For starters Recovering...I seem to be hearing differently. There must have been a filter between what was said and what I heard, before. I think what I see is that I am hearing the inappropriateness in the patterns of interaction, most particularly as they occur in my family of origin. This changed perception has been happening for some time, now. The difference is that I am noting and ~ surprising myself no end just lately ~ saying, how what I see is different than what they say and how I feel about that pattern of behavior.
Example: (My sister. For the thousandth time.) We are coming to see you!
Usual Response: Oh, that's great! We will do thus and so and thus and so. I am so happy you can come!
Current Response: That's not true. No, it isn't that you aren't welcome. It is just that there was a time when I believed you and anticipated your visit. Now, I understand you will not be coming and I wonder why you say you are.
In that it was a change in our normal pattern, my reply left my sister floundering. Even as I heard myself say it, I knew it wasn't very nice. I was discussing what happened with husband. (That's how big a deal it seemed like at the time.) It was like, what's the matter with me, to say something like that? I wanted to feel guilty, sorry, something ~ and I absolutely did not. It was such a change for me. Thinking about it later, I told myself those same phrases you used, Recovering. I just don't know what's gotten into me. The observation was an honest one. I don't feel like continuing old patterns, where actions speak so clearly of dysfunction and words are used to pretend what is, is something else.
As I become healthier, the cost versus benefit ratio is changing.
It is similar to the story you told about speaking up to the man walking all over the fresh asphalt. It was nothing that HAD to be said...it's just that the behavior was offensive and so, you commented on it, rather than not.
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I have been working on this thread as an exercise in going deeper into my own healing/clarification. Still, I wanted to post something before everyone forgot what we were talking about.
:O)
The gist of what I've been trying to say has to do with loyalty...with the decision, made as children, to define ourselves and our lives through protecting those we could not protect when we were younger. With why that happened and how we did that. To cherish and protect them now, as adults, means we take responsibility for the relationship, preserving it at all costs. Not so much for the other guy, but for the sake of the quest, which has something to do with assigning meaning to the emotional and psychological destruction that is the aftermath of abuse. The problem is, each sibling carries the same dysfunction in a different pocket. One way or another, the dysfunction created at the hands of the abuser continues to be the most important part of the relationship.
Maybe I want to stop dancing.
That is why I say healing results in hearing differently. I am not clear yet on what I mean, but there is something here to be unraveled and found, I think.
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Witz, you are absolutely right about self-talk. The question then becomes: what were the motives of the parent who devised the filter through which we name ourselves, now? Valid, or part of the same, broken mentality that caused the damage in the first place? As we figure that part out, our self-talk changes.
And our lives become very different things, filled with light and clarity and song.
And just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we realize we were the ones in charge, all along. Maybe, before we can give ourselves permission to choose a different version of real than our abusive parents allowed, we have to really see the messed up power dynamic the abusive individual was struggling with, how pointless and wrong it was, to act that out on a child.
Cedar
