The Only Way Out is Through the Center

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." On Pain - Kahlil Gibran

It's been just over six years since what I think of as Vanci's Last Stand.  You can read about that here, if you'd like.  I've been thinking that I should do a post to commemorate the passage of another year of NC, but the reality is that the only tangible difference in my feelings about the NFOO now as compared to a year ago is that I have a far greater level of indifference to their existence than I've ever had before.  In regard to my real (and quite wonderful) every day life, I've written about it all year long, and can only say that my overall feeling about the last year is that I am one lucky and grateful lady.

Much of my peace is attributable to the fact that I've got one more year of distance from the Crazymaker Clan under my belt, and that is a good thing, no, it's a great thing.  Maybe even in the All Time Top Five List of Best Things.  There's really not much to say beyond that.

But I've been thinking back to those crazy and painful times of six years ago, and I've been trying to ask and answer of myself some of the questions that I hear newly distanced, LC'd and NC'd peeps asking about how to make it through those rough and tumble, earth shaking, business end of the barrel times.  I've been trying to do what I do best, which is basically to boil a complex issue down into a simplified reduction, examine the facts that hold true and then develop a formula.  It's my process, and one that's served me well, both when I lived every day in survival mode and when I was starting to heal and now that I'm...well, I think the only way to describe where I am now is to say that I am content.

I spend very little time these days thinking about the members of the Clan, if I spend any at all.  I carry my scars and they are certainly reminders of all the negative feelings and horrible memories and terrors that I've survived, sure.  But they are also reminders of the fact that I broke those chains and won't be passing the bad juju down the line.  I live every day in the midst of so many reminders of the good, calm, loving, helpful, graceful, classy, joyful relationships and people and life that I have now, and if I charted a graph that showed my happiness in relation to the length of time I have NC, well, I'm sure that the trend would look like a dot-com stock's value in the early nineties.  Up, up and away.

I remember, though, what it felt like in Early No Contact.  It felt so awful, so wrong to be separated from my 'family.'  I was so tortured, so guilty for creating that heretofore unknown silence, for breaking something that I knew was wrong but that I'd been taught my whole life to accept as right.  I would have done almost anything to make things better, different, even the way that they used to be.  If you've read this blog at all, you'll know that every single person in my family of origin was abusive toward me in some degree.  The things that I've written about here - which are the tip of the iceberg, dearies, just a smidge of the reality of the abuse that I was dealt by the fuckers - are so horrific that they could be the plot-lines of a serial killer-hunting drama on television.  They're the types of things that people see or read about and think, "Surely this can't really happen in the real world."  Horror, pure and simple.

But in Early NC, I was still loathe to see it for what it was, to see them for the monsters that they really are.  I still held out hope that I could somehow, some way, if I was good enough or smart enough or worked hard enough or expressed myself more clearly or drew different boundaries or drank less or changed the way that I reacted or asked different questions, that I could find a way to repair my relationship with the Clan.  I didn't want to even contemplate NC forever in the early days; it would have been too much for my fragile world to take.  I felt like I would just shatter like a woman made of glass.  Thin glass.  Every.  Single.  Day.

I think of that now and I'd like to deny it.  I'd like to say that woke up one day and I was strong, that I was instantly okay, that I always knew what to do or how to act or react, but the truth is that it was a process of "the breaking of the shell of my understanding."  There's truth in the idea that a thing, once known, cannot be unknown.  As soon as I allowed myself to SEE the truth behind the false perceptions of the NFOO, I couldn't UNSEE that truth.  I didn't really want to accept it, but I couldn't unlearn it, I couldn't unknow and I couldn't avoid finding a way to deal with it.  Living every day with the pain of this process of knowing wasn't an option, so I had to find a way to move forward.

So I had to go through it.

Some days I put my head down and I charged through it angry.  I think of bulls in a run when I think of those days: incited to a near murderous anger and then unleashed in a narrow corridor to chase down a crowd of tormentors.  Some days I was like that, and those were the good days.

Most days I was lost, sad, unfocused and seriously fucking depressed.  In retrospect, it's all fine and good to say that I don't miss them in my life, and it's true beyond true that these days it's a ludicrous concept to me to even think about missing them.  I miss them these days about as much as I'd miss a hot poker to the eye.  But then, Early NC, I missed them like crazy. They had been my constants, you see?  No matter how fucked up they were, no matter how abusive they were, no matter how much of my life, my family of choice, my very soul I'd had to sacrifice to the altar of the Crazymaker Clan, they had been MY CLAN.  And then they weren't anymore, and that was a loss.

Loss is loss, and all loss leaves a void.  It hurt to cut off contact with them, it hurt like hell.

But, there's a reason that we recovering alkies talk about working a program and staying sober One Day at a Time and it's this: we understand that the only way to get the time to stack up is to do one of them at a time, moment to moment.  And that's what got me through the loss; doing just one more day upon one more day.

Eventually, I promise, the days got easier to do.  And that's when I decided to look into it further, to go beyond just accepting it and to start to try to figure out what the hell it really was, what it had really been in the first place and how it had changed.

Once I started to dig into core issues, I began to see a clearer picture of what, exactly, it was that I had lost.  The space and time that I created by just staying away and putting one day on top of another wasn't my plan, no, but it was instrumental in getting me clear enough from the leashes and muzzles of the NFOO to help me to see them (and to see me,) in the cold, clear light of reality.

That's when it started to get better.  That's when the FOG began to lift for me.  That's when I began to allow my defenses - so carefully constructed to block out a lifetime of abuse - to work for me instead of against me.  That's when I began to look at myself and really see who I was, to understand that I was broken because they'd broken me, but also that I was not beyond repair.

And that's when I began to understand that the loss that I felt, the grief that I was living with every day, was about my mourning the loss of something that never really existed in the first place.  And that's when I started to get better.

I've been NC long enough now to have experienced several distinct validations of the correctness of my choices to get away from the NFOO and to stay away.  I broke the shell of my understanding long enough ago that the pain that I felt initially and residually is largely non-existent now.  Bleeding wounds became scabs and then turned into scars, which serve to remind me that I survived and that I don't want to go back, so I won't.

I had to break that shell and go through the pain of it in order to form a new understanding, one that is without manipulation or lies.

So I guess that I will let this stand as my celebration of six years: the trend in my happiness and that of my family of choice has never, not once, faltered from us getting better the farther and the longer we stay away from the Crazymakers.

So breaking that shell and going through that pain has only ever been worth it.

Love,
Vanci