Scent of Cedar *
Well-Known Member
My abuser is the same way, BITS.
Even when it is happening to me, I can never really believe, down in my heart where I feel so small, so confused sometimes, that anyone would do the things it looks like my own mother is doing. Then, I too begin to question what is wrong with me, to think such terrible things about my mother.
It has taken so long for me to see her, BITS.
To believe it, I mean.
Fantasy, the whole family thing that I have worked so hard to believe in ~ that stuff worked against me, kept me keyed in and trying. Though I know better now, I still get a little shocky, thinking about the things my mother has done. That is the FOG Recovering posts about. Just like it happens when we are overwhelmed with the horror of what is happening to our kids, we go into that same kind of shocky, FOG feeling where our abusers are concerned.
It is a lonely, shaky place to be.
But you CAN take it, BITS. As your husband noted, the letter regarding difficult child's money was sent the day the returned card was received. Your abuser is getting a little desperate, I think. Just as we've learned to expect escalation from our difficult child kids, we can expect our abusers to up the ante, too.
To him, to your abuser, this win means everything.
For him, this has nothing to do with whether your son finishes school living at your house or at his.
That's all we're really talking about, here.
But to your abuser, this is all about who claims the power and who gets the shame.
That is why abusive people fight so viciously.
To them, everything is black and white. Power. Or shame. Like me, poisoned and positioned from birth to be who your abuser needed you to be, you are flying in the dark, right now. It isn't easy Bits, but if we keep our hearts open and try to see with clarity, we can free ourselves from the dirty little prisons our abusive parents taught us was all we deserved.
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The rest of this is just personal anecdotes, things I've noticed as I've healed, how the abusive parent affects relationships, that kind of thing.
It is a complex and tender process, to come back from abuse. It takes time, and much thought.
As you heal, as you become stronger, you will see your father for who he is, you will see the dynamic that runs him. And you will wonder how it was that you lived in such fear of that crummy, transparent, hurtful person for so long a time.
I am seeing, as I heal, that there is nothing my abuser does ~ nothing ~ that is not abusive. Whoever she interacts with, she sets up and abuses in the same exact pattern. The lesson here, and there will come a day when you see it too, BITS, is that as it is with every abuser, what my abuser did to me had nothing to do with me.
It was nothing personal.
She would have done to anyone what she did to me.
When I realized this? I saw my abuser's cowardice for the first time. Immediately after, I understood she was a bully. Shortly after that I began to see, not her anger or disappointment at me, at who I was, during the episodes of abuse, but my terrible vulnerability.
A child, at the mercy of someone like that.
Compassion for the self begins to flow, with that realization. I think you have never felt compassion for the child you were, BITS.
It is a very new thing for me, too.
But boy, is it powerful stuff.
Cedar
Just lately, the most helpful thing I have tried is meditation ala Pema Chodron during the sunrise.
And though I know it's technically against the rules to drink coffee while meditating, I do.
I set the timer for 12 to 20 minutes. The meditation consists of recognizing and then, practicing stopping our thoughts, practicing letting them go. She describes it as "putting space" between ourselves and the immediacy of the emotional charge the thought carries. We are to envision the thought, once we realize we are thinking about something, as a shimmering bubble we waft away with a shining white feather.
Then, we take the next inhalation. We breathe out, we breathe in, deeply or normally, eyes open or closed. When the next thought arrives, whether it is good or bad, we again envision brushing the shimmering thing away with the white feather.
That's it.
I love to be doing that as the sun rises. I don't feel bored or trapped or impatient. The whole thing is a beautiful experience. I have come away able to gain perspective, emotional perspective, about the things that happen to me, to us.
For me, this simple practice has brought such joy!
When my time is up, I finish my coffee here.
:O)
Cedar
Oh BITS, sorry this is getting so long. When I first began reinterpreting the things I had learned about who I was in my childhood, I posted the beginning of a story I wrote a long time ago. I will post it again here for you.
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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 was born.
It's an interesting story. At the end, the key to successful reinterpretation of self and subsequent reintegration of the family turned out to be hidden in the shame the abused child was taught was her only identity.
