NO! Oh Cedar!
It really is true, we can't make some of this stuff up.
I confess, I was catching up on your thread at a stop light this morning and continued to read just a teeny bit after the turn arrow changed, and I...well, I briefly veered into a ditch at that part of your post.
Ha! I love this.
The most troublesome part of the FB thing is that difficult child daughter has done such things many times. Not on FB necessarily, but...for instance. There was a time when our neighbor here in Florida visited us in Wisconsin. As it happened, difficult child daughter chose that day, just minutes before we were leaving for the airport to collect the neighbor, to come in off the streets. A friendship formed between difficult child daughter and the Florida neighbor which is ongoing to this day.
So, after the phone call where difficult child daughter and her exDH were fighting and difficult child daughter was running her exDH down for not working to the point that he shouted out the why behind that one, difficult child daughter FB me to call her.
And I didn't.
And so, difficult child daughter told me, when husband called her that night because I wasn't ready yet and after she had talked to him about how hurt she had been that I had not defended her, that it had been so nice to be able to talk to the neighbor about these things, since she had not been able to reach me.
Chilling.
But I don't want to know, so I don't really know that.
Why won't she take her medications? And how long can her (ex) husband afford to be off from work?
I am not sure, IAD.
I am thinking how to approach this. Lithium is working for her, but everything feels "dull." She admits to enjoying aspects of the manic phase of her illness. I am in denial about so much of this, and so I justify my way through it instead of researching the illness.
Denial really is such a strange, convoluted thing.
They are living in the ex-husband's grandmother's beautiful home. For free. difficult child daughter began receiving disability after the beating.
So, that is their money.
But difficult child daughter was all about how the money she "saved" is gone. husband and I were talking about it last night, and he reminded me that difficult child daughter had just received something like $7000 in disability "back pay".
So we are girding my loins (as mine are the only vulnerable ones) to practice all the detachment skills.
I am having that shockey feeling again.
I think I am not imagining all these things, but I don't see how they can be true, either.
FOG.
difficult children will use "shock and awe" words to get our attention if nothing else makes us do what they want.
Our difficult children are not psychotic. They know fantasy from reality. And t he reality is if they use "shock and awe" statements, we will react and maybe do what they want.
I know you are right about this. It's that denial thing happening to me again that prevents my fully claiming the reality of it. It seems like such a mean thing to think about someone. It seems like a mom should ~ I don't know. Should be able to not think like that about her own children.
So there is where I am doing myself damage, then.
That is the accusation I am making against myself, down in the heartlands where I can't access it.
But on so many levels MWM, I know you are right.
I suppose what I don't know is how to love a grown woman who is my child and who is also so darn mean and manipulative.
I feel like a foolish person, sometimes.
Part of this is that I have the dream of what I wanted and of who I think, and will persist in believing, my child to be.
In reality...in reality that may not be true.
But it might be. And so, I will not make myself give up on that dream just yet.
This is not a simple situation.
I do love her. I need to be wary and wise and I need to learn to be okay with that.
When things have been quiet for awhile I find myself letting my boundaries be compromised piece by piece.
That happens to me too, Tish. I have been thinking about the reaction I had. I think those blank places, those places our brains stop us from going, are there to protect us. There would be no way we could stay present with our kids when they are not in crisis without some barrier between the trauma response we've had to develop and the normal interactions of day to day presence.
I think that might be what happens.
I remember when the worst of it was happening, and I remember how odd it seemed that I was able to compartmentalize so much of it. I got dressed, I cooked things, I went to work, I went to school.
It might be that we erect boundaries not between ourselves and our children, but between ourselves and our traumas. When the trauma is fresh, the boundaries are there. When the trauma is concealed from us, the boundaries dissolve.
So, there is alot of energy there for us to access, if we can ever work through it. I was talking to someone who composes music, today. We were talking about what he sees or hears or feels when he composes, and how he recalls the separate pieces when he wants to play them back. He described it as a function of the brain that is happening to all of us, all the time. Our brains are processing all kinds of information, truly mind-bogglingly complex amounts of information and storing them away for future access in an instant, with the right key.
So, all those terribly sad things that have happened to all of us with our children are in here, fresh as daisies. They can be whipped out and presented in an instant. But when they are, we hit overload.
It's like blowing a fuse, maybe.
It might be that the grief response to the loss of the children we believed we were raising is locked up in there somewhere, too.
There is something happening there, when we cannot access those parts of ourselves. I do know that when I could break through it, the feelings accessed were intense. Once I got there though, I was able to push through them.
It was a strange thing.
It was like diving through deeper and darker layers of trauma to reach the one that echoed the horror of that imagery of difficult child daughter harming her children.
That one still has a little of that shocky, echoey feeling to it.
It costs us a great deal of energy to watch our kids suffer, or to function in spite of our own suffering. I never thought about where that emotion goes. I think it might be tied up in those PTSD kinds of knots, not so much to protect us from going there again as to prevent the toxicity of those kinds of understandings from infecting the rest of our lives.
It could be that this is why I found the phrase about "yielding to the joy underlying all of life" so comforting. All I had to do was go deeper, and there it was. This could be a piece of the reason we try so hard to make sense of things in a way that allows us to keep choosing loving and trusting in the face of what looks and feels like devastating, and repeated, betrayal of everything that matters. (I know I sound like a dork here, but I think I am on to something that matters.)
I could not think rationally, yesterday. I would get to a certain point, and my brain would just blank. I slept with those feelings, woke up with them too, but not in a clear way.
It was like I literally could not think my way through. I was getting sidetracked by the trauma response. I heard it described once as pulling up a fishing line. The deeper the line goes, the stranger the conglomerations of pieced-together things somehow adhering to it are. Those conglomerations of things adhering to the fishing line are pieces of unresolved trauma, and they were stopping me in my tracks.
They say the limbic pathways become automatic pathways, over time. Maybe that has something to do with it. It was like I was being stopped at the doorstep of one horrifying set of images or another.
It felt like being one of those game pieces in a lights and buzzers game where you wap the other guy's player. I could respond to a simple question from one of you. (Yet, I do not talk about it with husband in the same way at all. I did not tell him, for instance, the piece about the threat difficult child daughter made about the kids. I don't want him to know, I don't want him to suffer. I did finally tell him, night before last, what the heart of the thing was for me.)
Maybe that is why we leap to fix things, why we respond instinctually to emotional pain instead of thinking our way through or remembering to say the words we've learned here.
We literally cannot access them.
I read yesterday's posting. My writing seemed to have that same chaotic, disjointed quality my thinking did.
And the reality is if they use "shock and awe" statements, we will react and maybe do what they want.
They do use shock and awe tactics, don't they.
I never can figure out whether it's a tactic or whether it's real.
I remember posting about a conversation I had with difficult child daughter just after the beating. I was able to be in that place where I could view her as strong and healthy enough to take her life in a new direction if she chose to. She did not like those responses maybe, and she immediately posted pictures of her face taken by the nurses at the hospital. I hadn't seen them before, and I didn't know they were coming.
She was literally unrecognizable.
The FBI was involved because of both the savagery of the beating, and where it occurred.
They asked for pictures of difficult child daughter from before the beating.
She did not look alive.
Still have a little shocky around that too, now that I am there again.
I remember posting about that. I didn't know why she did that, but when I posted about what happened, the parents here pulled the pieces together for me.
It is one of those things where I know this fact on the right hand, and this other one on the left hand.
And never the twain shall meet.
So shock and awe tactics are real, and our children do employ them.
Glad to hear that that situation doesn't seem to be quite that serious and more about made up drama and your daughter's need for that.
Thank you, SuZir. I think this is where difficult child daughter is taking this, and that she will pursue it. In my coldest of hearts, I think she may be backtracking because the reactions were not what she had hoped. I could be wrong, of course. I sometimes really do wonder what causes me to think like I do. But I do think that way.
I do.
I think difficult child daughter is determined to have her boys back and to be away from exDH and I think that has been her plan all along and that she has done what she had to do to make that happen.
I think exDH may actually be in some danger from difficult child daughter. I think the situation is volatile. I do think these things. One of the things difficult child daughter said last night (just before she told me about the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers posting) was that the thing that hurt her most was that it seemed that I did not believe in her when I told her she needed to reach for her center, to reach for her best, kindest self and to respond from that place.
Eerily certain.
That is how I feel.
Eerily certain I am being played....
Sad.
The husband will keep the boys safe. He is an honorable man. I had discussed the quitting the job thing with him a few months back, in the sense of how that was affecting his self esteem. He never once told me so much as a whisper about the real reason he'd quit.
It was only when difficult child daughter was running and running him down to us on the phone that day that he began shouting out in the background what had happened...and difficult child daughter agreed that it did.
Maybe it is true that together they can pull one another through.
That is what husband says.
Cedar
