first "evil" ~ which happened some years ago, after the botching of therapy with the first therapist, and then, to break through what the sense of evil had been transformed into: an almost universal feeling of guilt, of fraudulence. </p><p></p><p>Perhaps that is similar to what you have broken through too, Janet, during those horrible, unfair years with Buck...and maybe that is why you can feel so clearly now the value of your own life, of your own time.</p><p></p><p>The thing I needed to break through, the thing I taught myself as an abused child and needed to reinterpret now, as an adult, is that it was not some mistake, some lucky but somehow, deeply fraudulent happenstance, that I lived. </p><p></p><p>In order to lay claim to the anger I felt, to the inadequacy I felt at everything beginning all over again, I had to break through the universal feeling of guilt that I substituted for the feeling of, for the question of, evil for having survived, against my mother's wishes. </p><p></p><p>Which brings us again to the question of what is really going on here, Recovering.</p><p></p><p>You, me, Janet, Witz.... I know there were others of us, as well, who were participating in those threads about our childhoods.</p><p></p><p>Tapestry.</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 616105, member: 17461"] Thank you, each of you, and especially you, Recovering. I am doing better, today. We both are. Here is a good thing that happened: husband ran into Winn Dixie for something, and found a 30# bag of oysters for $10.99. Figuring what the heck, he bought a bag. They were beautiful. So, back to Winn Dixie husband went, today. Today? The oysters are marked correctly, at $50. He is happily downstairs right now, shucking away and congratulating himself on his cleverness. ***************** Recovering? You are right. I did try to do my best. What I have learned going through this part is how much anger I carry for all those times I did my best and, almost every time, this kind of shocking upheaval was the outcome. I have never been angry for myself in these repetitive, ad nauseum occurrences. I have been guilty. Though it feels wrong to respond with anger when someone has been hurt or is in trouble, and doubly wrong to whine on about my right to something better when the kids I was responsible for raising are in pain of one kind or another...this anger was a triumph for me, Recovering. I am still smoking around the edges a little, but I seem to have come back to myself. The battle was between my right to be angry about the losses we've sustained and the guilt I feel for my responsibility for the losses we have sustained. All of us. The kids, too ~ all the things that should be good and right in their lives, and that are not. That endless question about what I did or did not do, what I should or should not have done...this is the upper slope of the "evil" question. So, it turns out the question was never about whether I was secretly evil for having survived against my mother's wishes. Neither was the question one of survivor's guilt or even, guilt that I survived, at all. Those questions about the validity and nature of my survival were my justification for why I could not claim the right, the undeniable right, to my life for my own sake. In taking on the role of mother (a role my grandmother, who loved me, admired and claimed for herself as admirable), I was both justifying my own existence and burying myself alive. To lay claim to the anger I feel was to have broken through, first "evil" ~ which happened some years ago, after the botching of therapy with the first therapist, and then, to break through what the sense of evil had been transformed into: an almost universal feeling of guilt, of fraudulence. Perhaps that is similar to what you have broken through too, Janet, during those horrible, unfair years with Buck...and maybe that is why you can feel so clearly now the value of your own life, of your own time. The thing I needed to break through, the thing I taught myself as an abused child and needed to reinterpret now, as an adult, is that it was not some mistake, some lucky but somehow, deeply fraudulent happenstance, that I lived. In order to lay claim to the anger I felt, to the inadequacy I felt at everything beginning all over again, I had to break through the universal feeling of guilt that I substituted for the feeling of, for the question of, evil for having survived, against my mother's wishes. Which brings us again to the question of what is really going on here, Recovering. You, me, Janet, Witz.... I know there were others of us, as well, who were participating in those threads about our childhoods. Tapestry. Cedar [/QUOTE]
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