The truth shall set you free
You're only as sick as your secrets.
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CEDAR
I think it is how we see ourselves reflected in our parents' eyes that becomes our secret truth, Recovering. If we can ferret it out, if we can stand to look at it, we find that, whatever any particular incidence of abuse involved, that truth in the abuser's eyes was always the same. For me, that truth in my mother's eyes was, and still is...contempt.
My mother is very controlling. I come away from any time spent with her feeling like a person so stupid I should hardly be allowed to walk around without a keeper. From what I remember of him, this was true of her father, my grandfather, too. He was very well dressed, but would stare directly into your eyes, counting and weighing and measuring and shriveling your soul before he said something awful like, "You little brat. You little snot."
And I'm talking like, at breakfast.
I think it was supposed to have been a joke.
Rumor has it that he was sexually abusive to his daughters. My sister reports a direct experience with him as an adult.
My mother, whatever else she did, kept us far away from her family of origin.
So, that seems to be the source of my mother's problems. I am sure she fought a battle as courageous as any samurai, to reclaim herself to the degree she has.
She pretty firmly believes and is oh, so quick to say, that every one she knows is stupid. (I don't mean she says, "Oh, darn it. Everyone I know is stupid."
:O)
No.
One at a time, she berates those who accept her. I think the underlying dynamic may be that anyone who cherishes her must not be worth her time. She talks about the person, laughs at their stupidity or incompetence with others behind their backs. Destroying their reputations among their mutual friends, she isolates them. Then, she is very nice, very helpful, very much the person in control to their faces. This is the pattern with her friends, her family of origin, her husband (and, after she was widowed, the man she planned to marry within just a few months of my father's death and non-funeral.)
And of course, this is how she interacts with her children.
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RECOVERING
Another helpful note for me is that as Brene Brown says, shame lives in the dark, once we start telling our "stories" and telling our truth, we become "shame resilient" and healthier, happier and freer to be ourselves.
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CEDAR
I agree, Recovering...sitting with the feelings and surviving them, which can only happen when we have enough understanding of the process to counter the soul-killing toxicity that scarred us in the first place, calms the fear response, or the shame response, to something survivable. Once we have seen the worst of it, we own it instead of it owning us. We've come through it.
There is a book (The Jesus Incident) in which people are tortured while being filmed. This is done by the government to guarantee loyalty through breaking the spirit. Those who have gone through the experience are never shown the film. But they know it exists, and that someone knows things about them they do not know, themselves. Terrible things. No one talks about it openly, because all are vulnerable. The place is called The Scream Room. They are drugged during the process, so they are not sure what they did, how they responded, whether they hurt someone else. In that imaginary society, there is a game, outlawed by the government, in which people run naked around the perimeter of the compound, vulnerable to a multitude of savage animals. Those who make it win nothing of any value.
But they recover their self respect.
That is why the game is outlawed.
That is how I see this journey we are on. It is dangerous to go back, to relive the emotional scarring. But once you understand there is a way to heal, however risky it is, some of us just have to run that perimeter. We have to know what we did in the Scream Room.
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RECOVERING
We hold the secrets of our parents cruelties and when we stop keeping that inside and bring it out to the light, my belief and my experience says, we get healed.
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CEDAR
I think we heal if we can counter the shaming things we accepted as our names during the abusive incidents, and during surviving a life lived with someone who identified us to ourselves as someone who can be beaten, taunted, threatened. We are fortunate to have found a way out.
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RECOVERING
I think healing results in not only hearing differently, but seeing, speaking, knowing, understanding, and perceiving differently. I have almost no relationship with my 4 siblings because as I have gotten healthier, I have popped out of that 'reality by agreement' that my whole family lived/lives within.................and in popping out I can see it way differently and they just can't because they are steeped in that reality, in fact, buried in it.
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CEDAR
I see this in my family of origin too, Recovering. That is why my response to my sister so shocked me. I try really hard not to do things to surprise or hurt them. But this time, I did. I know better. There has been so much pain, there have been so many rejections, for all of us. I don't want to add to that. I'm not exactly proud of myself. I did it because I was angry at being patronized, again and again. There was nothing gained by my action, other than to challenge the reality of what we wish we had, the reality of pretending there is something real there. Maybe, because of this, we will begin to establish something real in future. Or maybe, as you have had to do, I will lose even what I have. I sometimes think that would be preferable. In fact, I think that may be what we have. It's just that no one has acknowledged it.
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RECOVERING
I have come to a certain neutrality and forgiveness where my parents are concerned, I realized awhile back that they were treated in much the same way they treated us, wounded children raising wounded children.
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CEDAR
This is absolutely true, Recovering. The difference is that my mother seems to relish power-over. While she is achingly vulnerable in so many ways, she is dangerously perceptive, and will cut to the quick, instantly and with great joy.
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RECOVERING
She was crying and said, "
that's what my mother did to me." That moment stopped me dead in my tracks, I hadn't known that part and I just felt so much empathy for her, for me, for my grandmother, for all of us.
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CEDAR
I feel that too, Recovering. That, and anger, and a desperate kind of hurry up and get better so I don't continue passing bad things along without realizing it. In working with the Osteen materials, I discovered that I was carrying a belief that my kids were not going to make it. I don't want that stuff to be the message I am sending, subconsciously. It's so frustrating. I do try, though.
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RECOVERING
I think we send out a different energy, that child within us sends out a strong signal to the bully that we are defenseless.................perhaps letting that child within know that you will protect her, to soothe her..........that inner child work is pretty powerful stuff......it's helped me a lot.
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CEDAR
There is a man in my Tai Chi class who was telling me about his meditation class. He said that, as we heal through meditation and the energy chakras are opened, the scents of our bodies changes. Isn't that interesting.
