Do you want to know why you are so afraid to acknowledge the truth?

To the adult child of the psychopath/narcissist: Do you want to know why you are so afraid to acknowledge the truth about your Mom or Dad or both? About maybe even your siblings if they are disordered too? Because you know they don’t love you. This truth is the most devastating of all. Acknowledging this truth is the most painful experience you will ever live through

(quote from here)

Yes.  Yes it was.  Yes it is.

And yet… I am living through it.  In fact there is a sense of relief, of knowing that yes, my instincts and my intuition and the things I have learned from being around normal, loving people were all correct, absolutely on target.  That my desire to seek out health, instead of abuse, is what has led me down this path of learning and understanding, instead of excusing and blaming.  That going no contact with my siblings was the right thing to do in pursuit of that health, and in the rejection of that abuse.

I [don’t] exist as a human being to them, worthy of love and respect.

Yes, it sucks, but the only alternative they are willing to make available sucks worse.

The Other Side of the Story

There is a recent article by an obviously narcissist mother about “boo hoo, my kids have cut me off and I JUST DON’T KNOW WHY!!”

The rebuttals on the article itself, and here, and here, are so incredibly validating to read.

She did write one thing that I can agree with 100%:

“When something, or more specifically, someone, no longer supports the view you have of yourself — get rid of them!”

I have at least one sibling who has opined, in writing, that my personal choices in life are “big problems” — one example is choosing not to have kids, when I have never, ever, had maternal leanings, and have known that since childhood.

Perhaps he thinks I’d be better off (no wait, strike that, it has nothing to do with his concern over my welfare)
Perhaps he thinks I ought to have made myself miserable, and then dumped that misery on my children. At least then I’d be in the same boat as him.

… if you are an unhappy, unfulfilled person yourself, you are not going to want other people to be happier than you are. The Dalai Lama teaches us that.

No, in contrast, I learned from our experience. My mother was distant, cold, and said awful things to my face — things that make people with normal mothers physically flinch.

But yes, she too was right about one thing: she once told me that I didn’t want to have kids because, “You had your own mother taken away from you.” She meant taken away by the divorce, and thus it was dad’s fault — I know differently.

Reading so many comments, seeing so many other stories that have things in common with mine — so much damage done by so many broken people.  So sad.

A couple of things in the comments on these pages really spoke to me:

Excellent remedies may be made from poisons, but it is not poison upon which we live. ~~ Voltaire

My mother’s mantra has always been, “If I was such an awful parent, why are you and your brother such happy, successful adults?”

The answer: “Because of Dad.”

Thank you, Dad.

Scapegoat Complex

Found a book that I need to read:  Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)

From the reviews:

As long as women especially are scapegoated within dysfunctional families and collective circles, the universal insights and examples from Jungian Perera’s own practice will never go out of style.

I had no idea there was so much fall-out to being ‘a family scapegoat’ as i would not look at how it affected my life, and have always pushed it under the rug as i was not important enough to matter. Another guilty scapegoat trait, not important enough to face the reality of what was done to me and to actually matter enough to heal and reach for a better life. Now i see, by reading this, the myriad ways this complex affects a person, and i see myself on every page. [Hell, I am seeing myself in the reviews.]

I picked this book up because I needed to do some research on archetypes that come out of narcissistic families. Wow, did I find the right book for that. It was written in 1986, but rings true now as much as it did then. It is painfully accurate on the psychological makeup of those who suffer from being scapegoated.

We scapegoats can recount the most shocking details of our lives that horrify others while not being emotionally connected to our tales and then being surprised that others are horrified when we speak our stories… Those messengers of the shoulds and musts can still make me uncomfortable at times, awakening old feelings of not belonging and yearnings to belong and be normal like everybody else… seeing the complexity of being a scapegoat and that one does not have to be crushed by the burden we have carried.

The practice of Scapegoating, or sacrificing a being as a symbol of casting out sin, has not been left behind. Rather it has evolved along with our species into a more sophisticated, less conspicuous, perhaps far more dangerous practice. Rather than carrying out acknowledged rituals among and for the public, we have begun subconsciously attaching our shadows to those we then hold far from us, thus cleansing ourselves of the sin. We may worship different gods these days, and in some different ways, but the act of ridding is still alive and still hurts many of those among us... At the heart of the solution, as with all therapy, is understanding. Of course with scapegoating, this solution is particularly challenging, and important, because the entire point of scapegoating is the refusal to understand – to in a way, attach the painful side of truth to a person or being other than oneself rather than to try to understand the truth at all.

There are several ways of treating anomalies. Negatively we can ignore, just not perceive, or perceiving we can condemn. Positively we can deliberately confront the anomaly and try to create a new pattern of reality in which it has a place.

Get the Message

But maybe you see that it’s not [different] people who are the sick ones who have a problem. We are the sick ones who torment [different] people every day of their lives. The problem wasn’t inside Leelah Alcorn any more than, to reference Chris Rock, the problem with racism is in black communities or the problem with the Turner marriage was in Tina…

…They’re not the ones who need a message sent to them. They don’t need to hear the debate over how bad [the situation is]. They are already infinitely more qualified to have that debate than we are. They already know how bad it is.

We, on the other hand, are the ones who are making it bad, and the ones with the power to change that. We are the ones the message needs to be sent to.

The above is from an article on the tragic death of Leelah Alcorn.  I adapted it to a broader perspective because it resonated with me, and I think it’s a very powerful message that crosses over to all kinds of intolerant behavior and judgmental attitudes.

And it addresses the smug self-justification of those behaviors and attitudes — the ones that are so sick, so screwed-up, by religion or by a lifetime of narcissistic training, that they cause people to get so discouraged and depressed that they kill themselves.

Or, if they have the option — and the smarts and the guts — they may instead choose to cut out of their lives all the judgmental, intolerant, bullshit people who treat them like so much garbage, and the other ones who stand idly by and let them do it.

There’s one more quote from the story that applies to those who think that they know better, that they have more of a right to speak than another has to be heard.  Those who refuse to admit that they could have had any part in creating the problems.  Those who just HAVE to be right, at the expense of another person’s right to their own life, or their own family.

Well, they can take their “ethics,” and they can go fuck themselves.

Widow’s Walk

 
by Suzanne Vega

Obviously, this song was written about a different kind of relationship, but still there are similarities.
Consider me a widow, boys
and I will tell you why.
It’s not the man, but it’s the marriage
that was drowned.
So I walk the walk
and wait with watchful eye out to the sky,
Looking for a kind of vessel
I have never found.

Though I saw it splinter
I keep looking out to sea,
Like a dog with little sense,
I keep returning,
To the very area where
I did see the thing go down
as if there’s something at the site
I should be learning.

That line is the horizon.
We watch the wind and set the sail,
but save ourselves when all omens
point to fail.

If I tell the truth
then I will have to tell you this
Though I grieve (and I believe I feel it truly)
But I knew that ship was empty
by the time it hit the rocks,
we could not hold on
when fate became unruly.

Not My Choice

I can’t get over how good this blog is that I just found.  Here’s some excerpts from another winner.

My goal was never to go ‘no contact’. ‘No contact’ was a result of the decisions that “THEY” made.

I was asking for something that I needed. I was asking to be treated with equal value and equal respect. My motive was for having a better relationship based on the true definition of love, which values equally ALL parties in the relationship and the response that I got was “NO”.

This isn’t my fault. I tried and I wanted our relationship to be one rooted in love and mutuality. My motive is based in love. Their motives are based in the misuse of their power for the purpose of control.

Therefore, I don’t feel guilty; I have nothing to feel guilty about…

When a person is not heard or given the right to have a voice or if a person is consistently devalued or disrespected, then the relationship (or contact itself) is conditional. When I looked at who was the one being ‘conditional’~ when I looked at who actually held the cards and who actually makes the rules and who set those rules in place, I saw the truth about the conditions on the relationship. These are all things that I had to take a look at when I realized why I was so tired in the first place and how I realized that ‘no contact’ was more of a result of the dysfunction and not a choice I made.
And today I have realized that there is a difference between me becoming a happier, healthier person, and me having relationships with my siblings and their spouses.  They are not the same thing.  One does not require the other.
Maybe they are, in fact, mutually exclusive.  Maybe the one has caused the lack of the other.  But I can be happy and have a good life without having to repair those bonds.  Partly because it is not really me who has broken those bonds; partly because those bonds were not very strong or loving, and so they weren’t contributing much to my happiness anyway.  But mostly because not having those bonds doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me.
Yes, it sucks to have to say, “I have five siblings but they don’t speak to me and I don’t speak to them.”  Yes, it sucks not to be invited to family events.  But it doesn’t mean I’m the one who is “bad” or wrong.  It doesn’t mean that I can’t also say, “because my mother was mentally ill and narcissistic and she poisoned all my older siblings, but I was saved by my dad.”
I’ve pretty much accepted that there’s nothing I can do to fix things – the next steps are all in other people’s hands — but I ALSO don’t have to sit around and wait for them to take action in order for me to move on from this.  (And not in the “you just need to get over it” bullshit sense of “moving on” that they want to see.)
Which is a good thing that I don’t need them to do anything, because they obviously won’t.  But hey, that’s OK for the purposes of healing and moving on, because I don’t need the one to do the other.

Gifts

Wow.  Susan has always been a shitty gift-giver.  Joe used to be superb at choosing presents, but then he got married and Susan took over and that was the end of that.

Quoted excerpt is from here.

My mother didn’t give gifts to me in the same way she wanted to receive them for herself. Once again this is an example of how controlling and manipulative people live by two different sets of rules.  The rules that apply to her, and the rules that apply to others…
If my gifts to her defined my love for her and her worth in my eyes then I thought it would stand to reason that the same was true for her when she gave a gift to me.When it came to me and the gifts that my mother would choose for me, the gifts always seemed practical or convenient.  She hated those kinds of gifts for herself, but she bought them for me.
It seems odd to me that she would buy me gifts that would have disappointed her; gifts that would have “defined her” as less than worthy of a major splurge gift.If my gifts to my mother defined or proved my love for her and made a statement TO her about HER worth in my eyes then it would stand to reason that the same was true for her when she gave a gift to me.
Today I realize that her gifts to me were in fact another way of keeping me defined as less valuable than she was.  Upon closer examination, if my gifts defined my love for her and her worth in my eyes, than judging by the gifts she chose for me, it would stand to reason the same belief actually WAS true for her.
In truth, she was giving me gifts according to her own belief system. She believed that I was not worthy of thought and consideration in the way that I had to prove she was worthy of thought and consideration.Her double standard (in her view) wasn’t odd at all. It was actually a truth leak about the way she regarded me as “less” than herself.

So the best story I can tell about Susan’s gift-giving was the year I was getting married.  I had gone to their house to have dinner, by myself, which probably means my husband (at that time, my husband-to-be) was traveling.

After dinner, I was talking about wedding plans and so on.  Now, we got married in October, so presumably this has to have been at least September, but probably even earlier in the year.

At one point Susan looks at Joe and says, “Should I ask her?”  Joe says, “No, she’s got enough other stuff on her mind.”  Susan replies, “I’ll ask her.”

Susan then explains to me that she has gotten my name for the annual gift exchange, and wants to know if I would like one of these? And she shows me a vest she has sewn — you know the type.  It is made out of tapestry fabric and has some kind of Santa Claus holiday print on it and it is very folksy and it is just obviously absolutely not my style at all.

So what do you say to that?  “Geez, Susan, what on earth would make you think I’d ever wear a thing like that?”

Of course not.  You’re a guest in their home, you’ve just been fed a nice meal, you say, “Well, that’s very nice.”

I even wore the damned thing a couple of times, and I think when someone complimented me on it I gave it to them.

It was the first time I realized that Susan was manipulative.  The words I came up with to describe it were, “She asks questions in such a way as to get the answer that she wants.”

Or, as in the first part of the story — with my brother, who gave an answer she didn’t want to hear — she just ignores it.

Get Over It

Being told to “just get over it” is devaluing. It implies that I am making a mistake in processing an event. It indicates that something is wrong with ME because I am still confused about something that has not been resolved.  The statement is emotionally abusive.  And even when it is used in a positive context…there is a negative left over from all the abuse in the past.

WHY is it wrong to need to have something understood or resolved in the first place?

And of course the correct answer is, it’s not.  But some people just can’t deal with the fact that I’m not actually in the wrong here.

Furthermore, people who say stuff like this don’t have any solutions; they don’t ever offer suggestions on HOW to get over it or deal with it, because they don’t know how either.  They only offer devaluing and thoughtless instructions… I was not entitled to realize that I had been wronged. I was always the one who was wrong no matter what the situation was.

Until I learned that I do have rights, that I am as equally valuable as everyone else and that I AM ALLOWED to and NEED TO feel the pain of the past and get angry about it SO THAT I COULD “get over it” (which was how I did get over it)…

Well, maybe I’m on the right track after all.

I’m Almost With You

(It’s a little rough, but I prefer this live version to the studio one.  The studio version is clean, produced, and loses the raw feeling.  Also, this solo is awesome.  The acoustic version is also good, and better than the studio version for some of the same reasons.)

See the chains which bind the men
Can you taste their lonely arrogance
It’s always too late and your face is so cold
They struggled for this opulence

See the suns which blind the men
Burnt away so long before our time
Now their warmth is forgotten and gone
Pretty maid’s not far behind

Who you trying to get in touch with
Who you trying to get in touch with
Who you trying to get in touch with

I’m almost with you
I can sense it wait for me
I’m almost with you
Is this the taste of victory?
I’m almost with you

See the dust which fills your sleep
Does it always feel this chill near the end
I never dreamed we’d meet here once more
This life reserved for a friend

Who you trying to get in touch with
Who you trying to get in touch with
Who you trying to get in touch with

I’m almost with you
I can sense it wait for me
I’m almost with you
Is this the taste of victory
I’m almost with you

Last Call

Today I realized in a fairly clear way just why this whole thing with my family has had such a profound effect on me.

And basically, it is the fact that this is it.  Last call.  The end.  There really is no hope for anything else.  I know that sounds incredibly obvious and stupid.  I’ve been saying it over and over.  But today, it kind of hit me in a very solid way.  I guess we’d probably have to call that “internalizing”.

There are beliefs that we hold very deeply, and I think one of mine has always been that someday, somehow, I’d find “the key” — there would be something I could do or something that would change, to finally get me “in the club”.  Of course, for most people, simply being born gets them membership in that family club.  For me, I have always known I wasn’t in it.  I’ve always been on the outside looking in, at my older siblings’ relatively close relationships with each other, and waiting and hoping for the day when I’d get to have those too.

I think for a long, long time I put it down to being the youngest.  They weren’t that interested in me because I was a teenager, and they were 30 or close to it.  Because I was in college, and they were long past it.  Certainly my sister claims that age is a big factor in our distance.  Mind you, she manages to have a close relationship with my youngest brother, and he is only 3 years older than me, but I guess those 3 years are just a teensy bit too much of a gap to bridge.  14 years, no problem.  17 years, HUGE PROBLEM.

In the letter that I wrote to my siblings in 2013, after a year of therapy, I spelled out this belief towards the end.

At rock bottom, I think it has been a mistake to pretend to include me as part of a family that I do not think I have ever really been considered a part of. [My husband] and I are simply not in the club, and I think I never have been, other than to be expected to attend certain family events to complete the set. This distance goes back decades, far beyond our parents’ deaths and The Susan Incident. I can remember in my twenties and thirties, every single year I made resolutions about making regular phone calls and writing more letters, to try to bridge the gap that has simply always been there. The ties we have are not of affection, just genealogy. It was obvious to [my husband] from the first reunions that I am treated oddly, especially by my sister. [She] acts as though the family ends with [brother #4] and treats him as the baby of the family. No one calls or emails us just to say “hi” and see how we are doing. I don’t expect anyone will ever get on a plane for one of my milestone birthdays, as I have done several times for others. In the thirteen years we have lived here, we have had three visits from my family. And two of those were from [brother #2 and his wife], who had additional reasons to make those trips besides seeing us.

But I clung to that belief that if I could just find the right something to change, then finally I would be accepted and loved.  Maybe the key was that I needed to be OLDER.  Maybe when we were all adults, at the first reunion, in 2006, when I was 37 and my sister was 54 — maybe THEN I could be in the club?  This HAS to be it!  And of course nothing ever worked before, because it wouldn’t happen until I was old enough!

Nope.

I hoped that the reunions were going to provide the opportunity for me to finally be an accepted part of this family. I should have known better at the very first one, when I reached out to Joe and Susan beforehand, sending more than one email, with the suggestion that we do the meal planning together, and was ignored. We showed up, only to find that Susan had planned the meals on her own, and deliberately excluded me from my own idea. That wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t nice. That’s not my idea of a family. Last year I accidentally found out, from [my sister’s] Xmas card letter, that we were deliberately not invited to another get-together, i.e. [my nephew’s] ‘ graduation. That is not my idea of a family either. I will echo [my sister’s] sentiment that it is too bad that things are the way they are. I wish they were different, but try as I have done, they are not. If no one else makes an effort, this is how things will stay. I think for the most part that you all are pretty happy with the status quo: so be it. I am happier not being ignored or yelled at or simply feeling like a second class citizen.

This time, I have finally learned something that at least approximates the truth.  I have realized what the real problem is, or at least where it lies, and that it is not in my power to do anything about it.

So much for that belief.

The other thing I realized, with the force of a slap, came in the form of self-talk, in which I said to myself, “Well, they’ve never done a single thing you’ve asked them to do before, so why would you think this would be any different?”

This is another belief, or maybe an expectation, that has been so deeply established that to me it is just a truism.

I can remember at the second or third reunion, when I still believed I had a chance at being in the club, I brought up the fact that it was going to be my 40th birthday in a year or two, and solicited ideas for what we could do as a family to celebrate it.

Not one person showed any enthusiasm about that idea, at all.  The only person who even engaged in the conversation was my brother-in-law (who of course does not have all the family baggage about me that everyone else has).  And of course, my first milestone birthday passed with little or no notice.  I have different, more realistic expectations for the next one.

The conversation that they recorded “at my request” when I was trying to learn more about my earliest years — before I asked them to do it, I talked to my husband about it.  I put out the idea that I should make it sound as though the assignment came from someone else, perhaps a therapist.  My husband asked why I would do that, and I said, “Because if they think it’s coming from me they’ll never do it.”

He thought about that for a few seconds and then he simply said, “You’re right.”

So, I wrote them all an email that made it sound as though I had a therapist telling me to ask them to do this, and as though I was trying to hide that fact.  And guess what — they actually did what I asked.  I had to trick them into doing it, but they did.  That recorded conversation was a gold mine of information, too.

But I had to lie to achieve it.  I had to make it look like I was not the one asking.

So, what made me think that this time would be any different?  What made me think that explaining, spelling it all out, asking for justice, asking even just to be heard, was going to work?  I guess I was just hopeful that since we’re all adults now, that things would change.

I’ve learned better in the past couple of years.  I’ve learned that the problem isn’t me.  I’ve learned that patterns of dysfunctional behavior don’t change.  And I’ve learned from many sources that self-preservation, going no-contact, is the only solution.

We want closure which is never going to come in a way that we want but we can find closure by No Contact. We want to be heard, want them to know the pain they’ve caused but they are never going to listen and if they do, they don’t hear the words. What we often miss is the beauty of “No Contact.” You are finally saying No More. It is your voice without the words but they hear it loud and clear as if you screamed from the top of your lungs – “Go to the Devil.” No Contact is your pure and sweet rejection. It is empowering. It is your last word. It is your closure. It is one of the most hurtful narcissistic injuries you could inflict. They have finally come to understand you know just who and what they are. They know the tricks do not work anymore. They know you are no longer prey or a pawn in their game. It is your last word.

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago.  In it, I was carrying around a wooden box, not heavy in itself as such but I could tell the contents were very heavy.  And it seemed like I’d been carrying it for a long time.  I finally put it down, and somewhere in there was the suggestion that I was putting it down for the very last time, and that I was challenging, daring my sister to PICK IT UP.

It’s not my box any longer.  For a long time I was made to think it was mine, but it isn’t.  It belongs to my sister.  Maybe someday she’ll open it and figure out how much shit is inside.  But I’m not holding my breath.