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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659290" data-attributes="member: 17461">Innocence.The returning is about innocence, and about believing in love, and in about believing we can create all good things with our good hearts and our good visions.There is no penance in it.  We did not view our families of origin as things that needed recovering from or ourselves as crusaders.We loved them, just the way, after reporting the most chilling abuses,  we keep saying we love them, today.Because we do.  We tend, I think, to love pretty generously, with a wide ranging sense of celebration and a belief that whatever it is we do have, it is enough and more than enough.They are not like us.***When D H and I decided we should see my family of origin, I committed to creating the family I wanted for all of us.  I did not understand the unremitting toxicity in them the way I do, today.  Had I known then what I know about them now, I would have insisted on no contact.  It isn't that they don't know any better.  They know what they do and they mean exactly what they do.It is just like this thing with my sister.  It is exactly what it looks and feels like.I am battling around trying to figure it out in some other way because I can't believe it could be what it looks like.  But of course it is.So that is the first reason we continue going back, the reason we continue disbelieving our own eyes, the reason we continue taking responsibility for their amoral moral outlook ~ we did not know, Copa.  We thought everyone was like us.  They are not like us.  We thought they would change, or we thought we were wrong, or we thought we could change ourselves enough to meet them halfway.It looked so easy, in our friends' families.  That is because their mothers (and sisters) were not some version of sociopaths.  ***In posting here, I am seeing what they do, what they have done, what they choose every time and it's unbelievable.We don't understand the living toxicity in our family lines.  We have no internal reflection by which to recognize it.  When we do recognize them, we still are not going to believe it could be true.  That seems to be the essential nature of the conflict for me.  I can't believe it.  I beat myself up for thinking that way.  I wonder what is the matter with me.  I accuse myself of jealousy or cowardice or sour grapes.  I feel ashamed.  All these things Copa I do because I literally cannot convince myself that I saw what I saw, that I hear what I hear.It's extraordinary.  We do not believe that kind of evil thinking they engage in so readily ~ we don't believe that kind of thinking exists, Copa.  If we thought that way, we would be horrified speechless.We just don't see it.We don't believe it when we do see it.Cedar</blockquote>

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