Good morning, everybody. As always, a warm and special hello for Copa and Serenity. And, another Thank You, to you both. Like I always do, I will leave the how-did-I-get-here in, in case it could help another of us trying to pull clarity regarding herself (or himself) in the present from the harms of the past.
I found another one.
Maybe.
I was thinking about my kids, and about all of our children. I was thinking especially about my son. I was thinking about how broken I was, and we all were, in the family D H and I created, when we lost ~ when
son lost, the dream he was heading for, too. So, I wondered...why was it that I felt so broken, so confused. So afraid to parent, though I had been proud and happy about all of it ~ the good things and the challenges ~ before I came to a place where nothing I did fixed what was happening.
How did I lose confidence. Why did I feel so fraudulent, so foolish and stupid and wrong?
It could be that I was confronted with a version of my own grandiosity. Or it could be:
And I found this: I am just going to say what I found. The ramifications of the thing will be different for each of us but in the end
this is the issue. What the grandiose mother, physically abusive or not, teaches that the good enough mother does not: Certainty. The grandiose mother is certain she is right.
About everything. We pattern on that. That is how we know what to do, how to choose. But it doesn't make us strong because it is not real. The things that make us strong (and we are undeniably strong or we would not be here, battling away by our own determined choice) are our innate qualities. Nothing to do with our mothers, who hated us for that thing in us that refused to believe in them. Evidence: Automaton; responsiblility to, but not love for, our aging abusers. Regret at what never was. Blame for ourselves that we could not give them what we dare not expose to them: our hearts.
Contemptuous of everyone and everything in her life, the grandiosity addicted mom climbs that sense of contempt for all things (including, and maybe especially, us) into her favored status: Certain. Famous. Slick with it, sick with it. Martial music and waving flags, every one of her face.
Like Kim Duck Jewel, the Korean leader's son. (I know his name isn't Kim Duck Jewel. Good enough for him.)
As we responded to children ever more deeply troubled, the sense of self created at the hands of grandiose mom taught us
that there was an answer but that, just as we were somehow stupidly inept imitations of children, so as adults we were the same.
"Well, looks like you weren't such a good mother after all, were you."
We did not feel certain. Our abuser's did. And what they were certain of is that we would fail. And those are the echoes destroying us, now.
That certainty the grandiose mom reflects that we are nothing; that she is the one who matters. That certainty.
We could not find the right answer. That is, as we have learned, here on the site, because there is no right answer. There is hope. There is stubborn belief. There is love.
But there is no right answer.
Stay with me, here.
Repeatedly broken into shamed acquiescence to the views of our grandiosity addicted mothers (Or, whoever our abusers were. I think the essential pattern in abusive relationship is the same, whether we are talking about Security Boy or his paperless counterpart, take-the-woman-I-just-beat-to-breakfast boy; whether we are talking brainwash the soldier egomaniac or overrun my own children so I am king mother.
Or, sister. Though sister can only take what she intends to have over something to do with the mother, the grandiose mother.
What the grandiose mother (or any abuser) teaches is that feeling of scattered panic; those feelings we have when the unimaginable happens and we no longer know what to do
and cannot say I don't know.
Grandiose people do not make mistakes. They are right. Always. And the only way to be right all the time is to weaken and scatter, and twist into subservience to the abuser's grandiosity, the chosen victim.
Us.
Stay with me, here.
At the hands of an abuser, there is a right answer. It is whatever serves the grandiosity the abuser will sacrifice anything ~ even his or her own integrity ~ to have reflected back to him or to her.
So, when we are at the ends of our ropes regarding any challenge in life, and especially the kinds of unbelievable challenge that happens when a child is in trouble
because we have come to believe there is a right answer, an answer we cannot find...we feel stupid. Inept; sure we have missed something vital, something crucial.
Something the abuser has always known we don't have.
Which is exactly how we felt at the hands of our abusers. That we'd stupidly missed something, that we'd broken some rule. To end the chaos, we find
some thing; we make a child's sense of it and seal it in shame. Into the bottle (which I describe later) it goes.
That is the thing that does us in.
That feeling.
The abuser's grandiose certainty that they are king and we are not. And when we are broken in the face of any challenge ~ any challenge ~ we break again into that other, deeper layer. Not because we couldn't find another way, or search through many conclusions and try something else
but because we believe the grandiose abuser was correct in her assessment of us and that wrongness in us that she hurt and reviled and hated us for is the truth; is the real reason these things are happening to us, and to our people we love.
That is what we keep, in the bottle. (Which is described later.)
That true thing and all the proofs of it.
That is what we keep trying to find and fix. Whatever it was she saw with such certainty that she was willing to destroy us for. That failure in us.
And we are talking mortal terror; the primal fear of abandonment.
We come to believe we failed. Not that our kids are in trouble and need help, not that we need and will surely find a way to work through it, but that we failed as a result of some intrinsic wrongness in us, for me, about something wrong in the way that I think.
When the truth is that the way that we think is what got us through then and is firing and fueling our recovery, now.
That is the core of the breakage in us, today when our kids suffer and we do not know how to help them.
That is the thing in the bottle.
That our abusers were so sure; so contemptuous. So certain of their own value and of our flawed value. We are expected to fail; never to dare create the good for ourselves because the abuser's grandiosity will not have it.
But...those are our mothers. Or lovers. Or sisters or brothers.
That is the feeling of fraud. That is why the woman could not look up, could not confront breakfast boy. In her brokenness, she believes him. Until she takes the courage to claim that bottle and everything in it, she cannot face grandiosity mom and will never marshal the strength to confront Breakfast Boy.
We are supposed to lose. When we go on to accomplish what we do accomplish, it seems not legitimately ours. That is the abuser's truth, echoing through us.
...hellish thunder, resounding
in a theater of stone
The thing we need to understand about our childhoods and about our abusers is that grandiose mom was only who she insisted we believe her to be in the reality created in the abuser's tightly closed circle.
When we escape, and of course we do, grandiose mom will tear down and destroy, will hold in contempt, every good thing that we have or that we are or that we aspire to be.
Remember the story of "rich man's hostas".
Always and forever in service to her first choice, to her choice, every time: Self aggrandizement. Even if she has to rip at the roots of the hostas, when all she was invited for was dinner.
Two birds.
One undeniable stone.
I am not very clear on this, I know. But this is the core of the thing, I just know it. If we can see it in all its ramifications in our lives, we will be free.
So, the rest of this post is just this morning's thinking.
But I like it.
:O)
Your great suffering, I think, is that you have not decided. If you decide to decide, you will be spared the great suffering of having to re-decide every memory, every day. Decide this. To decide for yourself, each time doubt arises.
D H says something like that, Copa.
He says: It's like there is an old bottle, hidden in the heart of you. Hidden beneath a thick layer of dust, the bottle is sealed with waxed cork. It is filled with poison. Every time you open the bottle, the poison in it ~ just the toxic fumes rising from it ~ makes you sick; weakens and hurts you, and all of us.
It is very hard to get the cork back in the bottle.
You believe you can do this; that one day you will uncork it, that old, old bottle you fear. And that its putrid contents will have been transformed, will have been transmuted into gold.
It is a bottle of poison.
It is what it is.
Don't open the bottle.
But in this time, here with you both, I see that while we cannot change the toxicity of what was, we
can come to a place of compassion for those children we were.
And that change in perspective changes everything.
We come clean. We are beautiful to ourselves.
We see our abusers abusing us through our eyes, not theirs. We name them for who and what they are; we see the names they have chosen, for us,
and for themselves. As we heal, we see both them and ourselves through our own eyes and never through theirs, again.
Once that happens, our memories no longer retraumatize us.
Sacred ground.
This is where we were formed; a fiery furnace of epic proportions and yet, there we stand, the ropes and chains binding us burnt away.
Familiar territory, now.
There is nothing to fear, anymore, from the secrets the bottle holds.
We repossess the territory of the heart.
Where before we self victimized, now we see the choice in that. We have come slowly to see the betrayal in what was done to us; we are learning the ways and colors of self-betrayal. We are learning the ways we revictimize ourselves.
Whenever I go deeply enough, I feel I am betraying secret things. Those are the secrets that will shame us back to a kind of fearsome, horrified awe of that corked bottle. We know it is there. That is what D H does not understand. It isn't like I can proceed as though these things did not happen
or are not happening now.
They are happening now. I have no sister; my mother will die without me there at her side. My own mother. And the time lost now, in these years and in all the years when whatever happens in my family of origin happens and happens again...I can never have this time of choice back. I am choosing now and it hurts and confuses and enrages me that a choice needs to be made.
Be who we say; accept who we are. Play by our rules. Or don't play: Ostracization. The primal fear of abandonment that it calls, that it tastes of. We have always hated you. Who do you think you are. We have always hated you; we pray rings of fire around you and we hurt and revile your children. (And the secret is: And all children. Except the Golden Child. Who is golden by the grandiose mother's say so. To shame the rest, there must be a Golden.)
So...how can I just leave the bottle corked?
I will not.
roar
I will have myself, now.
And never be ashamed for the abuser's sake, anymore.
***
It isn't about condemning parents or sibs, but it is about having an honest look. We can be wrong in any of a thousand ways about how we remember and what we remember...but as you posted for us Copa
repetition is indicative of trauma; we have been traumatized and that is what we are healing. It isn't about calling names or naming a guilty party or making accusations. It is about healing. We will do what is necessary for us to heal.
If we elevate these people to prized specimens we depreciate ourselves to victims.
Yes that's true Copa and that is a great description of the power over, of the sickness running through our families of origin.
Someone turned into a victim so the others, in this very closed circle, feel like winners; like champions.
That is why we run alone now, breathing easily and well from a place beyond fear. (That is part of a quote.)
"F you, mom." Cedar whispers, furiously adding a beautifully draped lace border to the needlepoint in her saddlebag.
It is a beautiful thing, the needlepoint.
Silk.
So that is why I cannot leave the bottle corked.
My heart.
My rules.
Up with this I will not put: F you, mom.
This little emoticon is very right. None of this should have happened to any of us. But it did.
This is how to heal from it. What we do here.
I am addressing my own guilt, here. It feels awful to be the person who sees what I see about my own people that I love...but they don't seem to love me very much, do they.
Or they would not do what they do.
The question today is whether I believe them, or me.
Copa, you are right.
You wrote it with spare simplicity.
Thank you.
I seem to like to work it around so I can post "F you, mom."
:O)
I am questioning if it is correct to post on threads where I do not know the details.
Oh, yes Copa. We all need one another, here. We need never to be hardened into rigidity, we need to be flexible and we need to be honest and we need to care enough to tell our truths. That is how trust is built.
Are you thinking about P.E. post, Copa?
You were not here when the other parents were so at the end of their patience with me Copa. I just could not get it. That is why they remember me, now. Out of all those parents, I stuck out like a sore thumb.
I just could not get it.
I posted honestly about my feelings anyway.
You must claim that right too, Copa.
We need you.
You are elegant; spare and regal, honest and kind.
Does D H understand that you built a lifetime around the wish to deny this? And that it takes work to weed it out? Because it is twisted and hidden in everything we are?
It is, Copa and Serenity. Twisted into everything. And I want them out.
I am sounding like a bigshot again this morning, but I will have it as I want it.
Maybe.
I will have those good and strengthening things, or I will have nothing.
Maybe.
Which, when you think about it, is all I do have.
Nothing.
But it is better to know.
They never had the right to do what they have done. Not to me, and not to one another.
And never to my children.
When his sister took the parents' house he felt very bad and betrayed. I think he feels sad still. But he does not agonize about it. He does not revisit it over and over again, like we do. That is because he was not traumatized.
Repetition is a symptom of past trauma. The disbelief. Being stunned. Questioning oneself. Looking at it from every angle.
Setting things to rights.
Boy, I'm so mad, this morning.
roar
Do you suppose the anger has been under here all this time?
Just think how carefully we have avoided knowing how very angry we are and have been. Me. For sure, this is the bald truth about me. So afraid of an anger that would call the truths grandiose mom hurt into me. Those shameful things that made legitimate anger impossible to sustain. As long as the corked bottle exists, as long as those shaming secrets seethe and spiral like some live thing through that bottle, I will never be sure I did not deserve what they do, what was done.
That is a key for us.
It unlocks self betrayal.
That is why we self betray. We believe them; believe in them. We believe that if there were just some way we could all come together and not do what we do, what lives in that bottle would not matter. We believe, as I do with that dinner I am always posting about, that if there were no scarcity, if all things were provided from a sense of secure abundance, we could do it. We could come together with them; we could see one another and welcome one another. This, I so desperately want to do. It has to have been some horrible mistake that this happened to all of us.
But I collide with their choice. Flat up against what was done; against how things were and are handled. Against how I was seen and interpreted as a child, as a little girl, as a young woman; as a mother.
Tin.
Tinny sounds.
A toast with empty soup cans around a hobo's quick fire.
That is my family.
Daughter can breeze into and out of the hobo's reality at will. This is true. Daughter has zero fear of her grandmother and to this day, an open heart for her aunt. Son harbors the hurt of it; they are so much part of the reason he hates, demands proof.
The dinner, the white linen turned into molten gold, crystal flashing in candlelight. The wine deeply scarlet...afraid of it; afraid of what will be revealed about that bottle, if we claim that.
Yet there it is; the truth.
Little frogs. Toxic pond; thunder of life.
I reclaim my son.
From their ugly eyes I reclaim my son.
My son.
***
Okay. So, it got a little weird for a time, there. At the end of it, I see where the shame of what happened to my children has its freaking genesis. And it is in my mother's contempt. For me. Her certainty that I could never legitimately be who I am. In her reality, our losses and suffering are validation of the rightness of the abuser's grandiosity.
We need to stop believing that.
That is self betrayal.
That is how everything got so twisted. On some level, we believe our abuser's contemptuous certainty when she took from us anything that we had, any smallest thing we believed was good in us, was correct.
It is not.
What feels correct to us is the feel of the grandiosity addicted mother's illness.
That's what is in the corked bottle.
A lie.
Cedar
