But it crosses into pathology when the child takes on the guilt and suffering for the harms that my mother did to me. On purpose.
Once upon a time, in a faraway land where time and distance had lost all meaning, there were born to the peasantry a generation of female children whose task and whose talent it would be to unravel the tangled skeins of deceit, viciousness, and trickery that bound the hearts, the souls, and the bloodlines of those families into which each would be born.
I wrote the story that begins with these words something like thirty years ago.
Turns out it was a true thing; and not fiction, after all.
***
I was posting on a different thread. I wrote that I could not afford compassion for my mother. Not yet, not now, not when I was vulnerable to the feelings I was reclaiming. Not when I was vulnerable to the shame of those namings. I wrote that we would go back for our mothers (and our sisters and brothers and children (?), as it turns out ~ but I did not know that, then); that we would find compassion for them, later, when we were stronger enough.
So, thank you SWOT, Copa, Albatross, Trish, ISC, Confused, Lil, pasa, jabber ~ everyone who has been reading or posting. (I am thinking about the other thread, too ~ the To Tell the Truth thread.) Recovering Enabler, thank you, especially. COM of course, and Echo.
Child of Mine, for the Highchair Tyrants thread, and for Richard Rohr, and for the suffering of the Mary.
Wendy23, whose thread we usurped...I guess what I am trying to say is that this may not have been possible without all of us, every one of us. Going North, you too, with your beautifully recovered and recovering cats. Susiestar and Captain, as well. Coming back, coming live again, cherished and welcomed home to be celebrated and to celebrate. Just like me, coming back to myself all battered and time worn and able now, to be celebrated and cherished.
Donna, with her avatar of her dog, who is missing an eye.
On we go.
You know who you are.
***
That is happening, now. The compassion piece. Except once we get there, there is no real compassion or the need of it. There is just a kind of singing.
Like that, maybe. Only there would be choirs on choirs on choirs. A little like when people describe Heaven, maybe.
Or the breaking of a magic spell.
And I never once saw it coming in this way.
So here is the working through of it.
***
In response to Copa, as noted at the beginning of this post:
It does. And what we need to look for is whether we are witnessing what happened from our abusers' points of view, or whether
we are present now, watching the abuser.
That is locus of control. That is where the real self lives; that is where the damage happened. In the core of us as we took on the emotional flavors of the abusers valance, or aura, as the abuse was occurring. As surely as the mother mirrors positive grandiosity for her beautiful, perfect child, so our damaged mothers reflected to us what they carried; reflections from a darker mirror.
And that is what she loosed, on me. The horror of what had been done to her.
And that is where we are dancing now.
How to make sense of that, of having been named that, and of having recognized and encompassed it. And of having, in self defense, created a harrowing lust of vengeance
which we then had to protect her from
because it was not real and if we called it, if we enact it, if we act on it, that will be exposed.
And we will be without protection, without even our vengeance.
Our ultimate vulnerability will be exposed, and we will die of the shame of it, and of the hatred in that naming, in those repeated namings.
A samurai warrior refuses to live, can see no value in his life or in his living, can taste no pleasure, cannot claim legitimacy after having been shamed without taking vengeance.
So we are in good company, here.
And you know there is pain in
hari kiri, and that it is said it is the pain which cleanses and changes the legitimacy of having been shamed.
So shame is the thing. It is a really big thing, something humans have dealt with in a myriad of ways, forever.
But we were not able to access that level of real; not when we were little girls (or little boys). So, we enclosed and protected that thing that never was, that capacity to take vengeance, and we protected our abusers from that thing they loosed on us.
And we held strong.
And it must have been an ethical choice, because now we are choosing to change and see and name and set it free as nothing more than what it never was.
Because once we can know beyond a doubt that what they did to their babies was either wrong
or was fated, then we can acknowledge how truly at their nonexistent mercy we were, and we can let that go.
It is what it is. Now is time to have and to honor what was for what it was
and for the sadness that it was nothing more, and to heal it.
To heal the trauma of self desertion, we need to witness for ourselves, not protect our abusers. We need to see it and know it for what it was, that circle comprised of vengeance and shame and grandiosity and terror and hope and responsibility and shame and shame and shame.
Kaliedescope.
We have all already survived it.
Which is the doorway to the circle: To protect our abusers / to protect our abusers from what they have done ~ which is a secret though imaginary source of power in us, and is the only way to survive that kind of abuse intact; to split it off, that trauma, and protect the abuser from a vengeance we could never have enacted ~ not when we were little, and so utterly in their power and control. That is the nature of the damage that was done us; that is the thing we need to undo. That is the glass eyed witch, that is the hurt and the vengeance and the pretense and the necessity and the hope and the fraud of it.
That is the circle.
That is the thing we cherish and conceal and protect, that hidden core of us.
/ from ourselves / lose that too/circle; we need to regain locus of control. We need to stop joining with our abusers / to protect them from ourselves / to protect us from becoming what they saw (this is the essential insult) / to protect them from the rage / to deny they saw what they saw when they saw us / to protect both them and ourselves from what they saw and we believed
and what we believed we could destroy them with to threaten them with, to have any where at all to stand, to mount a life from.
Yet, we were born. We are here.
We are doing this thing.
There is the circle of it.
There is such heat, there.
Have nothing to fear; nothing to protect.
That is the core of it.
So perhaps that is true, then: To be free is to have nothing to fear, to have nothing to fear is to have nothing to protect.
Trust; perfect trust that it is as it was meant to be. How many times have we all said that here, as we have tried so hard to find meaning in what is happening to our children.
We are fortunate in that we have both the trauma and the answer, and in that we can witness for ourselves even now, even after so much time has passed.
I remember quoting something like that, once. Something about that at the touch of Eternity, so they say, we will know.
My mother was a paradox. She was among the warmest women I have known, really beloved by people who did not know her well: neighbors, cleaning ladies, salesladies. She had social skills of a duchess...outside the house.
My mom is like that, too. Plus, she is very beautiful. I would not ever say warm though, because I am very sure that part is not real. Eye rolling afterword: that is very real. Going behind their backs to destroy anyone who trusts her, that is real. I have seen it for myself.
I have grieved that my mother suffered because she did bad, bad things. I suffer more for her than for me.
I held that position for most of my life. It is this that I am letting go of. I seem to be breaking through the place I thought I had changed rage into compassion and am finding that it was myself I had imprisoned, there.
So, I am having the incidents, and the rage, and making them mine.
I am freeing myself; I am naming what happened for what it was. It seems to involve seeing from a different perspective. Not stretching to understand the abuser
and at some level, to side with her against myself, but to be right there through the whole thing, beginning to end, to the place where self desertion occurred.
She had no right to do that, of course.
To hurt me to that degree. I can feel her watching, pouncing on the break.
Hatred, killing rage, dying to myself time and again.
Changing locus of control and witnessing for myself has not made me hate my mother / sister / brothers / extended FOO. But it has changed my understanding of the victim role where my mother is concerned. She does not merit my protection
from me. And so, there is the whole magical vengeance thing going on. And that is why I hate her. She had no right to screw me up to that degree ~ to the degree that my sanity, my sane response, was unbalanced.
That is where I am most angered; that is where I feel shame.
That she messed with my essential self.
So, that eyeless rage I feel, right there ~ that is what I have been protecting my mother from.
Me.
Bigger than her.
Which was never true until today when she is frail. And when I am bigger than her? I protect and cherish and give time and wish well.
So, there you go.
There was never anything to protect my mother from. Just like there was never anyone to protect my babies from. Or my therapist from. But I have been afraid of that place all of my life
and it was never real.
I should never have been hurt to that degree.
I have to witness for me, not hold strong for her ~ not when my children are concerned. I want access to that energy. Whatever it was that happened to my mother, I should not have been hurt to the degree that I had to hide my own lust for vengeance from myself. And pretend it was a real thing when I knew better than to believe in it because she (my mother, my abuser) kept hurting and hurting and hurting me to every degree that was available to her.
To the isolation happening, today.
SWOT posted once about the sister who punishes by repeatedly separating SWOT from the family fold and then, stalking SWOT to see what that looks like, to see who she is when she is the one hurt, maybe.
That is what it feels like in my FOO, too.
So, one more time: If these things are happening to others
they cannot possibly be particular, be targeted with intent and malice aforethought, to me, to that core place where I
***
Well, how do you like this.
I was so concerned that I would lose the post unless I posted it that, after not posting it once, I posted it when I came back without reading it thorough. I did not want to edit the honesty of chain of consciousness, in case one of us needed to see exactly how I got to the place where I could choose to see and heal it.
Now it is gone.
But you get the drift.
All the stuff I am embarrassed to admit to is here, I think.
