You can also do "medium chill." When you have to be in contact with one of them, don't engage them.
This is good advice, Serenity.
When we began the FOO Chronicles, our purpose was to address dysfunctional patterns in our thinking and learn how that was affecting our kids ~ and all of our relationships, including, as it turned out, our relationships to ourselves. We are finding and identifying and addressing those patterns, and the roles come of them, beautifully. The thing we are finding that we did not expect (for me, this is true) is that the core dysfunction at the hearts of our families of origin are vital, toxic things to this day.
That is the part we were not believing. Copa gave us the name of that swirling feeling of disbelief: Dissonance.
Another term for that feeling of dissonance is: FOG
Now that we are able to identify and step away from the role requirements necessary to survival in our abusive families of origin, we see the strangenesses, the needless cruelties and unkindnesses, that run through every interaction with them. We experience dissonance. We keep trying to fit what we know with what we thought we knew. The pieces just don't interlock. We are beginning to realize, I think this is true, that our families of origin are operating, to this day, from roles designed to service the mother's (in our cases) dysfunction. It seems to me that our mothers still cannot see their children as other than externalized extensions of themselves.
I think they do not question what they feel for us even to this day, because they already "know". In the sense that all of us close ourselves to further understanding on any subject we think we "know", from whether or not an airplane could fly, back in the time before the dynamics of flight were understood, to the elusive structure of the DNA molecule that seemed impossible to figure out before the spiral structure we all take so for granted today was known.
That would explain why, when I visited my mom that day with my granddaughters, she pretended she was going to hit me. There had to have been an experience of dissonance for her that she resolved by finding the child I was in the grandmother I became. The dissonance was resolved by putting the adult me in my place: you are still what I say you are.
Not who: what.
What a nasty, nasty thing that was, that happened to me that day.
I feel badly for myself.
The nature of interaction with an abusive parent changes from overt to thinly disguised covert abuse, but the power dynamic is what it always was: a skewed and misshapen thing that is hurtful to all of us to this very day.
So, our abusers do choose. I think they respond to their adult children from an ever more encompassing sense of dissonance: It is wrong to strike an adult. In our mother's worlds, adults are either contemptibly less than, or awesomely superior to, the mother. I think the dissonance, for the abusive parent, comes from knowing the adult in front of her, though undeniably the selfsame object the mother believes her to be, cannot be hit or abused. One does not strike or display overt contempt for other adults, lest they strike back. (Instead, one solicits allies, as my mother and sister and all of sister's family did, the day they rolled their eyes at one another behind the back of the woman who, older than my mother, had just done all the driving ~ in a vehicle that she owned ~ to bring my mother to my sister's and then, was told that although she had spent that first night there in the past, there was no room for her in their home, this time. And there they all stood, rolling their eyes at the woman's discomfiture.) On the other hand, the child turned adult cannot possibly be awesomely more than. She must then be, after all, the contemptible, less-than thing the mother created of her child in the first place.
That is what I think we are up against when we interact with our families of origin.
I can be surprised into dissonance when interacting with my abuser(s), too.
My default position has been a role.
A very unpleasant place to be. A place that leads, without exception, to some degree of "automaton".
Though she looks so different, now that we are adults, the older, frailer mother insists she is still the abusive monster mother that scared us half to death when we were little kids. Experiencing dissonance ourselves, we pop ourselves into some role having to do with protection or kindness or some other appropriately adult place to be. We do that because, on so many levels of self, we are still scared silly of the monster mother live in our imaginations, and so familiar to us through that negative self talk running, like some inaudible unstoppable tape, in our heads.
And we know those tapes are in there, because we are hearing them consciously these days through the work we are doing here.
And they are nasty, hurtful things, those things we tell ourselves so routinely that we don't even hear them anymore and have to consciously seek them, to find and address and, over time, change the viciousness of our own self talk.
Thanks, mom.
Even to decide to be kinder to ourselves requires a certain amount of healing.
No wonder we feel so confused around our abusers.
So, that's what we're afraid of. The feeling of dissonance.
If, as Copa suggests, our sisters have taken on the power-over role of the abusive mother, that would explain our sisters' behaviors, too.
Again, the fear we experience when we think the sister is going to show up at our house or call, as she threatens she will, or when we think of calling them, is the fear of dissonance.
It sickens us; we can't make sense of any of it, so we confront or deny the fear feeling, and do what we require of ourselves as adults.
So, we can know we will experience dissonance in every interaction with our families of origin. Knowing, and having named and understood its genesis, we can name where we are, and stand up to it.
Dissonance; again, a thing that turns out to be totally understandable and so, within our control.
That is the thing we are afraid of. Dissonance. We made the luncheon. We used the good china but somehow, everything fell apart somehow and we feel sick and sickened and confused and responsible.
But we just can't figure out where we went wrong.
We didn't go wrong.
This isn't fixable.
***
I don't think I will hear from them at all, Serenity. That is how it is done, in my family. The last time, my mother was supposed to have said: "If Cedar does not want to be part of this family, then this family wants no part of her." At the time, I did not know what she meant. I knew I felt deeply shamed to understand that my mother did not care enough about me to clarify with me a situation I was not aware of having created.
I no longer feel shame when I think about our interactions. I understand the underlying theme of so much of what happens, and of what has happened, all of our lives.
I am having trouble believing it.
Isn't that something.
The other side of my family of origin is that they are bright; really bright, and funny and cute. But they are deadly, like a nest full of vipers. Humor is ridicule based. I see that now.
How strange.
Probably I would not find them so entertaining, today.
Our work is helping me unravel the nastiness of all of it.
Shame, in all its ramifications.
I get it now that this healing process has nothing real to do with my family of origin at all. It has to do with me. I do not require them to heal, and I probably require
not to see them, to heal. I never had family, not in any real sense of that word. Not in the sense of people who love me having my back, and not in the sense of having people who love and believe in me.
Isn't that a sad thing to know.
What a courageous thing we all have done, in creating our beautiful lives without all those good, strengthening things everyone else has had ~ has always had. Even when we were little kids, we went out into the world, not from places of cherishing and joy and security, but from mini versions of Hell.
Huh.
I never will have those things. But as it turns out, I never did have those good things. And, unless I was interacting with my family of origin, and I did just fine.
Beautifully.
:O)
Emphasis for me lately is on ferreting out where my thinking about myself has been twisted. The more we uncover about what has really been going on all along, the less not seeing them concerns me. I feel badly for myself now not so much because my family seems so intensely to dislike and disparage and victimize one another, but because I have spent uncounted hours and months and years trying to figure them and myself out. D H said, and I think I posted about it before, that he feels badly for me too, and for the same reason. He said he wonders what I might have done with all those hours I have given over to them, and to trying to unravel and put myself right.
I hope they never call.
When the call comes for my mother, or if I should die first, or D H...there is no one to call. There is no one in my family I would,
nor should I, feel safe enough to trust with either my grief, or with the vulnerability I will feel in that time.
It is better, to know.
I wish I had known, sooner.
I am less and less angry with them or myself. I am still working hard here, but they (the members of my family of origin) are secondary to figuring out how to address the woundings and learn how to think about myself and my kids (!) (that is a definite ouch) and my D H and my whole life really, differently.
So that's good, then.
One of the things I am seeing through the work we do here is that I was, after all, a good enough mom. For sure, there would have been huge differences if I had been stronger...but I wasn't. I really did do the best I knew or could learn. I will be able to do better, now. I was shocked to realize the way I was seeing my son...but how wonderful to have seen it. The shame I felt over everything that happened fed on that core of shame I was already carrying. Had these things never happened to all of us, the core shame would have meant less and less. It was already beginning to dissipate. We were happy, all of us together. We had D H family, D H mom. (Yay!) The difference in the way I see now is that good things and troubling things come to all of us.
It never was that I had harmed my children in some way I could not see. I get it that I will have transmitted so many terrible images of shame and grandiosity and other terrible stuff without meaning to. Healing now will change how we interact with one another, now.
And that will change the future.
And I am so happy to know these things we have learned. Pretty much, that would be that we are all fine, just as we are.
There is nothing, nothing at all, that I have to do but be present.
How extraordinary.
***
This is what D H means when he says: "Your mom hung up on you. She could have addressed that at any time. She chose not to." What he is telling me is to hold strong. Returning to the fold would be exactly that: buying in to the overweening grandiosity of my mother compounded now, it seems, by my walking-with-the Lord sister's own grandiosity. Maybe part of my role was to be the guy who
could believe we were all nice people.
I think less about the hurt of it, now. I feel shame still, but I think the truth of how I feel about them is that they scare me.
They do scare me.
Now, we know why.
Dissonance.
Cedar
