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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659615" data-attributes="member: 17461">No, I was wrong in suggesting this, Copa.I wish the people in Charleston had been able to execute that man. For all of us.  Right on the spot.  And I wish he'd known that was what was going to happen to him.  Who could ever say what a horrible difference those deaths will make to those families as time passes and those people who loved them  are never there, again.  Grandmas and grandpas and moms and dads taken out of their families just like that, forever.I saw that young man on television, sitting there in safety and not giving a rip about the pain he'd inflicted.  No remorse in his face or his posture.***I actually think it would be the right thing to do, to make copies of those pics for your sister.  The actions we take do matter.  What we do teaches us who we are.  Perhaps you could enclose a note.  One of the things I said to my sister on her phone call was that I loved her too much to love her this way.  Maybe you could say something like that, because that is a true thing.  Ask her to please send copies of the pics she has to you.I hope she does that.But our sisters do seem to try to hurt us, Copa.  So be wise, and be wary, as SWOT suggests.No.  Even when I am posting all about how mad I am and etc...I still feel sad that she doesn't love me, after all.It is a sad thing.  I do feel sad about it.  But if anything were ever going to change, it would be changed already.  It's okay to grieve the loss of a thing, even if it was always nothing more than a beautiful dream.  That was a good dream to have.  So much better than the hard reality of my family of origin.  It is a hard dream to let go.Maybe we think if we punish ourselves enough it will finally happen.I don't get to cheat about that.I don't think so, Copa.  My mother is in a state about whether the lady will be late for a day or two before she ever arrives.  She complains about needing to repack her truck, though my brother and I were usually there to do the lifting and repacking.  My mom laughs about the lady behind her back to the other ladies they are all friends with, implying that she is stupid and foolish.  When the lady arrives at my mom's house, she is so anxiety-ridden.  Strong and not strong.  I like your analogy of the key, Copa.  I think predators sense the wound and force whatever key they usually use.  I too think I am strong enough, think I can do my part whatever they do.  But boy, when I write out what has happened here, I see that while I may be strong enough, I have fallen into a crazy pattern of being  too polite to mention it when someone is destroying me to themselves and labeling me and looking down on me forever.It's just the strangest thing.Why do I have to be strong enough to stand up to their abuse when family is supposed to be about gaining strength to perform well in the world, and not about finding strength in the world to figure out how to survive having dinner with them?  Why did I feel it was my responsibility to listen to my mother hour after hour, or to visit my sister because her own mother would not?I will say that things have taken a decided turn for the worse since my father's death.What I think of my behavior is that I am doing really well.I don't feel so badly about any of it as I did when I went through it here initially.It is a hard thing though SWOT, to fit a family's hatred into that place other people have a family's love.  It is hard to be that person who needs to do that.  I think I would not have been able to face the feelings of worthlessness or wrongness or emotional flashback that I feel when I know they don't cherish me or my kids or grands without the support I receive here.Thank you both, sincerely, for that.It's an ugliness.It's difficult to know how to see that, and how to see myself in it.The best way I can describe what is happening to me from posting here as we have done is that I am seeing what they do as abusive.  I didn't really label it before.  And I am seeing the abuses through my own eyes instead of seeing me being abused, instead of somehow seeing myself as someone who can be treated so badly and who merits the kind of treatment they dish out because after all is said and done, that is what they did do.It is a strange thing to know what to do with that, to think how to see that.Very hurtful.There are times we cannot see what we choose.  Unless my sister is fooling me about that too, she does not want to be this way and would choose something kinder if she could.It was very hard for us, growing up.We have mother hunger and decency hunger and all kinds of darkness within us.  We declare our own names in how we love and care for our parents and our sibs and extended families and we cannot even do that.  Again, I have seen families unite around accompanying the parent through fragility and loss of function and death.  So I know it is possible to do it that way.It could be that my sister believes she is the one who knows how to heal the mother and create real relationship with her.  That could be true.  I don't understand the need to exclude, or the need to push even little grandchildren into that less than space if the objective is to create family.And there is that tire rimming machine incident where my brother is concerned.I just keep tripping over these things.Yeah.Well except for the dinner part.And the part where I think they are both pretty darn cute.  But then there is that tire rimming machine my mother disappeared when my brother spoke up about his grands.  But not the meanness, and not the exclusion, and not the part about requiring my sister's grand to be elevated over my brother's.  When I see these patterns, I just cannot believe it.  I go into a little emotional flashback feeling, maybe.  It could be that I am imagining the worst of this.  But I just don't think so.  Pasa said, on nlj's thread on Wills, something to the effect that if we did not expect our families to be wonderful, then we could accept all this with more grace. But I feel dirtied when I see what they do.Pasa probably is right.I just keep getting that black spider in the bathtub feeling when I think about my mom and my sister.  And then, one minute later, I miss them and I wish I could see them, and I feel badly for myself regarding nieces and grands and etc.And that stupid dinner I am always posting about.  Really you two, I think we are already having that dinner.  This is what it looks like.And then, back to the spider in the tub feeling.So, a slow moving kalidescope.  But I am moving.Very sad, to know it.A dirtied feeling.  A little like what Copa posted about being low rent.Like that.I agree with this Copa.  But my sister made my already so vulnerable daughter cry at the pain of what was offered and jerked away.  My own sister FB me to get all the juicy details (and I hate her for that) once she already knew them because my daughter was posting all of it.  And then, my sister said:  I already know.And nothing else.Like she was celebrating what happened to my child.  And my mother was being very mean too, I am certain, but I never heard a thing from her about what was happening to my daughter.I could just cry for the loneliness of that time, and for how scared I was.  What would have happened to me then, without this site.So I am spit done with forgiving and taking the high road where those two are concerned.  Oh, brother.  Here comes that stupid kalidescope feeling.I want what I want.I want it both ways, and I want what she did to my daughter never to have happened.But it did.But my sister even did that, to me and to my child, she did that.  A version of what happened to all of us when our children fell and our family was falling apart, in the first place.Vulnerability; it does not do to be vulnerable to my family of origin.  Sick, sick people.  I know that from reading about the responses other families make, here on the site.  They don't do what my family does.SWOT is right.I don't need a mother, and I don't need a sister.  And since my brother isn't contacting me since all this happened, I guess I lose him by default.I am feeling better about all of it, though.Well, except that I'm not.Would you like to start a thread with the title:  An Invitation to Discuss  Family of Origin Concerns or something similar?  Many of us who have been wounded as we have are reluctant to post to the depth required to uncover and heal the woundedness in so open a forum.But I am very open to beginning a new thread, Copa and SWOT.We do have followers on this thread.  Given the number of followers, I am almost certain they cannot all be my mother and my sister.:O)If you are following and would like to post in with an observation or with a question or an incident, please feel very welcome, everyone.  The more open we can be about what is happening to us, the less guilt about it we carry.  It is good and strengthening to choose the healing initiative for ourselves.  Just to make that choice and go public about what has happened to us changes everything.It is sad and scary sometimes too, but please feel most welcome to join us.If those reading along but not posting are really my mother and my sister?This is all SWOT and Copa's fault.:O)That's the thing.  We are in abusive relationship with our families of origin.  Think about the complexity of that.  We are determined to recognize and heal the hurt of that and to go on from here free of guilt or shame.To me, this involves seeing the ugly of the story through our own eyes, not theirs.Maybe by the end of this process, I will be the abusive one."ROAR you guys better watch out!"  Daffy Duck sputters.  Meaning it with all her heart, she stomps off to put out the fire in her tail feathers because the part currently on fire is the priority item.  The broken leg can be dealt with later.***I just don't know how to see myself, in this story of my own life.Well, that is why I liked the link to Monty Python's Frenchman and the king.That is where I am going to get to."We already got one.  Oh yes, it's very nice."Right there.  Right in that place where I believe that with all my heart.  No shadows.When you are ready, then you will define the terms of the relationship, not her.  Forgiving, especially to the point that we still believe in them, makes us vulnerable to them in a thousand unseen ways.  Forgiving to the point we still believe in them right in the face of the things they say and do leaves us vulnerable to them, and that is dangerous to our concepts of self.  We cannot continue to allow people to borrow from us, Copa and SWOT.  In a way, that is what our families of origin do.  They borrow forgiveness for current downright reprehensible meanness on the promise of repayment at some amorphous future date.And we keep lending them credence and safe harbor and some weird combination of legitimacy and shame with a delighted smile in our hearts when we see them.We need to stop smiling at them and the terrible things they do.They mean it.It is not an error or a clumsiness or a mistake, what they do.So I had best stop seeing myself as Daffy Duck.  I will be the rogue elephant in the room.Trumpeting.I will have to see whether that is what I think.  I think I feel like not a thing makes any sense at all where my family is concerned.  I have the sense that they think "What would Cedar do." sums it up.  To ridicule that way that I am.That was really very hurtful.Not that I am not mean or don't hate with fiery intensity.  I do.  But I don't act on that because I don't want to hurt anyone.  And I just don't get the win in what they do.D H does.He says I will be vulnerable to them if and when he is no longer here.I see this, SWOT.  Our sisters and mothers are meant to hold heartspace.  all the moms and sisters I know hold that special heartspace for one another and for all the grands.  It is that our moms and sisters are snakes.  Maybe they are snakes.  And it is hard to put those two realities together and come out knowing who that makes us.The rogue elephant; trumpeting at the stupidly hurtful injustice it.I swear, I am so sick of these exclusionary policies.Roar.Oh, SWOT.  That's very good thinking.  I especially like the part about two such damaged people.  Little resistance there about them not being important.I really like that global emotional flashback piece.  I kept putting those feelings together with a particular incident.  But it makes perfect sense that I would be coming from overwhelming emotional flashback through every interaction involving my mom and my sister.I am afraid of my mom, too.She is so freaking mean.  Well, that makes sense, doesn't it.  She picked mean every time when we were little.  No one forced her to do those things, those terribly destructive things, to her own children.My brother was very handsome; he has beautiful eyes too, like my father did.That did not protect him, either.It is hard to hold both pictures of my mother.  What she did and does and what my responsibility toward her, and toward everyone in my family, seems to be.  Those were never my responsibilities.  Those feelings are where I parentified myself to make it better for all of us.  And here is the terrible cost to me in all that:  I believed that was a value as true as the value of an education or a belief in oneself or a right to pursue creating a life that had nothing to do with laundry or dinner or breakfast or sweet rolls.So I will do those things now, then.It surprises me to think like that, now.  To know that inside myself I still believe it is more important to try to be together as family than to be myself, than to claim the right to fight to challenge and create my life in a way that does not reflect that family dinner I am always posting about.  It's like I cannot move on until that can be who we all are.I am seeing changes in my actions now.  I host Book Club tomorrow.  I am not even scouring or pulling weeds from the gardens or worrying about how to welcome everyone and be happy like I usually do.  In fact, if I don't get busy here, the windows are not even going to be clean.  This is very different for me.  When Baklava grand was here, I did not worry so much about food or whether she was happy or even, whether I gave good advice.I don't give advice, anymore.We were just all here together.  Her visit here was so nice, and we are not even worried about how she will do in her life.  She is very strong and gentle and sweet and has many good, good friends.  That is different for me.  I generally worry about clothes and diet and friends and life plans.It has to do with trusting her to be just fine, I suppose.("We already got one.  Oh yes, it's very nice.")  So those are all good things.  Now, we just need to finish up this opening our eyes about our families of origins part.We are doing well.That's funny and very cool, SWOT.Ha!"There's nothing like bad luck...." re family of origin.  That's a good way to look at it, SWOT.:O)I liked this one so much I put it in here twice.True.But then I get that circle over the protectiveness thing I have going on.  But "What would Cedar do." is a pretty cheap shot.Those dirty rats, to treat me like that.  The clip from Dragnet goes here.  Joe Friday, recounting all the things that make him legitimate, whatever the criminal says.Yay.  I am finally standing up for myself.  Usually, in my secret heart?  I feel ridiculed and foolish and so ashamed, when I know they did that behind my back while I was planning that dinner where everyone would swing on the rooftop restaurant while the sun went down.I sound pretty sappy even to myself.You both are right.  I did what I did.  Now, I will not do that anymore.Well, okay.  I choose me with a little confusion.  It is true though that I would not do what they do because I don't get how the win it it could be a win.Ever.In fact, it's offensive.Okay.I choose me.My way I think is just fine.The point was only to hurt me.  That is the win.Or to hurt my brother.Huh.This is a good point too, SWOT.I know what real love is now, too.  That is what I meant when I said to my sister that I did love her, that I loved her too much to do it this way.I like the part about never cheating.And about knowing what we undeniably do know.And changing the look of things from their perspective to mine.They have no right of access to me.I was thinking about that yesterday.  I was sort of pretending to be a big shot re: my sister.  And what I said, relative to what happened between she and my daughter was, "What this cost you was me."So, there's that.  I believe I hold a value there that I do not hold.Me, too.  All animals.  But spiders.  And I really don't like woodticks.And my mom, and my sister, too.Here's the thing.  In my mind's eye, I see my sister all forlorn and with tears in her eyes.  But that was my mother's doing.  I did not do that to her.  What I did do was the best I could.  And I was just a little kid, too.That's where the feelings of fraudulence and failure come in, maybe.  Even with that first therapist.  Whatever he meant when he said that, what I heard was that I hadn't been thinking right or behaving right and so, was judged and named and abandoned. But that was therapy!  I get to do whatever I want.  Who cares if we look foolish to our therapists.  But I also had that thing going on about what I may have done to my daughter to leave her no choice but to act out the family pain in that way.Man, that was tough.I haven't posted that he invited me to a gathering his friends were having, a goodbye party.Of course I didn't go.I am still so confused around everything to do with that.I must be stepping into seeing from my own eyes as regards that first therapist.  He certainly shows up here alot.  Which makes sense.  He could only hurt me through wounds that were already there.  Retraumatized trauma.  Emotional flashback.And so is that first therapist.:O)Yeah!  What SWOT said.Cedar</blockquote>

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