Surviving parent, whom I love, sad that his kids are estranged

[Copabanana]

I think they do not think that way, Copa. They are not like us. Nothing they do is about us. They move from victim to victim because ~ I don't know why. Maybe, they are cold, in their hearts, where we are warm. They probably wonder why everyone around them is forever turning up dead or destroyed and feel badly for themselves about that.

So we have a difference of opinion here. Two different hypotheses.

Copa has looked at the result, and she has assumed from that intent. I have argued that the perpetrator on some level whether conscious or not, has felt in the way that she makes her victim feel: small, powerless, without defenses, and without control. Cedar has divorced effect with intent. She argues that intent has no part of it. It is like an atom bomb in Hiroshima. That incinerates and melts bodies. The go through life destroying because that is their nature. Nothing personal.

I think I agree with both of us. Because if I am correct, the feelings of smallness are repressed. If they break through, they are covered with rage.

Those who shun are willfully employing a technique they absolutely believe will unravel the tenderest victim, and will deeply hurt the stronger victim.

I do not know if I agree with this completely.

My sister, with M, when she looked his body up and down, I am certain there was intent to humiliate him. That is a power over look.

If I think about her decision to shun my mother and I , I agree, too. Like when my mother told her to never take control over her affairs again--when she put my mother in the hospital and threw away the key. My sister felt my mother was the perpetrator in that. That is how she is. If you set a limit, she tells you you killed her. And she is justified in killing you.

So she nursed her wounds for a number of months, shunning my mother. And then out of the blue sent a letter to my 85 years or so mother that she had cancer. That she had a 12 hour surgery. That my mother had caused the cancer. That my mother and I were toxic to her and that she wanted nothing to do with us ever. She would not talk to us or ever see us because we caused her cancer. Or something similar.

Why would she do that? Vicious cruelty. There was no need to. She was already shunning us.


Why turn up the heat? It had to be to manage her own feelings. There was no other reason. That is why I think there is more to it.

Their repertoires of behavior are stupidly the same ones I think, all of their lives.

Yes.

There is nothing real they can do. They can destroy us, but not touch us. They can never be us.

Yes.

I have posted several times that my mother felt my sister was envious and jealous of me, felt I had the better life, and attributes.

I could never get it and still cannot. I have nothing of what my sister values. Except, possibly, myself.

When your mother called you to protect her, she knew you would come; she knew you would protect her; that you would behave with integrity. What I am not sure of is whether she knew what it would cost you.

I think it never entered her mind. She was indifferent to the effects on me. She never cared. She never factored them in.

Only one time that I think of. It was when she had just moved to the board and care. There is an outpatient surgery center near my house that has radiology and a lab. I took her for some procedure. She was disoriented and confused. I was beyond, way beyond my capacity to bear it. I was always calm and collected with my mother, never visibly reacting to anything she said or did.

I began screaming to her in the car: You are my mother. I cannot stand more. You are my mother. Other people in other cars heard me. She got it together.

I am sorry, Copa.

But I think she knew.

Cedar, I always felt there was intent on her part. Actually, for my whole life, I think I believed that her self-indulgence with me was both an expression of her feelings, as well as an instrumental behavior. But for what, towards what aim?

COPA

 

[Copabanana]

The only way I will be vulnerable to my sister is if M dies or leaves me and I am alone. Because as it is, we would be alone my son and I.

She would have lived a very different life than the one she is living now.

Cedar, I do not think it was ever in the cards for your mother to marry the priest. I think your mother manipulated your sister, to make her jealous. It was a love triangle of sorts. Your mother would never have married the priest because in a relationship of real intimacy she could not have concealed her cruelty. She would have never wanted to show him that.

Everything about our own family would have been different than it is, had my mother married the man.

Yes. But it is your mother who would have had to be different that who she is. I tell you, I feel certain she would never ever marry the priest.

Which is why my sister hated him, and waged (what now appears, in retrospect, to have been) an incredible campaign against him.

Look what your mother gained Cedar, with your sister debasing herself like that.

They probably wonder why everyone around them is forever turning up dead or destroyed and feel badly for themselves about that.

See this is the part which made me think that you do not believe they have intent.

I agree with this, Cedar. I think you are right. This is exactly what my sister does. Except she could care less if anybody feels bad about themselves. All she feels is their victim. If the other feels bad, for her, she believes they deserved one hundred times worse.

So, again, I do not know what I believe. My idea of my sister is she believes that I hurt her and do horrible things to her. That is how she justifies doing bad things.

The sister was done with the mother; had decided to move on.

So, she did.

So you do not feel there was any self-protection involved? My sister had extracted everything she could expect to get, and left her down, vanquished and abandoned, and did not look back.

Her attitude, actually, was contempt.

Later she expressed that she felt betrayed. Because only later did she realize that she lost power. To me. That makes sense. She had abandoned the town thinking there was nothing worth having there.

And she was forced to rethink things. Because if I took responsibility and had control...in her mind...it must have been for some kind of advantage. That was why she accused me of stealing. She could not envision I did not do it for some kind of material benefit.

She must think I am like her. She could not ever imagine who I am. Does she have the same trouble understanding me, as I do her?

Happy New Year.

COPA

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

She argues that intent has no part of it. It is like an atom bomb in Hiroshima. That incinerates and melts bodies. The go through life destroying because that is their nature. Nothing personal.

If it were personal Copa, there would be a specific victim or even, a series of victims. Once vengeance had been taken, the behaviors would stop. My sister, so it appears to me now, victimizes in whatever way she can seemingly by reflex. I think it was the same dynamic at work in the two women I have known in my professional life who were just not right, but who zoomed to the top before being fired.

I am thinking about my sister telling her story to a man on a plane and being given and taking a large donation of money. I am thinking of taking her to see touristy things, and of having her push for me to buy her an item more expensive than I would ever have bought for myself. And then, at the next shop, a different, equally expensive item which she fondled and sighed over and showed to me and showed to me again as she stood where she was and saw only that.

I did not buy the items for her.

It was an offensive thing for her to have done. And yet, I felt cheapened too in a way because I had not given my sister what she so clearly wanted. I think this is the dynamic at the heart of the sisters' gobbling up entire inheritances. It is not that the mother does not (well, except for my mom :O) wish to distribute an inheritance fairly so much as it is that the sisters who are different in the ways that our sisters are different manipulate the mother through their tears or sadness or whatever will work. In the same way my sister got money from a stranger on a plane, or tried to manipulate me into buying things for her, and etc.

I am thinking here Copa of your mother, too. Of what she said about the sister.

In any event, my sister will take until that point is reached where she has over-reached but still, the giver feels cheapened.

The gift, or the money, is never, ever, enough. It isn't that the gift is not appreciated. It is that the standard of exchange becomes pleasing my sister. We are manipulated by her gratitude (or tears ~ whatever works) into feeling we should have done more. Or by her poverty, to feel we should have given more, no matter how much we have given. (We should never have given any. Do not begin, with these people.) Or by her business acumen, to feel we should have given more of our time to research the things she needs researched because she is so busy, busy, busy. (Which I have done for her. And which is never-ending and yet, essentially pointless. I am not an attorney. So that is why I say they will steal our time. They will. They never stop. I ran an experiment. The more time I gave her, the more arrogant and demanding my sister became. It was an extraordinary thing to see, and was instrumental in my awakening to just who my sister is.) I continued to interact with her though, until she hurt my child.

It is a wicked little dance that we dance with our sisters. To me, what it seems like they want is for us to be wizened and blackened dead things and then, they would simply move on to the next victim.

I think we think they have been hurt Copa, and so, we protect or excuse and etc. But I think they cannot be hurt or not hurt. They manipulate.

Cold.

Even hosting my sister overnight in a beautiful beach rental will find her telling us they left us early so they could go down the beach to visit other, better places than where they had stayed, with us!

That actually happened.

So, all those things taken together tell me the sisters will play hurt sister if that works. Or, they will play arrogant bossy sister if that works. Or they will play any role at all that enables them to suck the people around them into confusion. (I think your sister's behaviors fit this mold too, Copa. I am thinking about the luncheon. I am thinking about the brash impropriety of running her eyes over M's body. Your mother was sick, Copa. You had come from far away to protect her. The sister runs her eyes over M's body?!? This was no accident Copa, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with M and everything to do with you. It had to do with passion and self definition and claiming what you want as you have always done. And that guilt at having what you want and doing what you want and going where you want and leaving behind what you do not want in your life is what the sister used to change the legitimacy of your position, Copa.

You had been called home by the mother to protect the mother and you came, Copa. That the mother was no longer defenseless must have absolutely enraged the sister. I am surprised she did not burst into a case of internal combustion right there in the hospital.

I wonder how we should interact with such persons?

In the internet articles, they say: Run.


***

Serenity's sister actively pursues her and is more frightening than ours. D H says I will need to be very strong where my sister is concerned. I never understood what he meant.

I am glad w are doing this thread.

Thank you, Copa.

***

It's like their time sense is different. Just as an artist sees color differently than someone who does not paint, these kinds of people perceive their worlds differently than we perceive ours. If there are not people watching them, if there is not someone else being labeled or demeaned or excluded they feel they have disappeared, or maybe, that they have become one of the great unwashed. They operate more instant to disconnected instant than we do I think. (That might be why they lie more easily than they tell the truth. They literally may not know how they got where they are.)

They are coldly manipulative.

I don't think there is one thing personal about anything they do, Copa.

My sister watches me watch her eyes fill with tears. Who watches the effect their tears will have on the observer?!?

Someone who is blackmailing us.

Which is what manipulation is, when you think about it.

BOOM

I am free of the first therapist.

:O)

My sister, with M, when she looked his body up and down, I am certain there was intent to humiliate him. That is a power over look.

A man would not be humiliated by a woman giving him a contemptuous once over the way a woman would be, were that same look to be directed at her by a man. Men routinely overstep boundaries to smile at us and stand by us and flirt with us, and they are used to the sudden cold shoulder, the contemptuous look, the turning away.

It's part of the game, Copa. Men whistle at us, they like to buy us things and ask us to have dinner with them and everytime they do that (and they do it, alot) they risk that look, that attitude your sister displayed toward M.

That look was for you, Copa.

Nothing to do with M.

Not on any level.

Only you.

It was your one vulnerability, Copa. That in comparison piece.

And down you went.

The memories came out of the closet......pulled out by the horror of what our d c's exhibited......Cedar, forgive my naïveté, but the things you have written, the degree of abuse you suffered as a child and beyond....was some of that so thoroughly buried within.....then came boiling up to the surface? It is the memories, or the feelings attached to those, or both......or this continued imagery of what wasn't....
I am asking because most of my bad memories are of my sis....My folks didn't really intervene, now that, I do not understand......
I cannot fathom the degree, that you, Copa and Serenity have suffered. I am sorry. It is awful. I will be your witness, I am horrified at the depth of your despair.

No Leafy, nothing was buried. We went on to live our lives beautifully. When our children became so troubled, losing them awakened old, and traumatic, pain. It does so for every parent of course, but it was a deeper, more confusing thing for those of us with abusive childhoods because it affected our abilities to cope with the dangerous and painful things happening to our families. As our children have come through it, as we have learned detachment parenting and pulled our lives together, we have decided to confront whatever is left of those old, traumatic things we were taught about ourselves.

Out they go.

There is no despair, Leafy. There is triumph in reclaiming the self.

What is done is done. Over. It cannot be undone or erased, but trauma-induced understandings of self and other can be confronted and healed, here in this anonymous place where nothing we say can hurt anyone else.

Thank you for reading along.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

I am still struggling with this, Cedar. It may be that our sisters operating manuals are different. Of course they are. They may be, each of them, buzz saws but they operate differently.

As I try to explain it, I see that I am the one who is confused. About my own sister. Let me write the disparate elements, so I can try to reach a different, better understanding.

She plots. She has a desired end in sight, and she plots to get it. She will stop at nothing, except that will hurt her.

She has the capacity to protect her own, from herself. For example, her children have always been defined by her, as "her" own. Probably because she literally sees them as part of herself. While she was with the second husband, she called him honey, she built a "team" with him, and they plotted together against others.

Just as quickly as you can say (or think) "better prospect" she dumps him. She defines him as enemy just like that. (But she has plotted her exit, so as to leave with as much money and power as can be gotten.)

Things shift on the dime. Alliances are broken. Just like that.

She thinks like a general. That is what confuses me. But it is a very limited and short sighted general. Because, while she does operate strategically, she is essentially short sighted. She is essentially a very limited person.

She as if struts and paces and plots like a general, like a conqueror, and wants to be powerful and think of herself as powerful and important, but it is skin-deep. She is organized, she is controlling...but essentially not that effective.

Despite the benefits accrued from her marriages and her own hard work as a professional, she has not managed to do any better than have I. It must gall her that I am her equal.

As if nothing really worked so that our relative positions changed.

If you put aside my own psychology (of disadvantaged, vulnerable) we would be looked at by any other person as more or less similar.

I still do not get her looking at M's body up and down. What did she want me to feel? Exactly what I did feel?

That she can do whatever she wants, whenever she wants to make me feel small, without protection, alone, marginalized, scared, alone in the world, without anything and anyone in the world. And whenever she wants, when and if she wants, she can topple my world. Because she controls my world. And I am devalued, without value next to her.

Why in the world would she want to do that?

If it were personal Copa, there would be a specific victim or even, a series of victims. Once vengeance had been taken, the behaviors would stop.

See Cedar, I think our sisters may be different. With my sister, the behaviors do stop. She is not perpetually seeking new victims. She is perpetually trying to maintain or advance her own position. Except for her 2 daughters, I think she has no real loyalties. While she professes to love her husband, for example, I do not believe that he is safe. If she finds another, better opportunity.

I think my sister can reach stasis. She is not constantly consuming, more and more, to maintain her stores of internal "stuff." Like your sister sounds.

My sister can stop.

They never stop. I ran an experiment. The more time I gave her, the more arrogant and demanding my sister became.

Actually, this sounds more like my mother.

To me, what it seems like they want is for us to be wizened and blackened dead things and then, they would simply move on to the next victim.

With your sister, I think she would want you to be ever-generating, so that she could be to infinity eating off you, feeding off of you.

With my sister

I think we think they have been hurt Copa, and so, we protect or excuse and etc. But I think they cannot be hurt or not hurt. They manipulate.

Yes. I agree with that.

In my case, with me, I do not much care about my sister, in the sense of protecting her. She is not vulnerable in that sense. I am. My mother is the one that protected, excused for my sister. And defended herself and suffered from my sister's bad behavior to her. My sister over and over again used my mother, tried to humiliate her, insulted her...(my mother was not anybody who would let this be done to her, by anybody...without retaliation. Except with my sister.) My mother loved her. And my mother felt guilty, I think.

Now that I think about it, that is what my sister would have done to me. But I would not allow it. Any time I was around her (and I tried not to be) she would do it to the extent she was able.

I always thought it was personal.

Even hosting my sister overnight in a beautiful beach rental will find her telling us they left us early so they could go down the beach to visit other, better places than where they had stayed, with us!

She had to make you small and insignificant in relation to her.

Is this why my sister looked M up and down? To make me feel small and insignificant? To take me in, assess my worth, and dismiss me as not good enough?

The sister runs her eyes over M's body?!? This was no accident Copa, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with M and everything to do with you. It had to do with passion and self definition and claiming what you want as you have always done.

Let me see if I can understand. This is important.

OK. The essential difference between my sister and I is this: I can infinitely reproduce myself, because the source of value is myself. That is to say, that I am my own value. It is like a gold standard. There is gold in a vault somewhere. I can always leave somewhere, someone, because I have my own gold in my own vault. And I know that. Even if M leaves me or dies, or I lose everything, I will be very sad and bereft, but I will have me.

And that is what my sister hates. She has tried to destroy me, my relative value to her. And she cannot. Because I always operate as if some where there is gold in my vault. Even if I have nothing. Even if I am Joseph. And I am killed off...and discredited and imprisoned. (Except internally, she does get to me. All of the people who I am hurt by hurt me. But I do not allow myself to be corrupted. I am not turned.)

And that guilt at having what you want and doing what you want and going where you want and leaving behind what you do not want in your life is what the sister used to change the legitimacy of your position, Copa.

Cedar, she did it from the time my stepfather came. From the time I was 11. Until that time, I was the power base with my grandmother, I think.

What gets me about her, I will say it again: She threw over my grandmother, too. In her own head. My grandmother loved her. Loved both of us. She took care of us. She was a woman who had suffered greatly. After my grandmother died--in 1976, my sister eventually through her over too. She named both a dog and a daughter after my grandmother, yet she called my dead grandmother, a crazy old woman. Like she did with my mother, eventually. She called my mother, a crazy old woman, eventually. While she tried to take her for anything she had.

Are you saying that my sister will do this to anybody? Because this is how she turned on the second husband.

Are you saying that my sister has no real loyalties to anybody? Except her children?
Or maybe, even, not to them, ultimately?

When I feel hurt and afraid in life...that the world is not a safe place, that my inner world is not a safe place...that is what I feel others say or think about me. That I am just crazy. A crazy young woman. Old woman.

I woke up today feeling that way. That the world is a dangerous place. For me. I live in a small city, really, where I have nobody except M. Actually, I live in a world where I have nobody, ultimately, except M and myself. When I lived in the area where I am from what I had was the place. When I lived there, the only thing I had really was not people. It was the place. I do not have that where I live now.

My internal world can be a dangerous place. Because when I feel like I woke up today, I remember how mean people can be to me.

I live in a world (in myself) where people are mean to me.

That the mother was no longer defenseless must have absolutely enraged the sister.

Do you think what my sister always wanted was to make me her prey? And while she did hurt me, she could never eat me up. I would always elude her.

So when my mother was no longer defenseless, and I had taken her in, she had to shun us. That was the only death she could cause. Social death.

Cedar. That is the essential remaining difference between the way we are thinking. I believe that while my sister was shunning us at the end, it was motivated. That is to say, she was not indifferent. She was doing something. She was trying to hurt us, myself and my mother, she was acting upon us. Believing that her shunning us was hurting us, was working to make us less powerful to her and her world. And showing us how much more powerful was she.

And I did play into it. At the end, when my mother was screaming, had become incontinent (and shunning me, herself) I was besides myself. I called my sister. I wrote emails to her. I needed her involvement, and she rejected me, and would not talk to me.

I could think that it was that she did not want the pain and loss to touch her. She wanted to feel above it. Or that she wanted me to suffer. To suffer my just desserts.

She had contempt for my mother. I spoke to my sister one time. She deigned to speak to me. From on high. That is the attitude. And she had contempt for my mother.

I am struggling here: Did she feel superior, or was she weak and defenseless, or both?

My sister is like some defective product with very good marketing. And I fall for it, every single time, on one level. I buy the stupid product. And then feel like a fool.

If there are not people watching them, if there is not someone else being labeled or demeaned or excluded they feel they have disappeared, or maybe, that they have become one of the great unwashed.

My sister I believe feels safe in her family. I have been there with her. She is comfortable. She is in her robe and slippers. She is content. She feels safe. And loved. She laughs. She is relaxed. With her husband and her dogs and her two girls. Now she has her community. Her job. When I imagine my sister. I see her content.

Cedar, do you think she hates me? Is it because I am more, have more? Or because she cannot eat me up and spit me out? Or both? Or what?

It was your one vulnerability, Copa. That in comparison piece.

I need to understand this better. Can you explain it Cedar? Because I know this is true.

Is it that my sister wants me to feel or be less then in comparison to her. This is what she is always after. To be better off. To have more. To be more. In relation to me. I am the gold standard to her. Even if she does not see me or talk to me. Because I was there in her life from the beginning.

There is something in my own psychology that answers this call. To feel less than in relation to, in comparison to her.

Is that what you are talking about, Cedar? Is that what you meant about looking M up and down, trying to make him into a piece of meat, to dehumanize him? She was doing that to me? She was trying to make me feel as if she can do anything to me, and I have to take it. That in comparison to her anything that I am or have, pales in comparison.

And no matter how much she does that, I am like the energizer bunny who keeps regenerating myself. Is that it? She can hurt me but not destroy me.

Is that why I am vulnerable to the comparison piece? Because part of me wants to obey her. Wants to diminish myself and what I have--to let her have it. What she wants. To be better off than I am. To have more. Or is it to protect her. There is part of me that always wants to accommodate her need to do that to me.

Even in my own life...apart from her. I believe there is something in me, that will accommodate. Answer this call.

Thank you.

COPA

 

[BusynMember]

She has the capacity to protect her own, from herself. For example, her children have always been defined by her, as "her" own. Probably because she literally sees them as part of herself. While she was with the second husband, she called him honey, she built a "team" with him, and they plotted together against others.

Sounds as if she feels everyone in her life is her property. She certainly found a wonderful teammate if he likes the drama of plotting against others with her (shudder). This gives me the creeps.

 

[Copabanana]

Sounds as if she feels everyone in her life is her property. She certainly found a wonderful teammate if he likes the drama of plotting against others

Happy New Year, Serenity. How are you?

This was the second husband. The third one is the same way. He was the one who went to my mother and told her that she should leave more of her money to my sister, than to I, because I had a retirement. (Well, my sister does to. It is just that my sister does not believe I deserve anything. And she deserves all of it.) The reason she, my sister, sent her husband was to have deniability. My sister is a lawyer. I told my mother that. My mother answered, what difference does that make? It was still her her that did it.

My mother believed she did not accede to my sister's pressure to disadvantage me. But she did.

My sister with her second and third husbands, had partners who would do her bidding and participate with her in her plots. Until she decided to go after her second husband. Is it a matter of time for the third one. Or now that she is older there are no more ready takers. When she was with the second husband, I thought it was him that corrupted her. It was her. All along.

I think you are right. She thinks everything in her life that she sees is rightfully hers. And feels no compunction to set about getting it. Or in the case of my stuff. Just taking it.

My mother asked me: Why in the world did you leave all of your stuff with her. You knew what she was like.

Well I did and I did not. I would never have believed she would sink so low. Or that she would let her rage be so "out there."

I mean. Why would she take the stuff of somebody who had nothing else. I had left all of my worldly belongings with her. Why did I do it? It mystifies me.

COPA

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Cedar, I always felt there was intent on her part. Actually, for my whole life, I think I believed that her self-indulgence with me was both an expression of her feelings, as well as an instrumental behavior. But for what, towards what aim?

I don't know, Copa.

It is like when I describe that feeling of magnified intensity of watching my reactions in my mother. What was she watching for? As I've explored things in depth here, I find myself confronted with the really most disgusting imagery. The whore, washing her feet in the sun was one. I can still feel the sun. I can see the whore's expression. But how in the world could such imagery connect to my own mother and a trip to WalMart, for heaven's sake?!?

But it did and we worked through it here.

Remember the dream of the hair. The mother, taking my own hair out of a drawer in a beautifully sun-filled room and giving it to me, as though she had saved it for me. And we thought the dream was so nice, but it had a feeling of foreboding attached to it and I could not stop thinking about it. And sure enough, it connected to the WalMart experience, and to how my mother has always done what she's done. Which involves something cheapening, something automaton having to do with internal, versus external, locus of control.

Had I been on my own with it, I think I would not have ever tracked those feelings down or made sense of what it feels like to interact with either my mom or my sister. Probably, I would have stayed firmly in denial and kept believing in that family dinner and everything it represented for me. I felt really nice and clean when I thought that is who I was.

But to believe in that dinner made me so easily victimized, Copa. And I was victimized, and I have told and told those stories, here. But even with everything we've written and worked through, I still cannot get the win in what they do. I cannot get the smallest little piece of why they choose those behaviors in relationship to me. It means they do not love me. Of coure this is true. But then why have anything to do with me at all?

I don't know.

That is why we were always trying harder, Copa. We can't figure out how the luncheon went so wrong, or the invitation to the beach, or the family dinner when the sister had her children wave flags and sing patriotic songs until everyone was ready to throw up or fall asleep and didn't really care which they did first, as long as they never had to watch a kid waving a flag and marching around a tableful of glaze-eyed adults ever again.

Look what your mother gained Cedar, with your sister debasing herself like that.

You know Copa, I never once looked at it like that.

D H sees things the way you do. He never budges, Copa. He says: "Your mother is the spider at the center of the web, Cedar." Whatever the incident is that I bring up, that is what D H says.

My idea of my sister is she believes that I hurt her and do horrible things to her. That is how she justifies doing bad things.

I will think about this in relation to my sister, Copa. The person my sister (and my mom) blame for my ~ whatever it is, they blame D H.

I wonder whether it is the same dynamic your sister employed in that once over she gave M.

I think it may be. In fact, I am sure of it.

It is an interesting thing that each of the husbands, and all of the children unless there is some public gain to be had in interacting with them are treated with some version of that look your sister gave M.

And I think these kinds of things do not happen in very healthy families. That underlying current of hostility which feels almost like that watchfulness I was posting about where the feel of my mother is concerned.

I think it might all be the same thing, Copa.

Variations on a theme.

And she was forced to rethink things. Because if I took responsibility and had control...in her mind...it must have been for some kind of advantage. That was why she accused me of stealing. She could not envision I did not do it for some kind of material benefit.

Not only that. If she put the Mother into a home, having carefully laid the groundwork among all her personal and professional peers for how hard she had worked for the mother (probably, with no help from the heartless absent sister) and how frustrating it was and how much she hated to do such a thing but had no choice. And then, you came home. And refused to have the mother placed there where the sister insisted she must go. What is the sister going to say about the changed situation to the friends she has so carefully groomed to believe she is who she says she is?

The only way to do it would be to paint you as ~ well, as she did, Copa.

Maybe, that is why the luncheon with the new husband had to play out the way that it did. And maybe, that is why the new husband's attitude toward you changed, once he had come to know you and his new wife.

Maybe this could be why all those troubling things happen whenever the sister is involved. If you did not love her the way you do Copa, she would not be able to hurt you as she has. I know you miss her. I miss my sister, too.

This is all very confusing.

But you know, Copa. The evidence just keeps piling up. And all the pieces fit. And something is really, hurtfully the matter here...and I don't think it is us, after all.

But the thing is, there is no way to know. It is always true in life that we could have done better, that we could have tried harder or been kinder or given more...but those things are usually seen in retrospect. Even in retrospect, I don't know how to explain what happens with my sister. I accuse myself of jealousy or maybe, of showing off or other kinds of things that might account for the way things just never are real where my sister is concerned.

Or my mom.

Maybe it is me.

I am serious. It could be me. According to D H, who has witnessed many things, it is my mother.

I am easily confused about these issues.

It does not seem right to think about my mother and my sister as I do.

But my sister did hurt my daughter.

And that is one thing I know for sure.

Knowing that, I am certain the other things are true as well.

Good.

Clear, again.

Does she have the same trouble understanding me, as I do her?

Do you feel the sister has made an effort to understand you, Copa?

I would say an effort was made to make it look like she was trying but that you were impossible...just as she will already have told everyone.

In a way, it is like Serenity's sister, and mine, hitting up the cousins once we are shunned. Painting themselves as better than they are by painting us as ~ well, as whatever they need us to be and believe they can get away with. It happens too consistently Copa, to have been accidental.

But how do they manage to accomplish it, I wonder.

So, there we are, back to "Maybe, it's me."

We will never know. Not for sure.

Except for what my sister did to my daughter.

Do you have such an instance? Some undeniable thing that is true, and that can help you remember that the other terrible things that seem to be true most probably are true?

I think that will help us not to be vulnerable to them, in future.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

It must gall her that I am her equal.

Copa. Here is a secret. Your sister is not your equal. I remember your describing the luncheon. That is how I know this. I remember your describing how she behaved toward M, and toward you. Decent people do not behave like that, Copa. They simply do not. I remember the mother asking where your sister was, and why she was not there, and whether she would see her again...and she never did.

I cannot keep facts about my sister still long enough to see them either, Copa. I think we are in active denial. I mean, denial active in the present moment because the pathway to the amygdala takes us there immediately when we try to think about the sisters.

They are to be protected. That was drummed into us.

We are to protect them. That was drummed into them.

***

That sense of confusion I feel whirling around when I try to make heads or tails of my mother or my sister does feel like denial. That same invisible force field feeling.

That could be.

How else could we possibly believe that people who do the things they do love us?

It must gall her that I am her equal.

Why would this gall her, Copa.

Whatever this answer is, this is the true thing you already know about your sister but will not let yourself see.

Like me.

I do the same thing.

So did Serenity.

But she is better now, and we will be, too.

I still do not get her looking at M's body up and down. What did she want me to feel? Exactly what I did feel?

Only you can know what you did feel. I think what she intended for you to feel was that she could take M, could have him for her own for one time or for a lifetime...but would not deign to.

The insult was to you Copa, on so many levels.

It cannot be fought or even, addressed, the harm your sister did to you, there in that room. If you were to assess your emotions regarding yourself and your womanhood and your appearance before the look Copa, and afterwords...what would the differences be.

Could this behavior on the sister's part represent the essential nature of the toxicity in which you were raised, Copa.

Consider this, also, ok? How would a loving sister comport herself if, upon a first meeting, she believed her sister were with the wrong man? She would wait, Copa. Her concern would be for her beloved sister. She may have ended up condemning the man but not on a first meeting.

She would not do what your sister did.

There is something in my own psychology that answers this call. To feel less than in relation to, in comparison to her.

I think not in our psychologies, Copa. In our upbringings. These belief systems were hurt into us. These entitlements may have been seeded in our sisters while they were just little kids and not responsible. But the moral choice to act on these entitlements now, as adult women ~ these, the sisters are responsible for.

If these theories hold true over time, then the sisters will be shown to be morally and ethically reprehensible.

Which, given their behaviors, would seem to fit these particular sisters like a glove.

Is this why my sister looked M up and down? To make me feel small and insignificant? To take me in, assess my worth, and dismiss me as not good enough?

Yes.

And some other things, too. Which is hurtful Copa but you are so close to free of them. You have carried this for so long ~ this is a life pattern for the sister, Copa...and for you, I think this is true. Once it is gone, it will turn out to have been way heavier than you knew. You are going to feel dizzy with it, when you are free of this.

Work, and the concept and understanding of Germany, will help. We are doing this intentionally, and we are moving well.

Happy Hour here everyone. Wishing all of us a beautiful first night of 2016.

Cedar

 

[New Leaf]

Have a relaxing happy hour, Cedar and a wonderful first night..... leafy