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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659135" data-attributes="member: 17461">You see the underlying fear, here.  This has changed.  I am through it.Thank you.***This quote was on FB this morning:  The reality is that you will grieve forever.  You will not "get over" the loss.  You will learn to live with it.  You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.  You will be whole again.  You will not be the same.  Nor would you want to be.That is Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.So, this quote tells us about sacred space.  It describes honoring the self.  There is not going to be a celebration for me; there is not going to be a conclusion.  Nothing is going to resolve.  It is what it is.  There are no surprises; not really.  There is the same wicked mindset spewed out in a thousand directions, seeping through a thousand layers of time and of mind, forever telling the same pointlessly stupid, forever unchangeable story.There is no redemption, here.That change in perspective is golden.I will grieve it forever, as I should.  It matters very much that I do not have what I need.  It matters that I was hurt; it matters, that I was tricked.  Like it always is with abuse, that I was targeted and ridiculed and hurt and shamed had nothing to do with me.  I was not born a victim.  I was victimized.  In every way they could hurt me, on every level, both my mother and my sister did choose to hurt me.  What my mother and my sister did to me, and to all of us, was very wrong.  I am surprised how simple, how right and real, this seems to me, now.  Believe them, when they tell you who they are.  That's paraphrasing Maya.In any event, we did it.  I am through it.  Even the strangulation memory is no longer me seeing me through the abuser's eyes.  This is major.  I am seeing the abuser's intent, and I am seeing a terrified, and a very little, girl.  Six year old children are tiny little beings.  It sickens me to know what she did.  She sickens me.  My mother ~ the woman she created of herself ~ sickens me.  Prior to working things through here, it was myself I was sickened by.  I imagined myself begging and crying, screaming out and wanting to live and wanting to breathe and there was no air.  Now, I see the fat, raging woman.  I see who she would have to be to do that to anyone.  I see who she would have to be to do that to a child between 30 and 50 pounds.  I see who she would have to be, to do that to any child.  I see who she would have to be to control who she was in the company of adults; I understand what that means, who that makes her.  I feel compassion for myself.  I feel anger and I feel the disgust and I feel echoes of the terror that must have been, and of the horror in acceptance.No air.Princesses of dark, timeless lands without water or air.As it always does when something core is healed, other incidents, shadowy things, are drifting in, coalescing, healing.I did not know I would ever work through that strangulation incident.But I have.My mother is a despicable woman.  My sister is a despicable person.Thank you for sticking with me.It worked.***This morning, healing is occurring.  I can feel it happening.  It is like coming out of an illness, or waking up from a dream.  I see my mother, my sister, my brother, differently.  I even respect my brother for the choice he has made to see this thing through.  It cannot be easy for him.  He does not need my protection.  He is a man.  He is not that little boy whose eyes met mine.  (I burn now, with anger at the stupidly out of control fat woman hurting a child, hurting a beautiful little boy.  Making him scream.  In all of my life, that burning intensity of feeling was directed at myself.  Powerless; coward; fraud.  Like me, my brother lived.  However he puts these pieces together is for him to do.  Instead of shame, I feel distaste and a bright, burning, anger-tinged disgust.  I would have been entirely correct in deciding, as I had done as a young woman, never to see any of them again.  I wish they did not have my pictures.Here again, widening the scope, tasting the flavor of the other interactions in the lives of our abusers gives us the truth of our own situations.  Why literally doesn't matter.  We are not going to find the sense of the thing in sifting through the ten thousand traumas of chronic abuse.   What we can do, finally,  is name what is for what it is.  That is where I was having trouble.  Believe them the first time they tell you who they are.I truly did not cause this.  My behaviors are not creating or feeding or even, impacting much about any of this.  If they come, if they call...I don't know.  I truly do not want their footsteps here on this sweet ground that is mine.  I do not want their breathing presences polluting the air of my home.  The conflict here was within me.  I would never allow exclusion.  That time is over.  I no longer have to welcome or include.  Truly, they are despicable people.  I am the one who had the heart.I still do.In losing them, I lose nothing.  Yet, I honor the loss.  For my sake, I honor the determination and the risk and the courage and the loss.  That is who I am.  I did not create a situation in which through some intentional act of omission, I lost the right to the beautifully legitimate warmth and support and validation that is family.  I no longer feel myself on the outside looking in.  I am inside.  They will never be welcome.I see them for what they are; I know them through their choices over time.  I know them through the repetitious patterns of their lives.  It is a small and inconsequential thing to give up that role of protector or believer or lover that I held for their sakes.Very beautifully quiet, here.No echoes.  I survived some terrible things.  I am home, now.Having reworked all this ugliness here has enabled me to accept, to validate the undeniable true thing that my family or origin functioned then and functions still, on hatred and on contempt and on trickery.I will never know why; I will never find the magic key that unlocks some mysterious something and brings us all through this.  It isn't that they're idiots.  They know now, and they knew then, what they were doing.They always knew what they were doing.The difference this morning is that I understand now that the only way I could interact with them was by creating an internal reality in which both past and present day episodes of cruelty were discounted in favor of some utopian future reality.  That is an apt description of faith.  It is never wrong to hold faith.  But there is a serious difference between Bingo and chess.  I play chess.  I play with an eye to the future and a willingness to forgive the past.  They play Bingo.  They probably have twelve cards each in front of them, all the distracting bells and buzzers meaning life, to them.I am outside it, now.Had I not been seeing them, had they never been given access to me or to my own family, there would not have been a need to create hope for the future in the face of the rotten pointlessness of the present.But that's what I did.There are no answers in the past.  It is good to know that what happened was never my fault, was not due to some shortcoming in me.  Shame for these issues ~ man, and I carried so much of it ~ is gone.  There is a kind of shocked disbelief.  There is a cry for justice.  I feel anger, not that they don't get it, but that they did these thing to me, or to anyone.I am no longer vulnerable because I am no longer in denial.  It is what it is because that is the way abusive relationship works.  Staying tied into it, trying harder, believing for the best ~ all those things are amazing things.  But not in intentionally chronically abusive relationship.We are free.Our relationships with our mothers, and with our sibs, display every component of classic abusive relationship.  The way we see them, the way we blame ourselves, that our locuses of control lie with them and not within ourselves ~ all that stuff ~ these are classic symptoms of abusive relationship.They don't want to change.  They are not sorry.  It does not occur to them to be sorry.They lie.  Every abuser lies, presenting their realities and requiring we believe them.  That is the essential difference between us and them.  Between ourselves and any abuser.   They lie, and they believe their own lies, knowing they are lies.  That is where the difference happens.  That is why some people abuse others.They lie.We are fortunate to have survived our childhoods.I don't want to think kindly about them, or think forgiving thoughts surrounding what they do to me.  I don't want to view them with compassion, because they do know what they are doing.  So there is nothing to say.  My sister can call as often as she likes until I change my number.  She can stalk me forever.  She has grown pale to me, now.  There is no core of her, no heart in her.  I feel tricked regarding my feelings for my sister.  That is not her fault.  I am the one who tricked myself.  There is a sense of distaste for her, now.  My mother:  I don't care.  Whatever I decide to do when her time comes will be the right thing.  As time passes after she is gone, my tendency will be to rework it, to find some meaning in what she did to me.There is no meaning.I am so surprised.  I thought this would end with some kind of answer ~ maybe with a new way I could be, once I was shame free, that would change the nature of the interactions between myself and my family of origin.  I no longer believe there is any way to change any of it.  It has always been what it is, today.  It will always be what it always was by their choice.Because they do lie.Even to themselves.I don't care.I feel questions now, but they whirl around how I ever believed so sincerely that this could be changed, could be healed.  I was correct when I was young and wanted nothing to do with them.  It was D H who insisted family mattered, who insisted that we see them, that we welcome them, that we have them over for dinner.  To allow the vulnerability required to interact with any of them, I had to believe they could change.  If I had it to do over, I would not choose to have them in my life, or in any of our lives.  I have been, we all have been, hurt and humiliated and ridiculed.And there is the answer regarding my mother's death.I will not regret turning away.  I regret having given them access to me, to my children, to our lives or our homes or our hearts or our thoughts.    I regret having given her, my mother ~ or my sister ~ access in any way.  I will not make that mistake again.  CedarI am so happy to know these things, SWOT and Copa.  It has been a long, harrowing journey. Thank you for witnessing for me.  Knowing you were there made it possible for me to keep going.  I am safe from them now.  I no longer believe in them.  I believe very much in myself.</blockquote>

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