So this morning, I am thinking about judgment and self concept.
I am thinking about Echo's "Just tell him to shut up!" and I am laughing because there is something horrifyingly thrilling and somehow illegitimate about not taking abuse seriously.
We were brought up to take the craziness of being seen as objects of abuse, of the self identity that would force on us, very seriously indeed.
Some of us know this internal truth not from abuse, but simply from being female, in this or any other culture.
We are responsible for the emotional tone of the lives happening around us.
Recovering and I were discussing the definition of freedom once. We concluded, in different words than I will use here, that freedom would be to have confronted fear often enough that we would never again be stopped by it.
Not that there would be no fear, but that we would know ourselves as people who would seek it out and face it, again and again, intentionally.
And then, fear or shame or whatever it is, is nothing that matters.
It no longer defines us.
That fits in here somewhere. As I have grown and changed, those for whom my only value -- and that is key -- my only value...those people have said some of the most shocking and ultimately, disgustingly stupid things, I have ever heard anyone speak.
Like, really weird stuff.
"Dumbass."
?
What I wish I'd said is, " And your point is?"
Ha!
But I couldn't think, when it happened.
Or when my sister told me, as our lives were falling apart, that she and her uber religious cohorts had prayed a ring of thorns around my family when the kids were little to "bring me to the Lord."
Know what I said?
Nothing.
I never even got it that not only was she celebrating what had happened to us, but that she actually believed she had caused this.
And had the gall to tell me so!
Oh, for Heaven's sake!
But once again, I digress.
I am seeing things I never let myself see before, about the suckness -- oops! I meant sickness, the pointlessness of that reward system, just blows me away.
***
For so many of us, the core selves we then went on to create and rely on and believe In revolved, by necessity, around believing that what was over and done mattered less than what we, by standing up, by behaving decently ourselves whatever had been done to us, could create of the future.
I think we were not wrong in that.
But what I do see, both in my own situation and in the determined responses of all of our dysfunctional family of origin responses to us, is that the challenge for us now is to re-examine the genesis of those core belief systems that, though they did make us strong enough to believe loving and accepting and mentoring were more appropriate and fruitful responses than hatred and blaming and victimizing, also left us cut off from our damaged core selves and functioning solely through intellectual concepts of choice.
How many times have each of us done the right thing, the thought out and chosen right thing in situations most people would have reacted to with anger?
But we've never known, we had no way to know, that the response of a truly healthy person would be to consider the source of whatever the weirdness was as something outside of ourselves altogether.
This is what Recovering is telling us, I think, when she describes her growing ability to observe without judging.
Or what our sweet, funny, courageous Echo really means when she says, "Just tell him to shut up!"
:0)
I still get such a chuckle out of that one!
***
It, this thing I am thinking this morning, will change everything about my perception of purpose and self.
It has to do with Recovering's willing suspension of that need to judge a thing as a process we can watch happen. It has to do with the ego boost, with the sense of right and wrongness Witz' family so vehemently and cruelly pursues to this day.
I hate them for doing that to her.
So I see the underpinnings, the nasty machinations, in my own family of origin and feel that same giggling, Illegitimate little thrill having to do with naming abuse for what it is AND WITH REALLY GETTING IT THAT NONE OF IT, NOT THE PROCESS AND NOT THE
PAIN AND NOT THE FIXING had anything to do with me.
And it has nothing to do with me, now.
It's just that same old role they always put me in. Shock me enough, make it bad enough, and I will rephrase it for you.
What that means for those of us raised as I was, or treated as Witz or MWM have been (and as, had I ever once been able to see clearly enough that I simply turned away from, Instead of trying to fix, my family of origin) Is less that we want those whose love should never have been a commodity, a condition, a threat or a promise...it isn't so much that we want them to love us as it is that those of us raised with conditional "love" have learned, over our lifetimes, to require an ethical standard of response from ourselves. We do not intentionally betray. Having experienced so much pain ourselves, we Intentionally set out to heal things, to believe In the better future, whatever the present looks like.
We do, intentionally, and with no malice, set our hearts on forgiveness.
But this morning?
I am thinking that "Just tell him to shut up" (Ha! :0) Illegitimate giggle, here!)
is exactly the right response.
We need to be pretty healthy to actually get there, though.
Cedar
