Payouts

I was raised in a torture chamber - and I mean that in both the literal and metaphorical senses, depending on the particular day of my childhood, early adolescence and young adulthood that I'm discussing.  Like the senator's daughter at the other end of Buffalo Bill's basket full of lotion, I shouldn't have been able to get out of the carefully crafted pit my Nparents (and later on, their minions in NSis, GCYB and others) held me prisoner in.

But I did get out.  Sometimes I had help; ropes to safety lowered by people who were willing to save me by helping me to save myself.  Sometimes I didn't have any help at all, sometimes I was all alone in the darkness, and then I had to fight to stay alive, to stay sane, to stay focused on that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.  I've discovered that a large part of healing has to do with finding the will to keep putting one foot in front of the other with an idea of that light as a goal.  I never stopped trying, and if I can credit myself with any part of my escape, it is that; I never stopped trying to find the way out.

I also got lucky, though, and to forget to acknowledge that feels criminal.

A lot of us don't get out, a lot of us don't make it.  I had many aborted and failed attempts at freedom before I found myself in the perfect storm of will, thought and circumstance that helped to propel me out of the hole.  I think that it's a chicken-or-the-egg question to wonder if I created all those ingredients or if I was simply blessed with their presence at the right time and the the right place, and it's one that I don't spend a lot of time looking for an answer to as the end result is the same; I'm out.  Well and truly out.

So I come here to write about that; what it was like and how it changed and how it is now.  I am as open as I can be in the real world and here about these things, but there are certain facts of my life that don't fit well into polite conversation while waiting in line at the grocery store or bank, that I don't drop casually into conversation at my daughters' sporting events or choir concerts.  I will talk about it if it's called for, but it rarely is.  My survival of the NFOO sadists and abusers is the focus of my conversation here, though, and I talk about the path of that survival a lot here.

So, tonight, a question that I don't often address; was it worth it?
All that struggle, all that pain of infinite change and chain-breaking, all the discomfort of prying open sealed closet doors and dragging moldy skeletons out into the light - is the life that I have now, in comparison to the life that I had before, worth all of that work?  I mean, I talk so much about what I've lost, what I no longer have, what I never had in the first place and what I may never have again.  What about the life that I have now; was it worth it?

Well, here's what I got out of it, ladies and gentlemen, here's an abbreviated list of the payouts.

At the point that I escaped from the NFOO, I had an almost failing marriage.  DH and I, we were okay in the sense that we both recognized that the DD's needed stability and we could provide that.  We didn't want to disrupt their lives any more than they already had been, so we had a mutual and unspoken agreement that we'd just ride this shitheap of a relationship out.  As I'm sure most ACoN's know, it's not easy to have a relationship of any kind when you spend every minute of every day lying to yourself in one way or another.

Now, though, DH and I are fantastic.  I'm realler than real, and he digs the real me.  I can see who he really is and I genuinely like the guy.  We are, ahem, in love.  More in love than we ever have been and we love spending time together; we have an awesome time just being in each other's company.  We are strong together and we both take time to seek understanding and joy in our relationship.  We're not perfect, but we merrily acknowledge our flaws and choose the ways in which we'll grow together.  My marriage is one of the highlights of my days, and that's been going on for several of the (NC) years.

My relationship with my DD's was pretty fragile at the end of contact with the NFOO.  The Girls (as they are affectionately known in our household) had been hurt by the N's, too, particularly in the sense that all the N's spent a healthy dose of energy undercutting the Girls' relationships with their mom and dad (DH and me.)   We're talking about giving them secret diaries to communicate behind my back with, leading them with questions about what they would do if their mom ever forbade contact, telling them stories about how fucked up I was as a teenager and planting the seeds to imply that they couldn't trust me.  Just your basic Narc arsenal stuff.

Now, though, the relationship between the Girls and me is good.  They're teenagers, so there's always something going on in their hormone fueled and developing brains and actions, but our relationship is normal by basic mother-teenaged daughter standards and dynamics.  I set boundaries - they test them.  We discuss.  They sometimes step out of those boundaries, and depending on the type of boundary it is, we either discuss expanding the boundaries (curfews) or we talk about the reason that their misstep just made the boundary tighter (not being where they are supposed to be or keeping in contact about their location.)  Either way, no matter what, love is never a card that gets thrown on the table.  Their self-worth isn't up for grabs.  They're learning how to be responsible for themselves, and I'm learning how to let them.  Pretty freekin' normal, I think.

When I escaped from the NFOO, one of my primary fears was the loss of relationships that I felt that I couldn't be without: mother, father, sister, brother, uncle.  I couldn't imagine a world in which I didn't have these family ties.  It felt scary to even contemplate their loss; like walking a tight rope with no safety wires or nets.

I did lose these relationships, but the gift of these losses was two-fold; first, I realized in that temporary void of those ties that the relationships I'd had in those categories were painful relationships that I didn't want to repeat.  Second, I realized that I could form a better version of these types of relationships with people who didn't share even a portion of my genetic code.  I have several close sister-like, brother-like and even mother-and-father-like relationships now with members of my family of choice; people that define these family roles as they should be, by their loving actions.  I reciprocate, too.

Even on the material front, I had suffered so many losses at the hands of the NFOO's training.  GCYB still, to this day, has not repaid a single red cent of the several thousand dollars that DH and I loaned him to start his business.  That was seven years ago and the business (from what I can tell) is now defunct.  We've long since paid off the loan that we took out for those funds for him, though, and without the additional financial burdens inherent in my Scapegoat role (paying NSis to 'watch' my children when she chose not to work, paying for every meal out ever eaten with them, paying for every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, paying for all the emergency needs that they always seemed to have, etc,) DH and I will be completely debt free (apart from mortgages) in the next month or so.

My drinking is my responsibility and I accept that.  In the struggle to get free, though, toward the end, my drinking escalated severely and any semblance of normal drinking melted utterly into my alcoholic spiral toward devastation.  My health, sanity and overall well-being were sincerely compromised.  I am only sober today because of NC with the NFOO.  They NEVER would have allowed my sobriety if they were still in the picture, and would have spent loads of time and energy sabotaging my sobriety if they'd been around.  Sober Vanci is a clear-thinking Vanci after all, and that's the LAST thing the Narcs want from their previously well-trained Scapegoat.

Due to my sobriety and the work that I needed to do on myself - which was made so incredibly apparent by the decision to go NC - I was able to land in a job/career that suits me to a T, in which I am appreciated, adequately compensated and valued.  This would not have happened when I was part of the NFOO; too much of my energy was being vamped away on a daily basis for me to pay attention to my job.

So, a quick wrap up list of the things in my life that are awesome without the NFOO in my life (that otherwise would not be so:)

My awesome marriage.
My fantastic relationship with my daughters.
My incredible group of supportive friends and FOC.
My fiscal well-being.
My ability to stay sober.
My fitting career and pleasure in my job.

Somehow, I think I got the best of the deal.

Love,
Vanci