My mom wasn't really like that. She did sometimes apologize and even, cry. I think she wanted to be a really good mom, but then something would slip. She might have been angry about my father being gone, or maybe, just about my father altogether. She was away from her own mother. Her father was ~ she was his favorite, but she was afraid of him, too.
I was afraid of him.
He could be right up in your face nasty.
She could be cruel about my hair and my skin, and about what the future would hold. It was like being seen one way in public and another way in private. It had to do with ownership, and with the hurt in her ~ and in me. There had to be black, and there had to be white. As I began healing, as I began seeing differently, I could sense the confusion in her over what she needed to believe and the way things really were. (Say, the belief system created around husband through the winter months when my mother was far away, and what was real in the summer months, when we both were here.)
She could be scary and hurtful, but she could be very kind, very generous to us, too. I am sure she loved us, but there was that black/white feeling. Someone had to carry the unresolved stuff, I suppose that was it.
So as I come through (to where we are now, anyway), I think I know that those patterns in dysfunctional families (and I read that 97% of families are dysfunctional to one degree or another ~ and I wonder about that other 3%) do have to do with role rigidity. Just like it said, in that article Serenity posted for us. Roles are created and assumed in response to patterns we don't understand; there is safety in knowing what to do, how to behave, when to respond and how. It's like being taught table manners. The ways we are taught to behave around food work well for us in familiar cultures, but turn out to be wildly inappropriate as we travel into other cultures.
What I am remembering to do now is understand what would be flexible response in any given situation. Flexible would mean steady affection, not desperate love, for instance. Flexible would mean not writing the end of the story. It would mean staying present because there is no other, certain place to be that is not a role. When I feel certain, I feel the role in that now and let go.
Just little steps, at first.
It has to do with trusting ourselves to not know; to just be where we are and open our eyes and not make judgments about what we see.
That is what it feels like to realize our families were dysfunctional. There are other, better ways to think and see and feel...but home is home. Just as we can learn other languages as adults but never lose our accents ~ especially under stress ~ so it is with those ways we learned to be, and to see ourselves, in our families of origin. Our process here of learning to see whatever it was that happened to us through our adult eyes, thereby changing the feeling tone of what we learned about ourselves, is working for me. I think it is working for each of us. What it feels like is that the automatic old assumptions about why things happen are still the first response. For me, because of that core of toxicity, that was shame. It doesn't scare me to feel ashamed, but it colors my interpretation of what my situation is. My interpretation affects my responses and on it goes. Whatever the situation was, it might as easily have gone in any of a thousand other ways.
That was an incredible thing to learn.
We are able now to question the assumed truth firing our own responses. This is huge, that we can do that, now. We are able to reassign motivation regarding how we define what we thought we heard. This is incredibly freeing. I think that is the essence of internal locus of control, versus external locus of control.
How we hear.
How we see.
How we take things apart and assign motivation and respond to every smallest thing, from looking in the mirror in the morning to greeting our loved ones to our most public behaviors to how we review our days in the evening to how we slip into sleep; to how we awaken.
There were so many patterns of behavior in my family of origin I was not aware of until we began sifting through them, here. I see meanness now in so much of what I took for granted, growing up. This meanness had always to do with role function. For those abused in their families of origin, the deeper wounds will be those underlying messages of contempt or destination or value we absorb. The flavor of it becomes so background a thing that we create and recreate it without knowing how it is we believe what we believe regarding the motivations of others, or even, our own motivations.
And that's what I know about that, this morning.
Cedar
