Love this Cedar. So much truth in it.
For those who have not yet seen Albatross' comment on blackgnat's thread, I will repost it on this one. Albatross named the core of the thing that is happening to all of us, and to our kids.
"And yes, it goes against what we are "supposed" to do. But we live in the rabbit hole now. We do what we have to do, to keep our boundaries intact."
That is the thing that is wrong, that is the situation every parent here finds themselves in. Some unimaginable something changed or happened and we are in places where our abilities to think our ways through our lives ~ all that stuff, everything we know or can learn ~ none of that is working, anymore. Like Alice, everywhere we look, nothing makes sense. And then, the Red Queen appears.
We are all such strong people, such good people. Here we all are in the rabbit hole and though we are scared and strung out we reach out to hold the others up, to bring strength and courage and a way to survive this to the others.
That is an amazing thing.
That doesn't happen on an internet site.
Chances are very high that this is also how we parented our children, how we interacted with our families of origin, how we lived and who we have been, our whole lives.
It is the situation we find ourselves in that is bad. Not us. Not our addicted or otherwise messed up kids.
I felt guilty because I am the mom and my family had somehow fallen apart and I have never not been able to put my attention onto a thing and set it to rights in my life. Over time, that guilt takes on the flavor of something criminal to us. We can't figure out what to hay is going on.
We accuse ourselves. These things began happening to us when our kids were still adolescents and we were still very much their mothers, when we were still very much responsible, as a mother or father should be.
That is where this started.
There is not something wrong with us because we could not stop being their mothers.
That's a normal thing.
What is not a normal is having to redefine our situations relative to our kids. Normal moms never have to "do" that. It happens naturally as the kids gain independence.
Ours do not gain independence. There is real risk, real harm, the real possibility of something so bad happening to them that none of us will ever come back from it if we turn away, if we stop helping.
That is a true thing.
That is why we need to pay close attention to those moms and dads who have been through detaching and detachment parenting. At the places we find ourselves now, years into enabling and without any clarity on how or why this is happening, detaching is the only way out.
There is clarity.
Whether we believe in it or not (and I didn't), there is testament to the chance that it works. Some kids picked up when their parents practiced detachment parenting. That was enough evidence for me, so I did it, too. Only I didn't have my own proof, yet. So I needed everyone here, like we all do, to help me stand saying no in a thousand unimaginable ways...and to stand the consequences.
And for me, and for all of us, those consequences are really bad, hard, unbelievable things.
But then, our situations are unbelievable, too.
Maybe that is why we keep seeing our babies in our mind's eyes, and cannot put those pieces about who our children have become ~ we cannot put that together in a rational way.
We (parents like me, people who have met every other life challenge pretty well), we address what is objectively (in the sense of objective reality) wrong. I think that is the dynamic ~ at least part of the dynamic ~ behind the enabling mindset. I mean I think that if we can nail that piece down, we can recognize enabling in a way we cannot see it while we are still trying to find that place, that criminal-feeling place, we went wrong.
For me, that was true. Helping wasn't working but I kept doing it.
I could not stop taking the blame for where my kids were in their lives. I could only see myself as some person who could not even identify the wounds I must have unwittingly dealt my own children. (That is how it felt ~ like I was stupid and desperately blind and frantically searching to find the thing that would put all this right again.)
So when I read Iwantpeace's comment, and really stopped for a minute to think about all of us here on the site and what we do ~ think how vulnerable we are to one another ~ I wanted Iwantpeace not to go through that kind of self-accusation.
I don't want any of us to go through it.
We are good, good people. We are in such hurtful places in our lives. It is crucial that we see clearly but we don't know where to look and, until we can let go of our guilt, we refuse to hold our children responsible for the actions they take.
We have nothing to feel guilty about because guilt will not help us and it will not help our children. So feeling guilty is a destructive thing that can sap our energy. Therefore, guilt is useless to us.
Out it goes.
That is the thing I refused when I chose to survive this. Everything that is not helpful is a sham, a prop, a thing without value. Guilt or empathy, even our thinking ~ our belief in our abilities to find the place we went wrong and chart a new course ~ none of that is going to change what is happening.
Out it goes.
A chance, based on what we learn here from one another that detachment can be a way to do this thing?
There we all have decided to be.
We are amazing, every one of us.
So, I thought that was a valuable piece of how to do this, for all of us.
No guilt. Useless thing, here where we are, in the rabbit hole.
For ourselves and for the kids' sakes too, that is what has to happen ~ we all have to jettison useless things, things that are not going to be valid tools in charting new courses, in facing and addressing what is happening to all of us.
And we cannot do that, and neither can our kids, when there is guilt or blame. It is what it is. The kids have to make different choices. The only way they can do that, the only way they can find solid ground, is to chart a new course. To do that, they have to be the captain of their ships. If they run them aground, they have to learn from what's happened and change course. They are not passengers on some luxury liner where someone else has the lifeboats
unless we put them there.
Okay, so I am mixing my metaphors, here. Always a sure sign that Cedar should end this particular post.
:O)
We are good people.
Living in the rabbit hole.
And that is okay; that is just what is true.
Cedar
