But what do they do? Do they pray? Write? Post? Walk?
Whatever brings joy I think, Copa. Very little can bring us joy, when we are certain, not only that we don't deserve joy, but that we are meant to sacrifice our joy. That is the bargain we made with our abusers. Fear for joy.
Joy is another word for love, if you think about it.
They feel the same.
***
The victim in the abusive relationship will have come to believe her value (or his) is somehow connected to sacrifice. That is the dynamic beneath self-sabotage. That is the bargaining chip that never was, the means of control that controls nothing.
But it was all we had.
And we spent it in earnest when our kids were endangered.
But it didn't work for us then, either.
***
Our pain, our shame or loss or grief were bargaining chips. That was the thing the abuser was after: our brokenness. When I say I broke, I mean I felt pain, I was shamed, I did grieve, I was hurt. To turn this breakage around, to imagine I have any self left to myself, I imagine my sacrifice of self to have been a willing one. I find that slim place to stand. I live, believing I have the capacity, if I sacrifice heavily enough, to control the manner and degree of hurt.
That dynamic is why we respond to the losses in our lives as we do.
It never worked, Copa. None of that stuff ever worked. The abuser abused when and for as long as they wanted to. We created the illusion of control out of what we had left. Which was nothing: pain and confusion and shame and that final, whistling in the dark place that is abandonment
and that turns out to be nothing more than where we abandoned ourselves.
Given that this dynamic was created by ourselves, we can change the dynamic. We can choose, because we are strong enough to do so, to hold ourselves in compassion right in the face of whatever this is. We can read Brene Brown and just sit with the feelings and never bargain pieces of ourselves away again. We are very strong. Strong enough to sit with the feelings of shame or self-contempt and whatever other ugliness was done to us
or by us.
Neither blame
nor praise. Remember that quote?
That may be why the New Year's resolution to be kinder to myself worked. I still sacrificed, still skewered my hopes or appearance or kindness with self-denigration, but not as much or as deeply.
I was kinder.
Maybe, I stopped trying to go deeper. Like sailing huge ships. It takes a little time to change course. From however it was I had been taught to treat myself in some futile effort to control the hurt to "That'll do, pig.", to...now.
To now, when we can see it.
***
This game of bargaining with our abusers was never real. It didn't work then and it isn't working now, when we sacrifice (By committing self sabotage in our thinking about ourselves ~ that is the nature of the sacrifice; it is that subtle a thing. And that blatant a thing. Hidden right out in the open all along. And our only weapon is to see it and boy, are we seeing it, now. Good for us.) Somehow, we still believe the dynamic our abusers taught us: that in sacrificing, in giving up, in admitting the pain, in letting them win by taking on their confusion, we can make them stop hurting us. That we had some illusory control over what was happening to us.
We never did.
From the depths of whatever their illnesses are, the eyes of those we love are blank. I have posted about that blankness, about that sense of thick, chuckling depravity, before. This is what Going North posted for us. Addiction: Nothing to do with you.
That is what we were bargaining with. Something with blank eyes. We convince ourselves it sees our sacrifice and hears us. These belief systems kept us sane in insanely dangerous situations. There was no guarantee then, when it was happening to us, that we would survive it.
That confrontation with our own mortality is part of what lives in that dark place named that pretty, civilized word that doesn't begin to touch what it is: abandonment.
That was the worst hurt, the scariest thing. We leap in to save our children.
And it doesn't work.
Oh oh.
***
We've forgotten the terror in it. We only remember sacrificing got us through, kept us going and somehow, here we are.
That is what we paid Charon for the cost of our passage.
But here's the thing, you guys. We were
born flying. We never needed Charon's craft.
How does that go? Something about trusting that you have wings, and that they will hold you; that they are strong, beautiful things made for soaring flight.
That is what our abusers took from us.
But they could only take from us what we were willing to believe they had a right to take.
So: Free. Not of them, but of the sickness devouring them and what they taught us about surviving it.
They could not have been more wrong.
***
Those things were the sacrifices we brought to the table: we believed ourselves to be controlling the abuser through our pain, through our tears or our refusal to shed them; through our rage or our refusal to acknowledge it. Whether groveling or refusing to beg, the music at the core of our lives has been chosen by the abuser, and by the family system he or she created.
Once we see this, we are free.
Simple choice.
Nothing we need to do but recognize our patterns
and the security in thinking the way we do. So, why we do that when it doesn't work? Maybe we are blind to it. Maybe, we had to keep ourselves blind to it because we did not have the courage yet to stand where Pema stands.
There is no balance; there is no center. Sacrificing ourselves at any level isn't working. It never worked. That whole mindset is an artifact of abuse, nothing more.
Huh.
We come real.
***
Protecting our core selves from our rotten abusers has been a primary value. The pain we are in when our children are hurt ~ somehow, we slip that into the original programming and begin sacrificing for real this time. Believing in self sacrifice, punishing ourselves in every smallest gluttony or asceticism, we demand of ourselves a strength no longer required and that never worked in the first place.
Recovering Enabler posted to me once: Hair shirt.
This is from Urban Dictionary:
"My brother sinner, even though I completely understand your need for purgation, there isn't a man among us with half a conscience who doesn't keep a hair shirt as a permanent part of his wardrobe."
Self sacrifice, self sabotage, self hatred, in an effort to control something we believe we can and have controlled. We didn't.
That is not the way.
***
That key piece for me today is that our suffering is not a bargaining chip for a Get Out of Jail Free card for our children or our families of origin or ourselves. It doesn't work that way. This way of believing may be the most harmful thing our abusers created in us. This too has to do with internal versus external locus of control. We need to stop valuing sacrificing anything about ourselves in a futile effort to convince ourselves we had any control. We cannot protect the kids if only we hate ourselves enough.
For heaven's sake. There is nothing our initial abusers can do to us, now. We don't need to hate them or distrust them or label them or anything them. We need to recognize where we are bargaining with our pain and stop it.
In that sense, that we choose love matters. The problem is that the person we must love is ourselves, and that we have to defy our abusers to do it.
And our primary abusers...are us.
Remember that old Pogo comic strip?
***
And we believe, somewhere down deep where I can't get at it (I think in abandonment) that if we love ourselves our abusers will make us dead things.
That is why we hid ourselves there, in abandonment.
That is the imagery in my mind's eye.
But that place is so alien to me that I recognize nothing about it.
I hid myself away well.
PRIDE
DEFIANCE
Yep. I'm in there, alright.
***
That we broke as children does not mean the abuser stopped. It only means we don't remember it going forward from that broken place. That is why we think that if we suffer, the hurt will stop.
That was never true.
Just the opposite.
When we stopped suffering, the hurt stopped. Nothing to do with the abuser, or with our shattering. We stopped trying to justify what they were doing.
That is why I see the blank eyes, maybe; or hear that oily chuckle.
We need to stop seeing suffering, seeing "to suffer" as a bargaining position.
***
We are not the only ones to think like this: There have been sacrificial altars throughout time and in every civilization, the objects to be sacrificed becoming more and more precious over time, all of it done to bargain for peace and safety and love; to guarantee those things.
That is the essential thing about the way we were brought up. We were hurt so often and so intentionally that our values systems became unbalanced things. Instead of believing capturing the goal or creating the piece or winning the race was the way to make our mark in the world, we were twisted by whatever your abuser's version was of "Don't you dare." Or, "Just don't think." Or, "Who do you think you are."
Because to them, who we are is the sacrifice of self, is the compromise of self we made, to suvive.
We need to let go of that.
It was wrong. Like, cosmic wrongness played out ad infinitum and boringly resentful but we could not get away.
Cynical in our sacrifice.
But sincere as the day is long, when it was our children we were sacrificing for.
***
Less a matter of Presence, though that will come, but of awareness and conscious choice.
If sacrificing ourselves were going to work, we would all be zillionaires by now. What if, instead of confessing our secret shames and believing that whatever happened all those years ago means anything at all in the light of this day, we just told ourselves: This is not the answer. Health and Presence and Joy wherever we find it.
It is like fear of the lust of vengeance. Once I got to the bottom of it, there was nothing there but a Magical Child's way of surviving. It was shocking, shaming, to realize it. I was able to find compassion for the child I was.
And then admiration.
***
There is zero reason to believe any abuser, even if it is us, like I am abusive in my anger lately, about anything. When we are not Present, we are not our highest selves. Neither were they. Nothing they taught us is true. Not about us for sure, and not about them, either. That is the thing that makes it stick: In their grandiosity, which was energy they took from us when we broke, the abuser's belief in his perfection keeps us believing he or she was not just a sad and broken person with blank eyes whose path intersected with our own.
There is no capacity for Mercy in them. They are like starving jackals. Or maybe, they extended every mercy of which they were capable or we would be broken irretrievably, today.
Maybe, they held on with white knuckle determination. I will believe this. I do love my mother, and all my people that I love, very much.
In any event, sacrificing ourselves to bargain with them is not the answer because it doesn't work.
On we go.
Copa, I think that is why you are so merciless with yourself. They were wrong as could be, Copa. You were never supposed to have been in a position where mercy was required.
You are not a beggar. You never were.
They tricked you, Copa.
I felt the same desperation and longing...and absolute damage of self I did so many years ago with the analyst.
Self sacrifice. To betray the self for the sake of the self.
Even we know that cannot possibly be right.
To sacrifice the best in us; to blacken and destroy and expose and make of it an ugliness so we can heal...hmmmm. No wonder it didn't work, Copa. Imagine the strength in you. Four days a week. Young woman alone in the world. Man in a suit. Nice shoes (that you were actually paying for); inner sanctum.
Young woman, alone in all the world.
A beautiful thing, Copa. The most valuable thing there is: A young female.
I dress you in high, defiantly red heels, Copa. Beautifully tailored pencil skirt. Flowing cape, ala Del Orifice'.
Beautiful; and strong, even now. Imagine her then, Copa.
***
You give the man in the shirt his money. Though he has not done as he promised he was able to do and so in fact, wasted your precious, precious time of your life, you give the man the money both of you pretend is not the core value, here.
Was that the nature of the Sacrifice, Copa? An impossible thing that you did though it was not possible, though no one could do it.
You did.
It still wasn't enough, because sacrifice is not the way to do this.
I hear: You have to take control of your own feelings. And I hear it as: you have to cut off your limb.
And I hear it as: It doesn't matter what you do. The addiction or the illness or the family dynamic ~ these things are what they are.
I feel badly because someone I love very much suffers. I can bring joy, can bring strength, can let in the Sun, or I can go down, too.
Those seem to be our only choices.
Huh.
That is why we need to be really clear that sacrifice will not help those we love.
Joy and strength and welcome. These are the things that will help them come back to us. Not guilty bargaining with which limb we must lose, or which person we love or swear we don't love anymore. I think we don't get to choose. I think I agree with Nietzsche (as I understand what he meant, anyway): Love is what we are, where we came from, what we're doing, where we're going.
That is why we can't see it, maybe. And maybe, that is why things like pornography and drug use and blood fascinate us. They aren't love, either.
Joy and strength and welcome and sunshine.
And music.
:O)
This is what I am listening to this morning.
Tomorrow I am going to listen to Lady Gaga. She has done much work on this issue of sacrifice and bargaining and betrayal. I did not want to reference her link that I was reading this morning here because is was religiously offensive...though we are working our ways through the same kind of thing.
Maybe.
***
Leafy's question: What is love. This was the Benedictine response of the five definitions Leafy listed for us. That definition resonates strongly for me.
"Love is more easily experienced than defined. As a theological virtue, by which we love God above all things and our neighbours as ourselves for his sake, it seems remote until we encounter it enfleshed, so to say, in the life of another – in acts of kindness, generosity and self-sacrifice. Love's the one thing that can never hurt anyone, although it may cost dearly. The paradox of love is that it is supremely free yet attaches us with bonds stronger than death. It cannot be bought or sold; there is nothing it cannot face; love is life's greatest blessing."
• Catherine Wybourne is a Benedictine nun
And there is Nietzsche: We love because love came first. In the power of creation, we are created.
Sacrifice is bargaining for love.
We need to stop doing that. In a way, it's what all fables and fairy tales and legends and epics and sagas are telling us: You already have everything you need.
No bargaining required.
That was the bargain our abusers struck with us. As with most of their thinking, they were wrong in this, too.
We are free.
Leafy, I wonder if your version of my "Just don't think, Cedar." is "What are you crying about." The abuser hurts you and denies that it hurt you. So, huh. That is twisted, crazy-making stuff. In our vulnerability, in our little girl or little boy knowledge of the world, we believed ourselves wrong and them, right.
Where I defiantly refuse to cry, you cry defiantly and try to figure out why. That accusation "What are you crying about." is abuse. It's crazy making. It's "You are not being treated unfairly. Buy into it. Believe it."
The answer is patently obvious. The abuser did not miss that. The answer is: "I am hurt." "I am crying about that I am hurt, you stupidly abusive person."
There is no why or justification and one is not required.
Whether we like it or not, we are alone, here.
"What are you crying about?"
"None of your beeswax." Leafy hisses, meaning it with all her heart. "I define myself, now."
And her tears flow, healing every broken place and becoming tears of joy.
So, that would be love.
Internal locus of control.
Well, the answer is no. Not fully. But I know this is part of it: I have always been great when I am losing. When I am the down and out who is fighting to survive. When the odds are against me. When I am a lost cause.
Maybe, for each of us, there is no self sabotage when we are losing.
We are given free reign to access our own strength; imagine what it will be to employ that strength as we will it, without self sabotage/sacrifice.
Cedar
