Hey, Cedar, or anyone interested in FOO (Family of Origin) issues. Cedar, WHY NOW???

[allusedup]

HEY SWOT, the woman wanted the puppy but because she is tired of taking care of it, she doesn't want it anymore. It was never meant that the child would take care of it as he is only 3 years old . But she blames the child because she said she wanted the puppy for him, lol. She asked me yesterday if I wanted it but I told here no for a couple of reasons, but I am going to get her tomorrow. I can't leave her over there like that. I will take care of her until I can find her another home. Thanks for the input guys.

 

[allusedup]

HEY SWOT, the woman wanted the puppy but because she is tired of taking care of it, she doesn't want it anymore. It was never meant that the child would take care of it as he is only 3 years old . But she blames the child because she said she wanted the puppy for him, lol. She asked me yesterday if I wanted it but I told here no for a couple of reasons, but I am going to get her tomorrow. I can't leave her over there like that. I will take care of her until I can find her another home. Thanks for the input guys.

 

[Natsom]

I'm sorry. Newbie here. What is FOO?

 

[Copabanana]

I'm sorry. Newbie here. What is FOO?

Family of Origin, meaning our parents, brothers and sisters, and sometimes grandparents.

You are welcome to join us.

 

[Natsom]

Thanks. It all makes sense now

 

[Copabanana]

Thanks. It all makes sense now

Natsom, I should have explained better. We look at how experiences in our families as children and our interactions with our families have shaped and still influence negatively our perceptions of ourselves as people and the way we parent.

It is very helpful.

 

[allusedup]

This site is lagging with me too, big time. Thought it was my device but it's not doing it anywhere else. Copa, was it you that mentioned you had noticed it too? What can be done?

 

[Copabanana]

This site is lagging with me too, big time. Thought it was my device but it's not doing it anywhere else. Copa, was it you that mentioned you had noticed it too? What can be done?

Belle, I think it is because of all of the content on the thread. We write volumes and volumes on so many posts, now 40 pages.

I think we need to agree to start another volume, and wait until others chime in so we are all on the same page so to speak.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

But to seek to be somebody who others cherish seems such a fragile and dangerous goal. So outside of our reach and our control. The expectation that what we are will in any way influence our value to others, especially our children.

I have been protected and cherished. My children are not in positions to protect or cherish. I will have to be stronger, more certain, less afraid, more capable. This has to do with believing people are better than they are. It has to do with that male beating my daughter and with who my own sister turned out to be.

It isn't that we were not strong, Copa. Our abuser's dysfunctions became the fulcrums upon which our very worlds revolved.

roar

I could spit, when I think of it.

Were the strongest of them able to hold themselves as precious and worthy and rise above the definitions of their captors?

I don't know. I do know that this is the exact nature of our quest here, Copa. To rise above the definitions of our captors.

You phrased it beautifully.

I do know this: "At the touch of Eternity, you will know."

What I don't know right this minute is who said that.

:O)

This too, but I would want to phrase it, I want to be someone worthy of their respect, because you will never be able to ensure that they do the right thing or one hundred percent act towards you with respect.

True, Copa. But when we are through this, and once we are freely ourselves in a way we have never known, we will be clearer, cleaner, stronger. We will feel different; safer. More someone to emulate than protect. We will be people so certain of their love, and of those they love, that our children will not use love as a weapon.

What else is my son doing but using love as a weapon when he hates me? When he pops into and out of my life at his own discretion, demanding impossible things, demanding things he was never raised to believe were right things? Would he take my house, take my money, become a righteous beggar if I did not have D H?

Yes.

There are times in his life when he would.

That is why I must be stronger than I am, Copa. And I don't know how to do that.

So I have to dig down there a couple feet and redo the elbow in the pipe. That's _with_ a heavy duty T-Post wired to the standing pipe of the hydrant. Not hard, just muddy and best done with an extra pair of hands. Imagine trying to mate a 4' long 15 lb top heavy chunk of plumbing hardware's 1" elbow coupler with the water pipe at the bottom of an 18" hole. I've done all of them, it just goes better with someone at the top holding the fixture.

Whoa! I am impressed. A T post, huh? Wired to the pipe elbow with all those other dimensions of things.

I have done those things too, of course. Just never in real life.

:O)

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

Why don't we just name it: Family of Origin Thread (FOO) Part II?

 

[allusedup]

I agree to change and name it whatecer yall want... posting and reading even is hard for me now.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

In what way do they still matter?

This was asked re: sisters. The post is a wandering, chain of consciousness thing but I will leave it in like I always do in case it helps anyone else to go through my process with me. What I've concluded is:

Whenever I think about the things discussed in the body of this post, I will think, instead: The goal is to witness for myself; is to see myself through kind, approving, intelligent eyes and not ever again through those of the abuser.

***

So here is the rambling post. Everything important in it is included above.

That feeling of ten thousand questions, that head in a beehive feeling I get when I think about FOO has no answer. The more I think about them, the more I post about this, that, or the next nastiness there, the worse I feel about where I have come from and who I might be.

So that explains why I refuse to accept my present situation, why I keep worrying it, keep second guessing and questioning myself as though I had another choice. There is no other choice I could have made but to do as I have done. This isn't about an elderly mother who hung up on me or a sister determined to do something hurtful and ugly that I don't understand. This is about all the things that went before and culminated in my decision to separate myself from them.

You are right on that one, SWOT.

Much of my identity is bound up in how I care for my sister or my mother and how they will do without me and how I will do when my mother dies and it is too late to try to create a different story for myself and even, for my family of origin. They are doing fine, but I am the rejected one and that fills me with ten thousand questions and I never can get the win in it.

But going along with what they insist is the reality they want is unacceptable to me.

That's all there is, really, to say: Unacceptable.

But who does it make me, to choose not to be there with the mother, to not have been there for the father?

Well, I don't know.

I don't know yet how to think about myself in that context.

I still see my sister's eyes fill with tears; I still hear her crying. (She does that to this day. She is like, 61 years old, and she wants people to hear her cry really loud and to watch her while she does it.) I get it now that these things are manipulations, and I don't like the way that makes me look, either. (It takes two to play a game.)

But there it is.

I never could see that before. I wanted to help, I wanted her to be happy, and I wanted everyone to be happy and etc. I have posted before that I never cry and when I do I feel, not validated, but like I have sprung a leak in public. So, I always believed my sister must be overwhelmed to cry in front of someone like that, and would rush to her emotional rescue.

Like the Rolling Stones.

Just a song, then. Play another.

What kind of sappy way is that to live a life?!? On the other hand, people do what they do when we are with them. If we'd known that is what they were going to do, we probably wouldn't have given them our time.

So, there's that.

So, I am not responsible for her crying, then. That little brat is playing a game. (Hear the tone of that? Mom response to someone else's brat of a kid.)

She's 61.

***

Especially since it looks like my sister is not some vulnerable little thing, after all, or at all.

Oh, roar!!!

You are further along than me, SWOT. Maybe I will get to that place where I no longer need to figure out how I got to be the way I am ~ to that place where I will focus solely on healthy response and self awareness and self possession. If I knew for sure I was never going to see any of my family of origin again, then I could let go of trying to unravel motivation. But I am still a little afraid of them, because don't I have a responsibility to try and who am I if I don't and blah, blah.

And my mother will die and then it will be irrevocable.

I am still confused about so much of all of it. In my secret heart I miss my mom and my sister and brother, except I don't. Missing them is a version of emotional flashback.

I miss the idea of them, not the reality of them. (Though there is that good feeling come of family around.) The reality that I see through writing all these terrible things about them is a clanking, intentionally ugly thing. It feels like that if I could just get the win in it, then I could understand what I am ~ I don't know. How this could keep happening, I suppose.

So, that little bit of confusion is why they still matter. I still wish I had what I wish I had. I can hardly believe the ugliness in what it certainly does look like I do have, instead. But I don't think I am seeing it wrong. I think that really is how they are. I don't think all families are so intentionally mean or small minded. Once I believe myself about these things, I will stop thinking about them so much.

But that is a loss, too. I want what I wish I had. I want to be who I would have been if I had been brought up in that other, better way where adult women don't hit and scream and hate and pattern that way of rising above our brokenness. I am excruciatingly aware of the broken places. So, I am further along than I thought. I can be comfortable there, knowing what I know about how it was for me, and I can lean in. (That's Brene Brown. That concept of leaning in to the discomfort instead of trying to talk ourselves out of it.)

So, that's what I know this morning.

My job here is to ferret out the places where the way I was brought up weaken me today. I will need to find a position, a set of words, a way to see myself without family without being ashamed of that.

I do feel pretty soundly rejected. (Second reading: Emotional flashback. Rejection is the feel of emotional flashback. Nothing more and nothing real and something to be appropriately labeled and disregarded.

Cedar

Okay. I found the words: I was thinking, "Ours is an ugly story." That is a true thing. I can hang onto that. What I am working toward here is acknowledging that this is true without feeling that the failure here is mine, is something intrinsic to me.

Something like what Francis of Asissi is supposed to have said: I have done what was mine to do and now, you will do what is yours to do.

Something like that. I feel like a bad person, not to try. But for heaven's sake. Look what they've done!!!

I keep thinking there must be a way to motivate all of us to change the repeated ugliness in the story. Ignoring the wrongnesses, assuming we will all rise if we just believe we can hasn't worked.

Ever.

That is why I keep tripping over what the win could be. I don't see the win in the smallness of "winning" the mother, or the mother's stuff, to the exclusion of family and loyalty and etc represented by that dinner I am always posting about.

Probably there is no answer.

Accept, and let go.

It is what it looks like. I have no control over them and seem to have no valid role in my own family of origin and isn't that something.

So, I will have to be strong in myself, and enough in myself, and leave them where and as they are without feeling stupidly rejected and therefore, rejectable in my real life. That's the vulnerability come of all this ugly stuff.

I don't see that changing. So, you are right SWOT in your contention that the sure way to heal is not to cheat, even in our thoughts.

That way, we can learn who we are when we are not rejectable.

So I will do that then. Stop cheating, stop thinking about them, stop wondering how this could have happened to all of us. Who I am in that mix is to be discovered. Who I was in interaction with them was not a good or rewarding or clarifying thing.

I think the secret is that I don't like them very much.

I feel better than them.


So where do they get the chutzpa to reject me, right?

:O)


I am very safe from them, now. Those feelings of vulnerability are only an old habit. Probably envisioning that dinner all the time is an old habit, too. A child would be very safe from the screaming mother at a dinner like that.

A dinner at my house.

 

[BusynMember]

Much of my identity is bound up in how I care for my sister or my mother and how they will do without me and how I will do when my mother dies and it is too late to try to create a different story for myself and even, for my family of origin. They are doing fine, but I am the rejected one and that fills me with ten thousand questions and I never can get the win in it.

Cedar, you already have your answer. They did you a big favor. They left you. Therefore you don't have any decision to make.
Mine did that to me too.
Cedar, I have often, on this thread an d to my Higher Power, thanked the circumstances that kept my FOO out of the life of my children and husband.
This choice was taken out of your hands too.
Cedar, unless going through intensive counseling because they know they have issues, PEOPLE DON'T CHANGE! They change if they see problems a nd WANT to change and seek out ways to do it. Your mother is your mother, as she always was, not any different. She may become despaerate when she is at the end, but that doesn't mean she changed. Her circumstances changed. That's all. Your sister is your sister. She is the same sister who was so incredibly nasty about your daughter. She thinks she is a good person and will not change. There will be no happy, Beavy Cleaver ending for any of us.

And we all know what happened to Jerry Matther (Beaver Cleaver). He is an unemployed actor

We are not unemployed. We have worth and love and we have lived through a lot and are still standing.

Don't wish for t he stars. That will only burn your hand.

Make a good life for you. We may have come from our mothers wombs, but that doesn't make us who she is. I shudder to think of that. Our sisters may have shared the same womb, but they are not us. We are not who they are. Yes, our childhood affected us and, in this thread, in a bad way. But we are still just one person....us.

They threw us out. We are FREE!!!!

We don't owe them anything. If we want to give something, we can, but it is not a debt to them for having been our womb or shared our womb. And what of our adopted kids? We love t hem as if we'd given birth to them. So w hat is DNA? Nothing.

Love is everything, not DNA.

 

[BusynMember]

So where do they get the chutzpa to reject me, right?

You are too good for them, Cedar.

 

[Copabanana]

Would he take my house, take my money, become a righteous beggar if I did not have D H?

Yes.

Remember I told you of my sister's words to my Mother, I can take your house any time I want. And that was supposed to reassure her.

I have done those things too, of course. Just never in real life.

Me too.
__

It isn't that we were not strong, Copa. Our abuser's dysfunctions became the fulcrums upon which our very worlds revolved.

Yes, for a time, they did.

why I keep worrying it, keep second guessing and questioning myself as though I had another choice. There is no other choice I could have made but to do as I have done.

Cedar, see if this makes sense.

The agony comes from seeing your life as: a, b, c, d, e, g, p...= Choice
That a series of events or feelings has led to Choice. The cart drives the horse here. Sorry.

Instead there is SWOT's way to think of it:

Choice. (because of a, b, c....)How much stronger this is. And the result is greater strength.

Because the choice comes first, we choose to not engage in second guessing and rearranging all of the infinite permutations possible among the events and feelings of a life.

SWOT every day sees herself as the powerful one, the decider, the chooser in her life. There is a driver here.

She does not see her choice as in any way dependent upon how she sees any person or event. Because to do so would be to be determined by others and to let something outside of her determine her choice. She will not allow second guessing because she is in charge. She the difference in power here?

how I will do when my mother dies and it is too late to try to create a different story for myself and even, for my family of origin.

Well, here you capture and frame my agony around the death of my mother. But see Cedar, you are anticipating the story and taking away its power to trap and kill you. I fell into it as if I was one of those little a, b, or p's in my equation above.

You will choose who you are and want to be.

Maybe I will get to that place where I no longer need to figure out how I got to be the way I am

Exactly this Cedar. That is exactly what SWOT has chosen and we are getting there too.

If I knew for sure I was never going to see any of my family of origin again, then I could let go of trying to unravel motivation.

Cedar, why do you have to unravel motivation.

The result is always "I hurt" in relation to a, b, c, x.

Do you look for motivation of a "pin" or a "knife." In order to accuse a knife of its sharpness, must you find and isolate and define it's ill intent or answer why?

Because it is a knife. That is why it hurts.

Now you can ask yourself, why does the knife decide to hurt me? That is a different question.

Because it is guided to hurt you by someone.

Why would someone guide a knife to my heart to hurt me or kill me?

Because they want to. A knife is seldom guided to a heart by accident. But of course you could entertain if you wanted to the idea that somebody in your life has repeatedly guided knives to your heart by accident, over and over again. That is your choice.

I will need to find a position, a set of words, a way to see myself without family without being ashamed of that.

Cedar, what is your shame? Do you believe that you deserved over and over again that a knife be guided to your heart? Each time it happened, do you really need to conduct a trial on YOURSELF to see if you deserve it?

There is no need for a trial of You or of anybody. You decide if something hurts. You certainly get to decide if you died from the wound.

You are responsible for protecting you. Nobody else gets to decide about what you do or not.

You do have a family and will always have a family. It is just that you do not like them much because knives keep ending up in your heart when you are around them or speak to them.

I keep thinking there must be a way to motivate all of us to change the repeated ugliness in the story. Ignoring the wrongnesses, assuming we will all rise if we just believe we can hasn't worked.

Cedar (in a weary, weary voice), knives are sharp. They keep ending up in your heart. Somehow they get there. Only when certain people are in the room. Read Agatha Christie.

How in the world do you motivate somebody to stop guiding knives into your heart to kill your spirit? How do you convince yourself that they did not mean it? If you do convince yourself that they did not stick you in the heart and indeed your spirit did not die as a result, what do you do with the bloody knife?

There is a time when a choice needs to be made. The only one to make it is you. We can keep taking you to court, but do we really need to?

I don't see the win in the smallness of "winning" the mother, or the mother's stuff, to the exclusion of family and loyalty

Cedar (weary voice again)she does not play your game with your rules. She plays her own. You decide your rules. She decides hers. You need to decide if you keep wanting to play her game in your head. Don't cheat.

I have no control over them and seem to have no valid role in my own family of origin

On the contrary, Cedar, you play the determining and vital role in the family. There is a term in the semiotics world called the "missing signifier." I am not a semiotician but I know that the missing signifier can name the whole of the thing, or at least distort the meaning.

Without Cedar they are missing the meaning of the whole, who they are. That is why they cannot stand it. Believe me it is not LOVE.

stop wondering how this could have happened to all of us.

This is my last word on this. (weary voice.) Knives hurt. You were stabbed. Repeatedly. You realized you can stay away from people with knives. You are.

Any time at all you can change this. Options:You can wear full body armor and give a dinner party or You can decide to be the Roast. There are no other options I can think of. I wish there were.

But you cannot make knives not hurt. You cannot lock all the knives up in the closet. People will fight you to keep them.

I do know that this is the exact nature of our quest here, Copa. To rise above the definitions of our captors.

I am rethinking this. Our captors have knives. They are killing us.

What our captors think means not one thing. It is always only about us. In the end it matters not at all how the knives got there. It is always only about us. We are good people. We try to live well. We have loved our children. Our mates. Our pets. Poor Romy.

Just, get out of the way of knives, and bad people who intend to hurt you if you can.

Who needs to rise above anybody? Except the answer to that question lies below.

We will be people so certain of their love, and of those they love, that our children will not use love as a weapon.

I cannot wait. In my case I see this a little different. I am certain of my love and here is the problem: I am only OK if love is returned. If I encounter a knife, I get angry or immobilized or hurt. In my life love often encounters knives.

And when that happens, I descend right back into FOO every single time. And that is the problem.

When our children who we love have their knives out for us, or use knives in their business with us.....

 

[BusynMember]

SWOT every day sees herself as the powerful one, the decider, the chooser in her life. There is a driver here.

Haha. It took so long to get here. Frankly, I had to decide that the actual truth is that what my FOO thinks or thought of me has no matter in my life. Until I did, they were crowding that driver's seat with me even when I wasn't talking to them.

I just wish I'd had this realistic mindset earlier. Nobody drives my car but me. But t hat was not always the case.

 

[BusynMember]

How in the world do you motivate somebody to stop guiding knives into your heart to kill your spirit? How do you convince yourself that they did not mean it? If you do convince yourself that they did not stick you in the heart and indeed your spirit did not die as a result, what do you do with the bloody knife?

Cedar, how many times have YOU said you can't change those who don't want to change? You know this.

They won't change.

And to me my FOO is not my real family. They are DNA related people, not a part of me. My skin isn't their skin. My blood isn't their blood. We don't even all have the same blood type. They are nothing more than people in a world of millions. I do not derive my identity from them and I never did. I always felt apart; different from them; better in some ways. Now you know my mothers hateful words affected me a lot, however I always felt I had the big heart in the family.

I used to fight back and I told this to Awesome New Psychologist yesterday. She asked me if I yelled at them? I said I did. She asked if they yelled at me first. I said, "Usually. Or baited me. And I was such a mess in my 20's anyway, but I shouldn't have done it."

She said, "What about them?"

I paused then said, "I deserved it?" but not with the conviction I used to.

She said, "Nobody deserves that. So you yelled back. So what? They doesn't make you a bad person. You were not taught how to deal with confrontation in your family, were you?"

"No. We weren't taught anything."

"Did you talk about it?"

"We never discussed anything." I don't remember the family sitting down for, say, the family meetings we have.

She just said, "You aren't bad for trying to stick up for yourself the only way you knew how. You have better tools now."

"I still get upset with FOO, especially when they pick on me as if everything is my fault." I gave her a brief rundown of my dad's 85th birthday whose demise was blamed on my inability to go.

She said, "I would say you were tremendously provoked."

We had a good session. She is getting me prepared for EMDR (I'll let you know how that goes). So we almost looped all the stuff that happened to me in my family because once you start talking, you keep remembering.

I left feeling exhausted but good about myself. Why did I ever let these weird collection of DNAers talk me into thinking that sticking up for myself when tremendously provoked made me a bad person?

It actually helped me by giving me my freedom early.

But that will be another post, hopefully on Part II

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Cedar (in a weary, weary voice), knives are sharp. They keep ending up in your heart. Somehow they get there. Only when certain people are in the room. Read Agatha Christie.

Ha! I love this, Copa.

It is good to laugh about these things. "Only when certain people are in the room...."

What our captors think means not one thing.

This is true Copa, once we have been able to see ~ for me this is true ~ once I have been able to see the hatred in my abuser's eyes as a piece of her illness and not as my "real." Just as loving eyes teach us something real about ourselves, something we can hold onto when we are hurt and need somehow to be strong, so can blaming and hatred teach us that we are hopelessly despicable, or that we are fraudulent in claiming bravery or competency in our lives today, as adults, because we were not able to protect our younger sibs.

I remember posting once that I believed myself to be a coward. That when the chips were down, I would freeze, would not be able to act, would be too afraid to help the victim. I believed that about myself Copa. And the memory attending it was always about my brother; about the things that happened to him. In going over and over this material here and on the first thread, I was able to understand that I did do something courageous. I went to where the abuse was happening. I did not stay safely away and thank my lucky stars it wasn't me this time. I could not stop it, but I did go there. I did all I could and my mother did stop kicking him that time.

Stuff like that, I needed to go through and resee my role in.

Turns out I am not a coward Copa, but I believed that all my life.

Remember when a plane went down in an icy river? One of the films showed someone, so scared, and their eyes frozen open. That retraumatized me to the max. I just knew I would never have dived into that icy water to save that man with his eyes frozen open.

Now?

I know I would have helped him.

It makes my heart beat faster even now though, to think about this.

But now, the overwhelming feeling is one of rage or anger at my mother, who should never have done any of those things she did, not to any of us.

And that is a very good place to be, instead of where I was, before.

But I don't want to hate, either.

That is probably why I keep trying to make sense of it.

And when that happens, I descend right back into FOO every single time. And that is the problem.

Yep.

But at least now we know we are there. We have SWOT's phrase, "emotional flashback".

We know the answer is to see ourselves through our own eyes and not those of our cowardly abusers, and to never believe the flowers. (To me, that phrase from The Little Prince meant I did not have to believe the bad things that were happening with the kids had to be the end of the story as predicted by my mother ~ that hatred and backstabbing and etc are what matter; that there could never be true goodness and loving and believing in ourselves or in other people.) I believe, but just not in my sister, anymore.

I don't know what to think about my mom.

I did have a dream once in which she was driving the car.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

These are my favorite quotes in my post which I feel are gut splitting in their funniness. I am now clapping.

Any time at all you can change this. Options:You can wear full body armor and give a dinner party or You can decide to be the Roast. There are no other options I can think of. I wish there were.

and

If you do convince yourself that they did not stick you in the heart and indeed your spirit did not die as a result, what do you do with the bloody knife?

The Red Badge of Courage Award goes to:

I just knew I would never have dived into that icy water to save that man with his eyes frozen open.

Now?

I know I would have helped him.

Good job, Cedar. I know you would and so would I. And so would SWOT. I know she would. But she would save the dogs first.

 

[BusynMember]

Hey!!!!

As the sign hanging above my computer says:
DOGS ARE PEOPLE TOO!