The Trinity Pages Recovery Journal

Good Stuff

I finally understand

I am so happy to finally figure this out. I feel like a huge brick wall has broken to bits in front of me, and I have a clear view for the first time ever. Wow!

So many things make sense to me now that I finally understand that my mother will do anything possible to avoid taking any measure of responsibility for herself and her life, and knowing that any time something is less than absolutely perfect, it sets off her own self-loathing (I'm not entirely sure the relationship between perfection and self-loathing, but I know there is one; I don't really care what it is, though).

One of the suicide attempts I made as a teenager involved me, in a fit of rage and despair, just swallowing a bunch of pills from the medicine cabinet. My mother's reaction? Well, she actually said to me that it was very inconsiderate of me to do that, because some of those were prescription, and now they had to drive all the way to the next town to get the prescription refilled. Your daughter tries to kill herself, or at least is so upset she's willing to risk her life to send you a message, and all you can say is, "How inconsiderate of you, now I have to drive all the way to get a refill!"?

It's a horrible story, I know, but now, I actually understand it. For years it totally perplexed me, I mean, what the hell was she thinking? Now I know. When I did that, all of her internal feelings of guilt, shame, worthlessness, incompetence, etcetera were riled up and instead of dealing with her own issues and owning them, she just turned it on the straw figure she had made and which she told herself was me. She looked at the straw figure she put in front of me, now covered with her own shame, guilt, fear, worthlessness, and so forth, and decided I wasn't really a teenaged girl in desperate pain, I was just terribly inconsiderate.

And she did it because she refused to deal with her own issues. She couldn't care, she couldn't give a damn, because then she'd have to ask herself why I was this disturbed. She'd have to deal with the volcano of self-loathing and her belief that she was a terrible mother (which she was, but only because it was a self-fulfilling prophecy and because she would never deal with her own issues). I've always wondered what stupid thing she would have told her friends and herself if I'd actually died in one of my suicide attempts, in order to cover her guilt and shame and feelings of incompetence... (Actually, she would have put on a huge, dramatic show with lots of black clothes and weeping and she would have played the role of the grieving mother to the hilt. I must say, I'm glad she never got that opportunity.)

Another thing I understand now is why my mother keeps in touch with D___, my very abusive ex. You see, he has nothing but lies, half-truths, and bad things to say about me. This props up the straw figure that she created to be a stand-in for me. It helps to maintain her fantasy about how I'm evil incarnate.

I could never understand why she undermined me at every opportunity, taking any chance she could, even making chances, to snipe at me and rob me of any kind of self-confidence I might have had. I could never understand why she wanted me to be mentally ill, why she wanted me to be homeless. Now I get it. The more I appeared to fail, the more she could justify her straw figure and the more she could deflect her own self-loathing onto it.

When I succeeded, when I did well, when I was happy, when I showed too much intelligence, when I was competent, when I was self-confident, that was a threat to the fake image, the straw figure that she pretended was me and onto which she projected all of her rage and guilt and shame and disgust and loathing and fear....

I know this post probably sounds like I'm miserable and upset and venting all this stuff, but actually, I'm grinning and I'm just so very happy to finally understand, to finally get it. There are so many stories in my life that are exactly like the ones above, so many things that I couldn't understand, that nobody could understand, and now, finally, finally, finally, understand.

Whew. What a relief.

I get it!

I had a rather big breakthrough in understanding and the dominoes are still falling. I won't go into every realisation I've had because some are quite personal and some are fairly esoteric and of a spiritual nature, and it would take too long to put them into context. This one, however, I can easily share...

Everything that my mother said about me is what she believes about herself. Useless, worthless, good-for-nothing, unattractive, all of it. I know for sure that she believes all of that about herself, and many, many more negative things. She set up a sort of cardboard figure that she said was me and stood it in front of me, and then pinned all of her own self-loathing and frustration on it. When I would dare to speak out in ways that didn't fit her projected image, or I stepped out from behind it, she went hysterical, because, suddenly, she had to face the fact that I wasn't actually what she was claiming I was, that the problem was actually with her...

This makes me feel so much better. All of the evil things she said and did, it was all actually nothing at all to do with me. I was just the invented target for her own self-hatred. It makes me feel better not because it makes it okay (it doesn't) but because I can now TOTALLY dismiss pretty much everything she ever said to me! All of the insults, all of the untrue accusations, all of the bullsh*t, it was just... nothing. Nothing to do with me. I am none of the things she said I was, no matter how hard she wants to try to pin them on me.

Another thing I realised is that she never, never ever takes responsibility for anything. Not for her thoughts, not for her emotions, not for her actions, not for her decisions, nothing. She believes that she's incompetent, probably because at an early age she was either punished for showing any competence or she found that it's easier to be helpless (learned helplessness). She is also the most miserable person I've ever met, mostly because of her own incredibly negative outlook and hateful attitudes, for which she takes no responsibility whatsoever...

This is amazingly freeing. One person, when I asked, "Why does she hate me so much?" responded, "Because she's an a&&hole," and that's certainly true enough, but now I have a better idea why she is that, and why she hates me, and it actually lifts a huge burden. NOTHING my mother ever said about me was true! Nothing that I can remember, anyway (I cannot recall even one time that she praised me unconditionally; I'm sure she tells herself that she praised me all the time, of course).

Whew. What a relief. She doesn't actually hate me. She doesn't even know me and she never did. She hates herself, and she used me to deflect her self-loathing. She's still doing that, in fact, still blaming the cardboard cutout that she tells herself is me for every bad thing in her life, the life that she, herself, created.

They Are Who They Are

I had a major breakthrough last night. I feel like a tremendous weight has been lifted off of me. It's amazing, and I am very, very grateful.

I don't know if I can explain all of the steps I took to get here. Suffice it to say that lately a lot of stuff has been reminding me of my mother and it's been... irritating. Bit like having sand in your shoe. It's not debilitating, but it's not comfortable and you wish it wasn't there. I finally got the sand out of my shoe last night...

In a nutshell, I finally understand something about relationships with other human beings, and that is that just as "I AM WHAT I AM", so too "THEY ARE WHAT THEY ARE". I am free to choose what to do, where to go, who to be, how to live. So are they. I live with the consequences of my decisions. So do they. I cannot (nor should I try to) force them to do what I think they should do (in my parents' case, it's give a damn and a genuine apology wouldn't have gone astray, but it's way too late for that now, of course). They can't force me to conform, I can't force them to conform. Even if I think they're completely wrong, it's not my place to try to make them be anything or do anything. They have free will, just as I do.

I know for some people this will seem not very helpful, but for me it has been amazing. I was finally able to let go. I was finally able to just say, "They are who they are, and that's all." I realise now that their treatment of me wasn't even personal! Seriously, it wasn't. It wouldn't have mattered who I was or wasn't, or what I was like, or what gender I was or anything else. I was just there, in the way, while they were doing their thing and acting how they wanted to act, and I got caught in the crossfire. It's regrettable, and it did do a lot of damage to me, yes, and in a perfect world they would have known better, but, well, they are who they are, and that's all.

I've heard people say "they were doing the best they could" and I've always rejected that idea. I've always said, "Well, their best wasn't good enough!" and that's true, of course, but... Honestly, they weren't (and aren't) equipped to be responsible, thoughtful, supportive, caring parents. They really just don't know how to do that. They're both deeply dysfunctional, and.... they are who they are. They could only act in ways they knew how to act. Controlling, manipulating, screaming, hitting, throwing things, verbal abuse, physical violence, neglect, eventually totally abandoning me to poverty and homelessness (happily, I didn't end up homeless, but I was very, very close), they did these things because, well, they are who they are. They probably were doing their (misguided, ill-planned, poorly judged) best. And no, it wasn't good enough, but it's the best they could do. I don't even think most of their actions were consciously deliberate. I know that on the whole they were severely misguided and acted accordingly. They are who they are.

I cannot begin to describe the peace I feel inside. I was able to completely let go and forgive (note: I've written this before, but forgiveness does not necessarily mean I'm saying "it was all okay", nor does it mean I have any desire for reconciliation; I'm still free to say "these are not people I want to have in my life"). I was able to just accept that they are who they are, good and bad, and I am who I am, good and bad, and that's pretty much the size of it all. All the rage appears to be gone. I'm not irritated any more. I don't feel especially loving toward them, although I have some degree of pity on some counts. I just feel free. I feel like I'm no longer bound to them.

I wish I could find the words to make people understand the power of release and forgiveness. I feel like I could fly...

It really used to freak me out

When I first started to feel content, safe, and happy, it really freaked me out. Seriously. I kept thinking that something bad had to happen soon. It was totally unnatural for me to feel happy for more than about five seconds! And, really, the pattern of my life had always been that any time there was calm, it was invariably the calm before the storm...

Sometimes, I brought the storm on, myself. When you get into patterns like that, it seems normal to you. It seems like the way things are supposed to be. You get to where when things are calm for too long, you provoke some sort of drama because it's better to "get it over with" and break the tension. I did that a lot.

I'm please to say I don't do that any more, and haven't for many years. The worst I do now is get into a cranky mood sometimes (usually as the result of hunger, tiredness, or physical pain; heaven help the world when I have all three of those at the same time!).

And most of the time I really am happy, or at least content, and it's easy to boost up into happy from content. I do feel secure. I feel actually outright joyful and even blissful sometimes. The periods of joy are increasing all the time. I can sometimes go whole days now in a happy, joyful frame of mind. It's really wonderful, and it's not something I would have thought I could achieve, looking at it from the perspective of only a few years ago.

Yay. Life is good. I don't hate being on this planet. I like myself, I like my life, I love my home and my family and my cat and my realtionship with that which I perceive as G-d. Other than my moments of irritation or the odd floating up of some unresolved bitterness (which then allows it to evaporate), I am happy, almost all the time.

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