Did I give birth to an unicorn? Or three easy steps to become a guru

[Scent of Cedar *]

http://www.sott.net/article/268449-...tural-targets-for-sociopaths-protect-yourself

And this.

 

[Copabanana]

So, I my Dad was somewhat like Suzir's. I am trying to find the book I read about 40 years ago that captured the dynamic. Self-centered, attractive, irresponsible father and a responsible son.

They do tend to not want anything to do with us though, after we say what we see.

In my family I let my feet do the talking. Not until that final encounter with my sister in the hospital, did I speak any words. Before that, I just withdrew. For years. I regret I did not speak sooner. I was afraid.

When I begin to feel badly about what has happened between myself and my family of origin, I begin to blame myself for the outcome. D H says: It was your mother who hung up on you. She could have called back then, she could have called the next day or a week later or any time at all, and the relationship would have been salvaged.

D H is right. My Mother would hang up on me. Over and over again.

And then I blame myself for it. And blame myself for the consequence: That I was afraid to be close to her. And then she was very old. And there were no more chances. And somehow, although I know on an intellectual level she bore at least some responsibility, I am left holding the bag.

Your mother created the situation, and expects you to accept her behavior. You did not create the situation. You stood up. What your mom does with that is her choice.

Is staying away "standing up"? That is the question, I have.

When I said to her, "your life is not more important than mine." And then as a consequence she endured agony in that board and care home, with the pressure ulcer that was concealed and the screaming. Was that standing up? Or was it standing down?

It's when the roles become rigid things ~ when the abuser stubbornly insists on a power over dynamic ~ that the family slips, one more time, into dysfunction.

This is correct. Our parents not one time held their weight. Not even their own. And the common denominator is that they expected their children to carry their weight. Not just their own. But the weight of their parents. And when the child balks or utters a word, they are punished.

someone has to speak up, or nothing will change.

This is it. But the thing is, Cedar, it may not change, except in you, in your marriage and in your own family...not in the system that your mother still controls.

I fear that there is no incentive for changing by your mother or sister. I fear they will always act against the deviant, and in this situation it is you.

I woke this morning from a dream. A few crumbs of it I was able to hold onto.

I was in an affluent suburb with green rolling hills with my sister and mother (not far from where we would go on summer weekends to escape the cold coastal weather where we lived.)

We were on foot. I commented to my mother, have you ever been here in xxx? No, she answered. Never.

And then there is a broad street we have to cross, at an intersection. With an occasional car whizzing by. Both intersecting streets are very, very wide.

It is a question of judgment as to when and if to cross. I do not remember our destination, but the urgency to get there is very great and intense. And there is a question of the correct direction to go. While not speaking, my sister and I each have a different idea (and will) of where or whether to cross.

And then my sister decides and through her wordless action moves forward with my Mother in tow. And I hold back. Alone.

Because I feel it is the wrong direction. I hold back.

And they are now separate from me and out of sight. I realize I had wanted to be with them. It is too late. They are now lost.

I know then that even though it was the wrong direction, and unsafe, I wanted to be with them. I try to find them. Now retracing my steps. Irregardless of the dangers.

I see a cute shopping street. Like a small village. Upscale. Darling. With all of the arty things in windows that attract the very, discerning shopper who wants to pay premium prices for the uniquely crafted thing. Distracted for a second from my mission, I soon return to my trek.

I see a man a handicapped man on a gurney counting money, with his wife. Because he has stories to tell about life, wise and special tales...he had been paid as a curiosity...to tell of his experiences, adventures and wisdom, by those affluent shoppers. As a curiosity. I take note and I go on.

And my Mother and sister are lost to me.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I came back on to post that I realized I was feeling badly because, each time we uncover another layer, we experience some version of Serenity's phrase emotional flashback. I just felt badly, and kept trying to reason my way out of it, but couldn't. Just kept getting in deeper and deeper. That is emotional flashback. Self care for us when this happens, when we recognize it is happening, would be to review the sites one or another of us has referenced a link to here on FOO Chronicles.

Anne Lamott; the article on sociopathy and gaslighting ~ especially the gaslighting aspect; Singing the Bones, with its caution about patience and intent. There are others, but these three helped me this morning.

That is what happens to us when we uncover another layer, even when the memories are not traumatic. Serenity, you may benefit from reviewing some of those sites too, now that your sister is pushing against your decision to declare an ending to her stalking and mistreatment of you.

I am back steady state from having read Anne and just the title of the article on sociopaths and gaslighting. I was like, "Oh! Of course! I am in emotional flashback. That is why I feel so unfocused, this morning."

Copa, I will go back and read your post, now.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

Copa, could it be that the Child in you is very sure she is guilty that something really bad happened to Mama while Copa was caring for her?

I think this has merit, Cedar.

I think my whole life collapsed in front of me, when it was too late to fix any of it.

I hear a child's promise of anything, of whatever it costs, for Mama to come back on her terms, this time.

The dream I posted just above demonstrates that this is true.

I think by putting myself back in bed over and over again I am trying to put myself in her place. As if to say, I will die so that you can come back. Please, Mama, come back. It was a mistake. I made a mistake to go in the wrong direction. Let me correct it, please. Come back.

I keep going back to bed and back to bed. And it is not working. But I do not know how to stop going back to bed.

Telling myself it is not my fault does not help. Because everything is my fault. Everything is my responsibility. That is the way the game is set up. My whole life.

They couldn't give us what they didn't have, Copa.

They did what they did, instead.

Yes, Cedar. I think that what is making this so hard is that we are having to reconstruct identities from the bottom up. Because everything we know of ourselves we did defensively, to accommodate the limits of our mothers.

All I want, now, is the chance to have a "rest of my life" outside of bed. Instead, I keep going backwards. There is something that I am missing and I do not know what.

My mother would cry sometimes, about what a bad mother she was. That was her word: bad mother. So, I felt guilty about that, too.

Me, too. There was always built into that, their wanting for us to take responsibility. Like the mother's saying, it is not my fault. I am doing the best I can. And with that the daughter has to be OK with what she does get which is a bad bargain. And the mother is off the hook. The other piece of it is that the mother wants to be consoled and indulged for how bad she feels. How she feels injured by even being asked to give more or to act differently.

So even wanting more is a crime against the mother which gets turned against the daughter. Who is accused for wanting something. Anything at all. And punished for that. (My sister does this to me, too.)

There was nothing left undone, in your care of your mother;

Thank you, Cedar. Except that I could not live my life over so that I could have been with her. And had a mother.

I urge you again to consider the guilt of a little girl, that little Child within, retraumatized, horribly retraumatized, at the instant of the mother's passing and over those first terrible moments of realization that Mama was gone.

Horrible guilt. And loss. My mother was so stunning. Funny. Interesting. Poised.

But she hurt me and I could not be who I needed to be, when I was close to her. She cost me my life. So, I chose to leave her. It is regret that I am working through.

And I fear it is costing my me life, now. That mourning the life I left behind, I am surrendering any chance of a life, now and in the future.

you don't understand is that you handle everything that matters,

Then, how come I am back to bed? When will it be enough?

My mother was impossible. She was self-indulgent, dramatic, hard an cunning. She chose herself.

Yet she loved me. She tried to change. She tried to love me. I just cannot find my way out of this thicket.

Trust, Copa.

In who, Cedar? That is what it comes down to.

We had nobody to trust. We were let down by everybody. Even ourselves.

My life was built on a foundation built on sand. And it caved in. And now I look at everything from that scary place. Knowing that nothing is solid. Nothing is stable. Nothing is safe.

And yet I believe to a large extent in M. In his heart and wisdom and strength. I believe in myself. In my mind and creativity. In my own integrity. I believe in my animals. That has to be enough to start over.

He is home now. Maybe we can walk today. That is my new plan. We will buy a new collar for Romy. And I will walk each of the dogs every day and once a day M and I can together take them both.

Thank you.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I regret I did not speak sooner.

I do, too.

I was afraid, too.

And somehow, although I know on an intellectual level she bore at least some responsibility, I am left holding the bag.

I am all about emotional flashback this morning Copa, but could that be what is happening to you? When you think about everything and how it was and what the end of it was...that is so much pain. There were crucial decisions to be made, and you made them. But when we are so used to questioning ourselves over everything to do with our families of origin, how could you not question yourself and then, begin accusing yourself, over and over again?

But there cannot be a different answer or a better way to have accomplished what was accomplished. You did the right things ~ all the right things. You remained flexible; you made other, seemingly better choices, but the situation was still difficult.

Look what happens to the way I think about myself over something as simple as my mom hanging up and my decision not to pretend I was okay with that.

Is staying away "standing up"? That is the question, I have.

When I said to her, "your life is not more important than mine." And then as a consequence she endured agony in that board and care home, with the pressure ulcer that was concealed and the screaming. Was that standing up? Or was it standing down?

Yes. All those things were standing up. If we have been taught that whatever it is that happens, we should have done better, that is how we find ourselves second guessing and then, condemning whatever it is that we did. In reality, our choices were correct. There were bound to be consequences either way, because the family was dysfunctional. And our family members seem almost determined to keep it that way.

It makes sense that they would want all of us destroyed, that they would want us to blame ourselves, given that this is what they hurt into us while they were bringing us up.

This is it. But the thing is, Cedar, it may not change, except in you, in your marriage and in your own family...not in the system that your mother still controls.

Yes.

I am forever forgetting that this is how my mom wants things.

It is a hard concept to wrap my head around.

But you are very correct, Copa.

It's hard for me to believe that could be true. But most moms do not beat their kids in secret. Abusive moms are not so...I don't know.

Cunning.

I fear that there is no incentive for changing by your mother or sister. I fear they will always act against the deviant, and in this situation it is you.

Ha! Copa. I have never known someone to be named "deviant" in such complementary terms.



You are right, Copa.

It's hard for me to believe, but you are right.

***

Yours was a lonely, frightening dream, Copa. Retracing your steps, regardless now, of the danger.

Distracted by unique and beautiful things; things you can appreciate and afford.

The handicapped man...what color are his eyes, Copa?

Is it a representation of M, do you think?

Your dream leaves me feeling sad, Copa. Each avenue was very wide. Each, dangerous in its own way.

The handicapped man...is it you, Copa?

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

Anne Lamott; the article on sociopathy and gaslighting

I never thought of this before, that what my mother did was gaslighting, "the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred."

For my whole life, my mother would deny that things took place. That did. I always believed her. I believed her intent. That she believed her version. That it was not a deliberate lie.

I thought she had some kind of selective, self-serving amnesia. Usually she lied to cover up some bad behavior on her part. Her lies represented what she should have done, but did not. Or to deny bad behavior that had hurt us.

An incident from the long ago past comes to mind. I do not know why I am remembering it now.

There was a resort, one of those old timey places. White with a wide front porch. A hotel or inn with rooms upstairs. The kids would be put upstairs to nap in the afternoon.

My Dad was not there. He was in the City maybe an hour and a half away.

I remember my mother entering the dark room with a man. The man was not my father. I think sexual things happened.

I asked my Mother later. She said my father had returned. He had not.

I am back to intent, here. There seems to have been a lack of intention to do the right thing for the children. There may have been the wish or wanting to be what they knew was right, what could have been. but not the will to have done so. To pay the cost of what good parenting would have been. To invest. At the cost of themselves, what the right thing would have been.

Or even to retroactively, repay the emotional capital to say I would have, I should have, I wish I had....My Mother did tell M's sister...I would tell my daughters I am sorry.

But she could not tell me herself. Why? Weeks before she would die, why could she not say it?

 

[Copabanana]

I see a man a handicapped man on a gurney counting money, with his wife. Because he has stories to tell about life, wise and special tales...he had been paid as a curiosity...to tell of his experiences, adventures and wisdom, by those affluent shoppers.

Yes, I believe this handicapped man is me or M. His eyes are brown. M's are brown. Mine are hazel-brown.

So here we are. Affluent shoppers v.s. tell about life, wise and special tales.

Each of us, M and I have lived this way. We have chosen this road.

So maybe I understand the compulsive shopping since my mother's death....another do over.

Cedar, what would be your take, if the handicapped man is either M or myself?

It is a sad story, separating from my Mother and sister, in life. Trying to do whatever, at whatever price to find them to get a chance to live life again, with them, even if it had been the wrong direction, for me, my self.

I think this is what I must be doing over and over again. Trying to go back and do it over again. Each time I get up to live, now, from bed, I pull myself up from bed only to force myself back...to re-unite with my mother and sister. Where on some level I want to be.

How do I accept it is too late? How do I accept that I made a choice that cannot be changed? How do I accept I might have even made the right choice for myself? I am trying to walk it back.

What if I really do own how I lived my life? What would be the cost of saying out right I chose my life. No matter what. I chose my life because there had been no other way to have had it.

That had I subordinated myself to my Mother and sister, their values and rules it would have been a horrible, defeated and sad life.

And even though my life has had its sadness, handicaps, defeats, limits and self-deceptions--it was mine.

This is what I have not yet gotten to. The place where I can say: I chose to go my own way. Because that was my way.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

All I want, now, is the chance to have a "rest of my life" outside of bed. Instead, I keep going backwards. There is something that I am missing and I do not know what.

Just after we moved South, I was afraid to drive there. I beat myself up for that...but I still did not learn to drive, there. I created a circle whose purpose was to hate myself for some shortcoming I could identify.

Something concrete, to externalize and justify and name, something already happening inside me that I could not name.

Thank you, Cedar. Except that I could not live my life over so that I could have been with her. And had a mother.

This is true, Copa.

And cannot be changed.

Horrible guilt. And loss. My mother was so stunning. Funny. Interesting. Poised.

So is/was mine. Except that she wasn't. I had to work very hard to see that my mom was not as I had believed myself into believing she was.

I discovered that I believed those beautiful things about my mom because what she was really doing, the things she was really saying, the person she really was, was unacceptable. And the reason I did all that imagining of my mom as so much better than she was?

Is because I was too scared to do anything else.

But that may not be true for you, Copa. My mom has done some of the most amazingly rotten things. I excused every one of them. Most? I did not see. I did not realize that whenever I was with my mother, I was in high anxiety, in emotional flashback past and present and fear for the now and for the future and I covered it all in a thick coat of denial and called it good.

Because I needed my mother to be my mother.

And that was the cost of it.

So, I paid it.

And I fear it is costing my me life, now. That mourning the life I left behind, I am surrendering any chance of a life, now and in the future.

I think you are doing important work. You are up and out when you need to be. Whatever it represents Copa, it matters very much.

I can understand wanting to move on, though.

One can only experience so much, from one's bedroom.

Yet she loved me. She tried to change. She tried to love me. I just cannot find my way out of this thicket.

Perhaps there is no way out, Copa. The truth of it is just as we've said. They did love us. I don't know how it could be that they loved us and did what they did, either.

I think we will never know.

But we do know they did love us.

That matters.

My life was built on a foundation built on sand. And it caved in. And now I look at everything from that scary place. Knowing that nothing is solid. Nothing is stable. Nothing is safe.

Pema Chodron writes about this state of affairs. She names it true enlightenment. Truth without filters.

The trick is accepting it.

And that takes real courage, because we are creatures who seek meaning. We make patterns out of everything and name the meaning in the thing we've created. It is a hard thing to understand that we are the meaning.

We are the observer-effect. (I got that from Frank Herbert.)

That is what we do. Observe.

And yet I believe to a large extent in M. In his heart and wisdom and strength. I believe in myself. In my mind and creativity. In my own integrity. I believe in my animals. That has to be enough to start over.

Those very fortunate, blessed things; the animals we love, those are our blessings too. I read somewhere once that like all of us here, animals are on their "Missions of Love".

That is why they are made so they do not speak in words.

It is only visible once we see it.

So, we become more silent, too. Words can be distracting things, but they are all we have.

***

So, now? After having such deep discussions on purpose and form...I will be out in the yard, chipping cement and replacing drain tile and digging trenches.

Huh.

I am practicing that Buddhist practice: When chopping onions, just chop onions.

So, I am enjoying these messy, dirty, impossible things that I don't really know how to do. We chipped away at a piece of cement sidewalk until it is just heavy enough that we can lift it so we can insert a drain tile. Beneath the cement, when we finally got it tilted up and out of the way?

Is a drain tile.

Under standing water.

Why is it not draining, then?

We don't know.

That is where I will be, this afternoon.

Practicing Buddhist landscaping.

:O)

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

Is staying away "standing up"? That is the question, I have.

Copa, I think it all depends on who you ask.

I think it is standing up to the person. The silent message is "You respect me or I will not share your space. It is too hurtful."

Words turn into arguments.

I am sooooooooooooooooo learning "less is more."

It was never your fault when your mother acted badly. If you think it is in your own mind, then you will feel like it was your fault,, but your mother had free will and did what she wanted to do and you couldn't make her do or say anything. She is responsible for what she says and does, as we all are. If she was mean to you and you pulled away, that is just a natural reaction. Trust me, I pulled away from my mother too, and, like you, I did try to make it better, although not as hard as you did...and I didn't consider the price as high. But we tried and that's all we can do as humans. We can't make anyone else try (shrug)

 

[BusynMember]

For my whole life, my mother would deny that things took place. That did. I always believed her. I believed her intent. That she believed her version. That it was not a deliberate lie.

I thought she had some kind of selective, self-serving amnesia. Usually she lied to cover up some bad behavior on her part. Her lies represented what she should have done, but did not. Or to deny bad behavior that had hurt us.

Your mother was lucky that you loved her enough to give her the benefit of every doubt. That speaks to your heart and seeing the good where there isn't any, but to you it's still there.
I am such a cynic. I think I was born that way. I don't see the good. I listen to the words and take them at face value. "When I held you in my arms I felt nothing, absolutely nothing" for years was laughed about as "That's just mother."

Yes, that is mother. What's wrong with her not only to feel that way but to tell me she had felt that way? In my mind, I excused it when I was very young, but the older I grew, the more I realized how dangerous this statement is. If you don't love your infant, the infant has many lifetime ramifications. And she didn't want to hold me either so she didn't. I paid. All of us paid.

I would not want my mother back for anything. If she came back again, I would not want to know.

 

[BusynMember]

That had I subordinated myself to my Mother and sister, their values and rules it would have been a horrible, defeated and sad life.

Copa, it scares me to think of a kind person like you with so much going for her could have turned out like them. You made a choice to be different. So what? I also saw my FOO and did not want to be them and did not become anything like them...from values to likes/dislikes to personality. It is right for us to be true to who we are, Copa, not to be somebody else whose flaws we don't wish to carry on.

 

[SuZir]

Suzir, I did not chime in, not because I don't care, but because I don't really understand what your father is doing, in his mind, or why. So I do get why it is so puzzling to you. He sounds like a bit of a con man maybe?

Basically he has gotten involved in faith healing business. I find it disgusting because I consider it double con: First it is conning people to pay for something that has no known positive effects aside from placebo or 'care-effect.' And secondly, and this makes it worse in my eyes, I don't believe a second my dad would believe any of it himself. However it is perfectly legal. Only court cases we have had concerning faith healing have been those cases where provider has used the trust their patients have for them to sexually abuse them and one case against the parents who used only faith healing methods to treat their young child with diabetes. Child dies and parents were convicted of neglect. Faith healing provider wasn't.

I also fear that my dad is considering this an art project and to me that is basically playing with people and their emotions and bound to hurt them, which is also wrong, but again, not illegal.

How he actually claims this thing is working is not like I wrote. It is complex belief system and I do not feel like finding out how it is supposed to actually work. But it does seem to involve unicorns, angels, Atlantis, indigo and crystal people as guides and what not.

By the way, I did talk with my dad last week and he in no way mentioned anything about any of this. He also offered a lie, without me anyway referring to that weekend, why he is busy during the weekend this fair will be.

We will see if he ever decides to tell me about this new business. I will not be asking.

I am glad for you that you did not have to live with your father. I believe it is easier if your more dysfunctional parent is not with you day-to-day as a child.

Him being my custodial parent would not had been feasible. I would had ended up in care in no time. My childhood was the time his substance abuse was at it's worst. I can't even remember how many episodes of alcohol withdrawal he had (one even led him to ICU and it was a very close call, he wasn't medicated quickly enough because he went straight to some no medications rehab and it took couple days before the symptoms really came) and he was also addicted to drugs and had his amphetamine psychoses at that time period.

Even when I visited him, I often ended up alone to someone's flat after he and his friends had first partied there and then continued to bar. Quite a few times dad was not able to remember where he had left me before the visitation was over and it was often my grandpa who managed to track me down. It got easier when I got to school age and had bit of money so I could leave those flats and find a bus stop and try to figure my way to some place I could name and then call to grandparents or my mom from pay phone.

If he had been a custodial parent CPS would had likely taken me after first time he had to go to police Sunday afternoon and tell that he has forgotten where he left his 4 year-old daughter Friday night and none of his friends remembers either.

I think part of what we are learning here is to forgive ourselves for the almost unbelievable situations we found ourselves in. You expected more from your father and were strong enough to say so. That is a more respectful thing, a more real response, than not to address what the people we love are doing.

I'm a perfectionist and I have had to work hard on understanding concept of reasonable expectation for myself. While I said I was horrible to him, and I was, and while I would be disappointed with myself if I would now end to those kind of screaming matches with him and saying all those ugly things, I have decided that it would not be reasonable to expect that I could had handled it better at the time. I was immature and mean and didn't use better techniques like validating and better communication techniques, but there is a really good reasons for that. First, I was a child or young adult at the time. Children are supposed to be immature. Second, I didn't use those better tools, because I didn't have them. It is as simple as that. It is not reasonable expectation that I could have handled it better.

It would had been favourable to our relationship if I would had knowledge and maturity I have now, but that is not reasonable wish. So I can't keep it against myself, that I didn't do better with my dad when I was in my tweens, teens or early twenties.

Of course that also means that to not to be a hypocrite I can't have unreasonable expectations to my dad either. It would be interesting to know what kind of person he would be, if he would had had little more luck with family he ended up being born to. He didn't have and his childhood was horrible and tragic. That kind of background does not breed healthy people and against that one has to say he has done really well. It would be interesting to know, how he would had turn out with just a little bit of stability or even nurture. But that we can not know.

But it would not be fair for me to expect something totally unreasonable from him. And with the cards he got, the reasonable expectations simply have to be very low.

 

[Copabanana]

Just after we moved South, I was afraid to drive there. I beat myself up for that...but I still did not learn to drive, there. I created a circle whose purpose was to hate myself for some shortcoming I could identify.

I think there is substance here. Because you know that I lost my confidence driving at home after I had traveled the world alone.

My mother would never in her life drive freeways. And that is the capacity I lost.

Something concrete, to externalize and justify and name, something already happening inside me that I could not name.

So, looked at it that way, getting up and returning to bed is a means to externalize concretely something that is happening inside me. A way to understand it, through the physical behavior I am re-enacting over and over again. Making visible a conflict.

Perhaps the same conflict as was played out through the driving.

The question I am having now, is this: Will this pattern of returning to bed, be chosen by me? Will, it finally be enough because I say so? Or is it dependent upon learning something, discerning something, accepting something, in a way I have not yet done?

If I could get out of bed and drive....again. That would be something.

Thank you very much, ladies.

Suzir, I wish I could find that book. I have been searching on Amazon and Goodreads. I must have the author's name wrong. I thought it was Gerald Woolf.

The author's father was a con-artist. Attractive to look at and be around. Without a moral compass that guides him to protect others, even those he loves. Or even himself.

The book begins at the moment that the son receives a phone call that the father has died. With the son's guilt that his first feeling was relief that it had not been one of his children who had met danger or death.

I read the book with my own father in mind. I had to struggle with the deaths of both of my parents with the awareness that I had separated myself from them, to protect myself. I had guilt in the same way this man did.

I do not know what it would have been like to read these posts, from the perspective of having a living parent from whom I had not detached. There is so much here...of regret....I cannot even comment further.

I seem to have great regret that I had not had the strength to maintain a better, more complete relationship with my mother.

But I think as you describe it your father was more peripheral to your life and less central to your care and to your identity. Perhaps you have a range of choices that I did not have or greater strength, or both.

I will keep looking for the book.

 

[SuZir]

I seem to have great regret that I had not had the strength to maintain a better, more complete relationship with my mother.

But I think as you describe it your father was more peripheral to your life and less central to your care and to your identity. Perhaps you have a range of choices that I did not have or greater strength, or both.

I had a blessing in having my grandparents in my life. They were not without their issues, and now as an adult I have better understanding over how their issues carried to my mom's life, but when I was a kid, they were stable and grandpa also very strong individual. When I came along they had already matured out some of their more troublesome issues and they also really made an effort to be there for me.

My mom, who was my primary care giver, was not stable nor safe, but in her own way she was loving. She could be very selfish and did lots of things that hurt me, but we had also many really great moments together.

That and often having access to my grandparents helped me a lot. My mom did go no contact with her parents and denied them from me too every now and then but even during those times I had their phone number and that brought me feeling of safety. I could maybe not actually call them, but I knew that if things got really, really bad I would call and they would answer.

I have read studies that imply that even just one stable, safe and loving relationship to an adult through childhood can save a child living in chaos and I had that. And life I had built to myself has been very safe and stable so that has helped a lot too when it comes my adult relationship with my parents (my mom died over ten years ago, but we ended up having quite good relationship in the end. He was much better mom to an adult daughter than for a child.)

But I guess it was mostly a grandpa that helped me to grow up somewhat sane and stable adult.

 

[Copabanana]

I think what we are struggling with here, Cedar, and I and Swot, is whether or not we survived or not. Suzir, your perception of yourself is as having been saved, by your stable relationships with grandparents or intrinsic strengths or good enough mothering...is what is in doubt in my case. I do not know if I was saved or not.

I also am guessing that Cedar and I and SWOT are older.

I will speak only for myself. I guess I am deciding now whether to see my life as I lived it as viable and worthy of accepting as well-lived or not.

Was I saved or not, as a child?

And I am struggling with just who is the decider or what decides it. Whether I am and my life has been worthy or not.

Because haven broken down as I have, seems to point to an internalized quite severe conflict. That existed my whole life, only being revealed just now. That perhaps I had been so damaged as to have been broken. And lived life limping along, as if handicapped, going through the motions of what would like like living and achieving...but broken nonetheless.

Now, I wonder if this could describe everybody. Look at Donald Trump, who lives his life declaring he is a winner. Because of the money, and women and power he has amassed in his life...to combat his sense deep inside that he is anything but...a winner.

I am back to what Cedar says that we erect these physical manifestations of what we struggle with internally.

For Trump, Trump Towers...

Brokenness, for me. When you look at it, how Freudian.

It is really back to half empty or half full. There has to be a day of reckoning of deciding. Whether or not there is more evidence. There must be a decision. A matter of justice and will. Do I save myself or not?

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

An update on the drain tile that was not draining. It was plugged. When we found the crushed end? We dug mud out from around it. And the drain tile, which was not empty after all but very full indeed? Began draining into the hole we'd dug to see where it went.

So, now? We have mud.

I called D H (who is working on another section of drain tile that never did drain and had to be redone) over to see.

So he said, "Well, that's good then. Now we know where we are."

Huh.

So, I came back in to check on you guys.

Cedar

 

[InsaneCdn]

It is really back to half empty or half full. There has to be a day of reckoning of deciding. Whether or not there is more evidence. There must be a decision. A matter of justice and will. Do I save myself or not?

Copa... the whole half-empty/half-full discussion? How about a different twist. Whether it is half-full or half-empty depends on whether you are pouring or drinking.

Copa... it doesn't matter whether it's "half" full-or-empty. What matters is whether you are filling it or emptying it. Choose to fill your life. With M, with your interests, with travel, with anything else that is part of who you are today. Experiences in life can be draining. And while we are being drained, it is alarming to see the glass getting half-empty or worse. The solution is... keep pouring. Keep putting things into your life so you have a cup to drink from.

Yes, your mother drained you. So did your son. That wasn't your fault. Life sometimes does that. But you are not required to stay there.

It took me a long time to figure this out.

 

[Copabanana]

"Well, that's good then. Now we know where we are."

Huh.

This is enlightening. It is all a matter of self-definition. We're in the mud. Now we know where we are.

OK

I will model this. I am in bed. Good. Now we know where we are.

This is tremendously enlightening. I am not being sarcastic here.

It is all about the value you give it. I nominate D H as the Frenchman.

Good. Now we know where we are. (_____) The bed? That's good then. Now we know where we are.

 

[Copabanana]

The solution is... keep pouring. Keep putting things into your life so you have a cup to drink from.

Yes, your mother drained you. So did your son. That wasn't your fault. Life sometimes does that. But you are not required to stay there.

Thank you, Insane.

Evolution of the species does not include self-destruction as an adaptive response.

I did love my mother.

Those are the only true things that I know. All the rest is making up stories about myself.

That's good then. Now we know where we are.

 

[BusynMember]

I was born broken...lol. I was differently wired from birth.

But I'm not broken now, except when I forget what I struggled to achieve.

Somebody posted on another forum about worrying about what others think. I have not ever really cared much about that. I find it amusing that some people are so worried about it. I only worry about that when I care about somebody and, if that stops, I don't care what they think either.

We decide if we are broken or not. We are the only one who can permanently break ourselves.