The Big Picture

I'm a detail person, and I tend to see things from a slightly varied angle than the majority does.  This is often a benefit to me in my life; I'm naturally curious about how things work, what makes the world go 'round, the how of the matter at hand.  I can often think my way into the very core of a matter easily simply because I happen to see the back doors, the missed or misplaced variables, the hidden patterns.  I've always been like this, and I think this tendency was developed at least in part by the intuitiveness that I developed in response to abuse as the scapegoat of the NFOO.  It was a survival tactic, this seeing-around-corners vision that I can have.

That's the upside.  The downside is that I can become almost obsessively mired in details.  I can spend so much time living in what's right in front of me at any given moment that I fail to notice the world at large around me.  I often have people that I know tell me that they've seen me at the grocery store or driving around and that they were puzzled that I didn't respond to their - often animated - attempts to get my attention.  I honestly don't see them, truly, especially if I'm on a mission; kids to school, grocery list to complete, rental movies to return, make it to the post office before closing.

I've been digging into my past in an effort to understand myself better lately - ha ha, like the last five years! - and I've been examining my habits and character.  I've come to a quasi-conclusion that I often fail to see The Big Picture, and I think that this is part nature and part (lack of) nurture.

I can say for sure that I have a selective vision, and that this was first developed in early childhood as a defensive measure.  I think that I had to forget and not see what was truly happening around me.  When a child is raised in the 'fucked up tsunami tidal wave of craziness' (thank you Lisa for that apt and colorful phrase!) that I was, it's impossible to discern real from false, up from down, love from pain.  So, I think, there's a mental and emotional switch somewhere in me that I developed early on.  With the flick of that switch, I can become extremely focused on and engrossed by the one thing in front of me.  It's one of the reasons that I'm good at jigsaw puzzles and stacking games and spelling and finding themes and analyzing data and finding effiencies.

In flipping that switch, though, I lose sight of everything outside of my focused area.  I become narrow and hindered by a lack of peripheral vision, so to speak.  This can, I want to stress, be a good attribute to have.  But it can also be a sort of partial blindness, particularly when I stay focused for too long on such a small spectrum.

I've been thinking about this in the context of how I filled my allotted role within the NFOO for all those years.  I was the fixer, and I fixed every single thing that was handed to me, whether I agreed with the problem or the outcome and despite the back-flips and somersaults I had to do around my own opinions or moral leanings.   "Linin' em up and knockin' em down," is the phrase DH uses to describe me when I get into my task-oriented mode, and my perceived value in the NFOO was directly related to my willingness to continue fixing problems, no matter how many NM, ENF, NSis and GCYB created.

But spending all that time fixing everything for them created a long-term narrow focus for me.  No matter how much I tried to be a superhero with a cape, there really is only a limited amount of time in a day, and all my energy was allotted to the NFOO's crap.  I missed a lot of the world outside of the Crazymaker Clan Compound.  I didn't see The Big Picture - I was too busy managing the details.

In the phase that I think of as Early NC, I continued to be hung up on details; the minor slips or problems that painfully extracting myself from a dysfunctional family system caused caught all my attention.  I spent days running around trying to fix minor issues - when was a good time to return the call from NM that I'd let go to voicemail?  should I return it?  should I have someone with me if I returned the call?  should it be on speaker phone?  should I let someone else listen to the voicemail to see if I was reading too much into it?  if so, who? and on, and on, and on.  And in doing so I failed to see The Big Picture - that she was violating a clear and firm boundary that had been clearly drawn by calling me in the first place, and that therefore meant that she was being just as disrespectful of me as she'd always been, no matter what the actual message was.

I was fortunate in that I had fantastic support that I was willing to use, so I'd take all those inane questions of minutiae to my counselor or to DH or to a friend and begin to spin on them and one of those good people would say, "Hey, Vanci.  Why would you call her back?  You asked her not to call and to set up a counseling appointment if you wanted to see her, and that is not this."  The helped me to understand that it was a strategy and a tactic on her part to prove that my boundaries didn't matter and that she was firmly in control of when and how she'd contact me regardless of my desires.  So I was able to avoid a lot of the Early NC traps because I had other people in my life that would point to the Wile E. Coyote sign on the side of the road that said in six foot tall letters: TRAP - THIS WAY.

Sometimes, even now, I can get too focused on the details.  Some part of my brain that has yet to be retrained pops through every once in a while and makes a pathetic effort to hook me back into the details; "maybe it wasn't that bad?"  or "wouldn't it be nice to have parents?" or "maybe they've changed?"  And that's when I have to remember to look at The Big Picture.

The Big Picture is this: they've had 34 years to love me and treat me well, or at least like another member of the human race.  Since I went LC followed by NC, they've had five years to suck it up, take accountability, apologize, change their continued abuse of me and stop causing pain - to me and to themselves.  They've had their entire lifetimes to choose to be willing to get well and to do what it takes to work on that path.

They haven't done any of these things.  Using past performance as an indicator of future behavior, I can surmise quite easily that they never will do the 'right' thing, that they will continue to choose the 'easy' thing, which is to blame me.

So they, like the proverbial fool who defines his insanity by continuing to do what he's always done while expecting a different outcome than he's always gotten, will stay the same.  And I, as a truth teller and a seeker of growth will continue to work to better myself and to grow into as good a person as I can possibly be.  I understand more and more as I age and grow that I have control over one thing in this world and one thing only: Me.

So The Big Picture is this, too:  I'm getting better.  My landscape is vibrant and crowded with good people and good things and good feelings and good thoughts.  I don't know what their Big Picture looks like, but they sure as hell have no place in mine.

Love,
Vanci