I'm a pattern seeker. I always have been. My brain has always been wired for puzzles, and they've consequently always been fun and relatively easy for me. My upbringing fine-tuned my ability to pick up clues to patterns as well, creating that intuitive sense that all survivors of abuse and trauma seem to develop on some level, just in order to see the crazy train bearing down the tracks at us. Seeing patterns intuitively is partly based in the ability to anticipate, I think, which is also grounded in sensitive observation skills.
In a childhood world where a slammed door means something far, far greater (and often more ominous,) than a gusting wind, we learn to pick up supersonic behavioral clues and subtle hints about the direction of the atmosphere. I see how this has translated into my adult life; I'm always on the hunt for answers, usually before a question has even been posed. In moderation, this serves me well, as I can often see a pattern - whether of data or behavior - forming long before my peers or colleagues see it.
Lately, I've noticed a pattern in the conversations that I'm having with the people around me - from my daughters to my bosses, from newcomers to my alcoholism recovery support groups to the distant coworker that I recently sat next to on the plane, from friends of friends to co-workers grabbing a coffee in the break room. Everyone's asking me this on some level,
"What's the secret to overcoming trauma?"
Dalai Lama, Yoda-type I ain't.
But I know a little something about how to move on from pain.
So here it is, straight from me to you, the best trick I know to overcome trauma...
It takes ACTION.
Unfortunately, the first action that anyone has to take in order to overcome trauma, I believe, is to face the trauma. I'm not a big fan of pop-psych ways to do this. I believe that I would bodily harm anyone who tried to wrap me in a warm and fuzzy blanket to simulate the womb. I don't think that setting the stage to re-live a trauma is necessary, but it does have to be remembered, acknowledged, brought forth into the light.
It's ugly, it's painful, it's shameful, it's embarrassing and it goes against our very natures, but I believe that this action of exposure has to happen. How, after all, can one overcome something that is fuzzy around the edges? How can I overcome fear if I'm not entirely sure what it is that I'm afraid of.
I used to think that I was afraid of the dark.
It was a vague, faceless, anonymous fear.
I looked at it and I thought about it and I wrote down specifics and I touched it and I danced with it and I examined it and analyzed it.
Guess what? I'm not afraid of the dark.
I'm afraid of the abuse that happened to me in the dark.
Ahhhhh...
What's the antidote to that fear? Well, there's a whole list of ways that I can keep myself safe from that very specific fear, starting (and often ending too,) with this: don't allow the people who abused me in the dark into my life, house or head. And if that doesn't work? Turn on a night-light, know my surroundings and the people in it, have a plan (turning on the light in the room I'm entering before I turn off the light in the room I just left,) and a contingency plan (flashlight on the nightstand,) and I could go on and on and on.
I can take action to at best banish, at worst delay that fear. Either way, I'm progressing - taking action.
I used to spend a lot of time reading self-help books. Some of them were pretty good, especially the ones that made me stop my ingrained thought cycle and attempt to re-think it. I can't honestly say that I learned anything I didn't already know, but the process of attempting to seek self-improvement DID get me out of my own thinking long enough to look at myself and my behavior from a different angle. And that is an action.
Maybe I don't know how to act or react. Maybe my training as an abused child and as a scapegoat prevented me from learning how to handle myself, sure. Survivors of trauma often don't know how they should move on, we just know that we don't want the pain that we've already had anymore. But I always have a baseline, and that ground zero is this: I know definitively how NOT to act. I know what causes pain to others and to myself, so I know what I don't want.
Holding on to that negative has been a crux of action that I've returned to over and over again; "Well, I won't do that," has been the jumping off point for me so many times of trying... well, anything BUT that. I've gone full pendulum swing to the opposite ends of the earth before in an attempt to get my emotional bearings in the world post-abuser, and I've tried everything on the spectrum in between. Sometimes it's worked and sometimes not, but I've learned more and more about how to act and react appropriately (and non-abusively,) every single time. So that, too, has been action.
So I've taken the actions to identify the trauma, I've taken the action to rethink the trauma and how it affects my life today, and I've taken the action to determine how I will avoid the trauma in the future and how I will act differently. Doing this over and over and over again has helped me to face, overcome and move on from trauma.
Lastly, and this is my favorite action, I make it a point to attempt to do something good every single day. I find at least one moment each and every day in which I can take some action that pleases me, or that I can enjoy, or that makes me smile or laugh - often this involves kindness and humor to another living soul. This is an annuity based action. I get a moment of pleasure today, AND I've just set myself up for success down the road. Six months from now, when I have that moment of relived trauma that pops up out of nowhere and attempts to side-swipe me, I will also have a well of good moments to draw from to counterbalance that painful memory. I create good future memories every day partly so that I will have them in the future when I need them -but mostly because it feels good to do good.
When the memory of NM telling me that I'm the most selfish person on the face of the planet surfaces and attempts to derail me, I'm going to remember, too, that I just gave a homeless veteran every single cash money bill in my wallet, and that when he looked at me like he was going to cry and said, "How can I repay you?" my honest, authentic and sincere answer to him was, "You already have sir, thank you for your service." Is that the action of a selfish person? I think not. But it is action.
These are all great tools, and I can honestly say that these principles are some of the main reasons that I'm still ambulatory and have made it through so much trauma with my sanity - relatively - intact.
But the greatest action I've taken and that I continue to take in order to overcome trauma is this:
I stay the fuck away from the people and places that cause me trauma in the first place.
Love,
Vanci
Showing posts with label overcoming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label overcoming. Show all posts
Monday, March 18, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Keystone Concepts
I've been focusing heavily on staying in the moment lately, on simplifying my often distracted mind, on streamlining my hectic schedule and allowing myself a less frantic pace. It's working and I'm starting to feel better, if not physically as much as I'd like, at least I'm finding ways to stop demanding so much from myself emotionally. I have a lot of tools for accomplishing this, thankfully.
One of the allowances I've made in my quest to calm my mind and heart (and hope that my body will just take a fucking clue already,) has been to indulge my Inner Documentary Junkie. We don't have television here in the house of Vanci, you see, because A) it rots your brain, B) from what I've seen of television in the last fifteen years, either I've gotten really really smart or the rest of the planet has gotten progressively stoopid-er and C) our area is rural enough that we don't have any free television channels available and I'm too cheap to pay someone to beam into my home and ask my if my teeth are white enough or if I'd like to lose weight without trying. So, no television channels, but of course we watch movies and we play video games and the like. I'm not a Luddite, I'd just honestly rather read a novel if I find that I have excess time in my life.
What we do have in my little town, though, is a killer library. And that library has a fairly extensive movie/tv series selection. So, I've been checking out documentaries lately and DH and the DD's have indulged me by letting me watch them in the family room in the evenings - sometimes the series are good enough that one or two of the family members get interested, too!
I recently finished a rather poorly done - but still fascinating, to me at least - series on the 'secrets' of ancient architecture. I'm happy to report that I now know far more than I will ever be required to know about the difference between doric, ionic and corinthian columns. So I've got that going for me.
One of the so-called secrets that fascinated me the most, though, transcended cultural boundaries and seemed to show up in all of the ancient civilizations discussed were these enormous stone archways that stood for millenia over huge spans and at towering heights. There, apparently, always has been debate about how these wide curved spans were constructed by people with marked lacks of technological advancement: how does a society with no firm grasp of potential uses of wheels manage to heft a series of two-ton blocks into the air in a graceful, flowing curve so masterfully that they'll stay in their place for, theoretically, ever?
It's all about the keystone - the load bearing, specifically shaped, precisely fitted wedge at the top of the span that, once inserted, holds everything together. I'm not a geologist and geometry wasn't ever my thing, but my lack of technical understanding hasn't stopped my absolute respect for this concept of the one key piece that determines the fate of the rest of the structure.
So I'm thinking about my own personal keystone concepts. I've survived an awful lot of really terrible events and people in my life, and I'm grateful for that. I've learned from these experiences, and I'm even more grateful for that. What I've mostly learned is that I wasn't always able to prevent the Big Bads from happening (and I'm sure I won't be able to sometimes in the present or the future, too,) but that I can pick up certain invaluable tools every time I make it through, and I get to keep those tools.
Those tools have become my go to's, no matter the situation, the ideas, concepts, learning that I can come back to and understand that yes, THIS, THIS is what works, THIS is the TRUTH. I hold that little collection of Truths near and dear to my heart: that I am lovable, that I didn't/don't deserve for bad things or people to happen to me, that love is strength, etc. But I've been wondering what the crux Truth is, if there is a single identifiable piece of Truth that holds all of the others to their shape. The baseline, the square one, the universal Truth. What's the keystone?
I think it's this:
I exist as a human bean, and that alone grants me the right to decency.
The right to decency isn't about entitlement. I don't deserve anything more than you or anything more than I'm willing to work to attain and keep or give away. Being in the line up, after all, does not guarantee one the right to a home run. It doesn't even guarantee the right to a swing, necessarily. But it does guarantee me the right to show up and to take a shake at it if the opportunity presents itself.
It seems to me that the people who've tried to hurt me have really, at the core of their behavior, been trying to take away my right to exist. Through fear, lies, manipulations, violence, abusers have tried to convince me that I deserved less than the breath I inhale and exhale, or that I should be ashamed for taking that air.
Every time I've come back around to understanding that I didn't have to take abuse, my strength has come from my eventual understanding that I have a right to decency: which simply means to me that I have a right NOT to be hurt, or to choose to walk away from hurt.
It's sad to me when I hear people say, in response to an action of distance taken by one being abused from an abuser,
"But she's your mother/sister/friend/teacher/father/uncle/brother/pastor/lover/husband/wife etc..." as a means of implying that, yes, this behavior is unacceptable, but some tie that you have with the person treating you inappropriately requires you to ignore the abuse.
As if abuse can be lessened or somehow condoned based upon the title or DNA similarity of the abuser and victim. This quantification is a protection of the abuser to the detriment of the one being abused, and that's a societal sickness that's, unfortunately, socially acceptable. But it's not a Truth.
The Truth to me, the Keystone of Truth I suppose, is that it doesn't matter who wants to hurt me nearly as much as it matters that I have a right not to be hurt.
I'm a human bean and I have the right to exist and be treated decently.
So are you and you do too.
Love,
Vanci
One of the allowances I've made in my quest to calm my mind and heart (and hope that my body will just take a fucking clue already,) has been to indulge my Inner Documentary Junkie. We don't have television here in the house of Vanci, you see, because A) it rots your brain, B) from what I've seen of television in the last fifteen years, either I've gotten really really smart or the rest of the planet has gotten progressively stoopid-er and C) our area is rural enough that we don't have any free television channels available and I'm too cheap to pay someone to beam into my home and ask my if my teeth are white enough or if I'd like to lose weight without trying. So, no television channels, but of course we watch movies and we play video games and the like. I'm not a Luddite, I'd just honestly rather read a novel if I find that I have excess time in my life.
What we do have in my little town, though, is a killer library. And that library has a fairly extensive movie/tv series selection. So, I've been checking out documentaries lately and DH and the DD's have indulged me by letting me watch them in the family room in the evenings - sometimes the series are good enough that one or two of the family members get interested, too!
I recently finished a rather poorly done - but still fascinating, to me at least - series on the 'secrets' of ancient architecture. I'm happy to report that I now know far more than I will ever be required to know about the difference between doric, ionic and corinthian columns. So I've got that going for me.
One of the so-called secrets that fascinated me the most, though, transcended cultural boundaries and seemed to show up in all of the ancient civilizations discussed were these enormous stone archways that stood for millenia over huge spans and at towering heights. There, apparently, always has been debate about how these wide curved spans were constructed by people with marked lacks of technological advancement: how does a society with no firm grasp of potential uses of wheels manage to heft a series of two-ton blocks into the air in a graceful, flowing curve so masterfully that they'll stay in their place for, theoretically, ever?
It's all about the keystone - the load bearing, specifically shaped, precisely fitted wedge at the top of the span that, once inserted, holds everything together. I'm not a geologist and geometry wasn't ever my thing, but my lack of technical understanding hasn't stopped my absolute respect for this concept of the one key piece that determines the fate of the rest of the structure.
So I'm thinking about my own personal keystone concepts. I've survived an awful lot of really terrible events and people in my life, and I'm grateful for that. I've learned from these experiences, and I'm even more grateful for that. What I've mostly learned is that I wasn't always able to prevent the Big Bads from happening (and I'm sure I won't be able to sometimes in the present or the future, too,) but that I can pick up certain invaluable tools every time I make it through, and I get to keep those tools.
Those tools have become my go to's, no matter the situation, the ideas, concepts, learning that I can come back to and understand that yes, THIS, THIS is what works, THIS is the TRUTH. I hold that little collection of Truths near and dear to my heart: that I am lovable, that I didn't/don't deserve for bad things or people to happen to me, that love is strength, etc. But I've been wondering what the crux Truth is, if there is a single identifiable piece of Truth that holds all of the others to their shape. The baseline, the square one, the universal Truth. What's the keystone?
I think it's this:
I exist as a human bean, and that alone grants me the right to decency.
The right to decency isn't about entitlement. I don't deserve anything more than you or anything more than I'm willing to work to attain and keep or give away. Being in the line up, after all, does not guarantee one the right to a home run. It doesn't even guarantee the right to a swing, necessarily. But it does guarantee me the right to show up and to take a shake at it if the opportunity presents itself.
It seems to me that the people who've tried to hurt me have really, at the core of their behavior, been trying to take away my right to exist. Through fear, lies, manipulations, violence, abusers have tried to convince me that I deserved less than the breath I inhale and exhale, or that I should be ashamed for taking that air.
Every time I've come back around to understanding that I didn't have to take abuse, my strength has come from my eventual understanding that I have a right to decency: which simply means to me that I have a right NOT to be hurt, or to choose to walk away from hurt.
It's sad to me when I hear people say, in response to an action of distance taken by one being abused from an abuser,
"But she's your mother/sister/friend/teacher/father/uncle/brother/pastor/lover/husband/wife etc..." as a means of implying that, yes, this behavior is unacceptable, but some tie that you have with the person treating you inappropriately requires you to ignore the abuse.
As if abuse can be lessened or somehow condoned based upon the title or DNA similarity of the abuser and victim. This quantification is a protection of the abuser to the detriment of the one being abused, and that's a societal sickness that's, unfortunately, socially acceptable. But it's not a Truth.
The Truth to me, the Keystone of Truth I suppose, is that it doesn't matter who wants to hurt me nearly as much as it matters that I have a right not to be hurt.
I'm a human bean and I have the right to exist and be treated decently.
So are you and you do too.
Love,
Vanci
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Leaving Isolation Behind
Isolation of the victim is one of the primary tools of all abusers.
Whether an abuser is of the pathologically personality disordered or the garden variety asshole vein, the removal of their chosen victim's external support will always rank high on the abuser's to-do list. In the middle of a fire, a person with an exit plan behaves in an entirely different manner than a person who believes that they are hopelessly trapped.
In this respect, the goal of an abuser is to force their victim to be cut-off from outside help, or if that is not possible to force the victim to at least believe that if there is a way out, it's unreachable or undeserved.
When I was a child, I was held hostage as a member of the NFOO, both physically and emotionally. The NParents couldn't hold up the shiny-happy mask that covered their absolute insanity for very long, so our family packed up and moved every single year. Sometimes we'd make it for 18 months or so, but that was a stretch. In retrospect, I think of them as locusts: show up, suck the life out every available resource, move on and leave the land dead. In having any tenuous roots and branches of relationships to other people that I was able to establish as a little one yanked out every year - literally, I did not go to the same school two years in a row until my freshman and sophomore years of high school - I was being groomed to believe that the only people I was allowed to have long term relationships with were NM, ENF, NSis and GCYB. Functionally, they were the only people in my childhood world. And that meant that I had no way out.
There were no teachers who were able to know me well enough to step in, no counselors who knew me long enough to detect a pattern, no mothers or fathers of friends who heard or saw changes in my affect and worried about it. No one was allowed to know me long enough to fight for me. Any perceptive adult in my life who might have picked up on eccentricities, (if they caught me in a rare moment when I stepped out of line and peeked out from behind the iron mask of the Clan at all,) would have had to chase down the moving van to inquire after my well-being. What a lonely, sad, isolated childhood that was. It taught me that the few relationships that I did have - with the NFOO - were something very precious indeed and that I must preserve them at all costs. Which is just what the NParents needed to keep me hauling on that party line.
Later in life, I discovered that I had difficulty maintaining relationships with outside parties for more than a couple of years. I had trouble staying in the same job for more than a couple of years. Small wonder, eh?
Even when they were no longer able to physically separate me from external parties, the Crazymakers still held sway over my relationships with others. My friends became their friends, and then they'd drive in their wedges at every available opportunity. When DH and I tried to establish our own holiday traditions, we were being selfish and cruel, so they showed up at our house anyway, uninvited, and stayed for dinner. Shit, I'm 95% certain that NSis slept with my first husband the night before our wedding.
No wonder, I discovered that I had a hard time trusting people. That I had a polite conversational voice that I'd use with people and that was it, I never would allow any truth to pass my lips that wasn't about the weather. That when I hit it off with someone from 'outside,' I threw up walls to make sure that they wouldn't get any closer to me. I felt toxic. I gave up on ever having any close girlfriends at all. I shut down. I stopped sharing myself with people at all. I hid a lot. I just knew that there was something wrong with me; that I just couldn't be a good friend. I'd tell myself that a potential relationship wasn't worth the effort. I only figured out later that what I'd really believed was that I wasn't worth the effort.
I was NC with the Crazymakers for a good while - I think about a year and half - before I began to let anyone in past the gate of politeness and into my real life, and even then I was more careful than Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits, which is to say verwy, verwy. I spent entire relationships waiting to find out that I was being used, again, that I was fucking it up, again, that I didn't deserve a friend, again. Some of those relationships made it through that painful and constant vetting process. Some didn't. For a long time I felt like I'd failed in those relationships that didn't spark or flamed out. It just didn't occur to me at the time that I didn't HAVE to make it work. After all, weren't my choices thus: take what you can get for as long as it's there, but don't get too attached, because it'll be taken away at any moment - or - don't get attached in the first place and pretend to be okay alone (or better yet, "Vanci, remember that your 'family' are the ONLY ones who will always be here for you.")
The Crazymakers even tried to destroy some of my fledgling relationships after I'd gone NC. How crazy is that? I refused to talk to them, but they sought out people with whom the N's had never had a relationship prior for the specific purpose of destroying new relationships that I had with those people by cornering those new friends of mine and listing of litanies of the Sins of Vanci. Gawd, can you even imagine what some of those poor souls thought? No wonder they mostly ran for the hills.
I kept trying to bring new people into my life, though, by conscientiously and carefully reminding myself to leave one or two doors to my soul open - just a crack - because I didn't want to be alone in the world anymore. And because the longer I stayed away from the Narcs and their legion of psycho-pets, the more I became aware of the fact that isolation from the external world was one of the ways in which they'd kept me under the Clan thumb. Slowly, painfully, awkwardly... I made friends.
I found people with whom I shared similar interests - like sobriety, hardy har har. As I got better, I found that people approached me with invitations - not just to Drink Wine and Buy Pricey Kitchen Stuff parties, either - but real, genuine, Hey We Think You Might Like This Movie Too kinds of outings. Apparently, I'm a lot of fun to be around. Who knew?
It was, for a very long time, uncomfortable to be vulnerable enough to get to know people and to let them get to know me too. Uncomfortable is a mild word for it; it was often excruciating. I discovered that I visit the bathrooms in public places quite often as a means to have a moment of composure alone. And somewhere, somehow, I became okay with that, accepting it as just another of my many, many quirks.
Because as hard as they tried to keep me alone and without ties to those around me, without support from people whose goal is not to hurt me, I know their secret now and I have for awhile.
They don't know how to form meaningful relationships with anyone; they only know how to use and be used, hurt and be hurt. They can't fucking stand it that I am absolutely surrounded by people who love me and whom I love back, because that's something that they will never, ever have for real. The closest they ever came was when they had me all scapegoated and slavishly in their service, and that's never going to happen again.
My oldest DD is turning 17 within the next couple of weeks, and what she's decided to do for her birthday is to go to a nearby town with a group of her girlfriends for an outing. She's known some of these girls since kindergarten, and she's close with a couple of the girls' moms, which is something that I am entirely grateful for. The more people she has that love her in her life, the better off she is, in my opinion. She said to me, "You don't mind that I won't be spending my whole birthday with you, do you?"
To which I laughed and smiled and told her that I love her but that spending your 17th birthday with your life-long girlfriends is the healthiest thing in the world. Youngest DD had her 15th birthday a few weeks ago, and our house was filled with seven 14-15 year old girls, some of which have been friends since kindergarten as well. I cooked for them and cleaned up after them and other than that, I stayed out of their way and let them have their night, which they took full advantage of until they crashed out at four in the morning.
Man, it's fucking awesome to see my girls living in that sea of friends, held up by the joy of their relationships that have nothing whatsoever to do with me. Cycle: broken.
Love,
Vanci
Whether an abuser is of the pathologically personality disordered or the garden variety asshole vein, the removal of their chosen victim's external support will always rank high on the abuser's to-do list. In the middle of a fire, a person with an exit plan behaves in an entirely different manner than a person who believes that they are hopelessly trapped.
In this respect, the goal of an abuser is to force their victim to be cut-off from outside help, or if that is not possible to force the victim to at least believe that if there is a way out, it's unreachable or undeserved.
When I was a child, I was held hostage as a member of the NFOO, both physically and emotionally. The NParents couldn't hold up the shiny-happy mask that covered their absolute insanity for very long, so our family packed up and moved every single year. Sometimes we'd make it for 18 months or so, but that was a stretch. In retrospect, I think of them as locusts: show up, suck the life out every available resource, move on and leave the land dead. In having any tenuous roots and branches of relationships to other people that I was able to establish as a little one yanked out every year - literally, I did not go to the same school two years in a row until my freshman and sophomore years of high school - I was being groomed to believe that the only people I was allowed to have long term relationships with were NM, ENF, NSis and GCYB. Functionally, they were the only people in my childhood world. And that meant that I had no way out.
There were no teachers who were able to know me well enough to step in, no counselors who knew me long enough to detect a pattern, no mothers or fathers of friends who heard or saw changes in my affect and worried about it. No one was allowed to know me long enough to fight for me. Any perceptive adult in my life who might have picked up on eccentricities, (if they caught me in a rare moment when I stepped out of line and peeked out from behind the iron mask of the Clan at all,) would have had to chase down the moving van to inquire after my well-being. What a lonely, sad, isolated childhood that was. It taught me that the few relationships that I did have - with the NFOO - were something very precious indeed and that I must preserve them at all costs. Which is just what the NParents needed to keep me hauling on that party line.
Later in life, I discovered that I had difficulty maintaining relationships with outside parties for more than a couple of years. I had trouble staying in the same job for more than a couple of years. Small wonder, eh?
Even when they were no longer able to physically separate me from external parties, the Crazymakers still held sway over my relationships with others. My friends became their friends, and then they'd drive in their wedges at every available opportunity. When DH and I tried to establish our own holiday traditions, we were being selfish and cruel, so they showed up at our house anyway, uninvited, and stayed for dinner. Shit, I'm 95% certain that NSis slept with my first husband the night before our wedding.
No wonder, I discovered that I had a hard time trusting people. That I had a polite conversational voice that I'd use with people and that was it, I never would allow any truth to pass my lips that wasn't about the weather. That when I hit it off with someone from 'outside,' I threw up walls to make sure that they wouldn't get any closer to me. I felt toxic. I gave up on ever having any close girlfriends at all. I shut down. I stopped sharing myself with people at all. I hid a lot. I just knew that there was something wrong with me; that I just couldn't be a good friend. I'd tell myself that a potential relationship wasn't worth the effort. I only figured out later that what I'd really believed was that I wasn't worth the effort.
I was NC with the Crazymakers for a good while - I think about a year and half - before I began to let anyone in past the gate of politeness and into my real life, and even then I was more careful than Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits, which is to say verwy, verwy. I spent entire relationships waiting to find out that I was being used, again, that I was fucking it up, again, that I didn't deserve a friend, again. Some of those relationships made it through that painful and constant vetting process. Some didn't. For a long time I felt like I'd failed in those relationships that didn't spark or flamed out. It just didn't occur to me at the time that I didn't HAVE to make it work. After all, weren't my choices thus: take what you can get for as long as it's there, but don't get too attached, because it'll be taken away at any moment - or - don't get attached in the first place and pretend to be okay alone (or better yet, "Vanci, remember that your 'family' are the ONLY ones who will always be here for you.")
The Crazymakers even tried to destroy some of my fledgling relationships after I'd gone NC. How crazy is that? I refused to talk to them, but they sought out people with whom the N's had never had a relationship prior for the specific purpose of destroying new relationships that I had with those people by cornering those new friends of mine and listing of litanies of the Sins of Vanci. Gawd, can you even imagine what some of those poor souls thought? No wonder they mostly ran for the hills.
I kept trying to bring new people into my life, though, by conscientiously and carefully reminding myself to leave one or two doors to my soul open - just a crack - because I didn't want to be alone in the world anymore. And because the longer I stayed away from the Narcs and their legion of psycho-pets, the more I became aware of the fact that isolation from the external world was one of the ways in which they'd kept me under the Clan thumb. Slowly, painfully, awkwardly... I made friends.
I found people with whom I shared similar interests - like sobriety, hardy har har. As I got better, I found that people approached me with invitations - not just to Drink Wine and Buy Pricey Kitchen Stuff parties, either - but real, genuine, Hey We Think You Might Like This Movie Too kinds of outings. Apparently, I'm a lot of fun to be around. Who knew?
It was, for a very long time, uncomfortable to be vulnerable enough to get to know people and to let them get to know me too. Uncomfortable is a mild word for it; it was often excruciating. I discovered that I visit the bathrooms in public places quite often as a means to have a moment of composure alone. And somewhere, somehow, I became okay with that, accepting it as just another of my many, many quirks.
Because as hard as they tried to keep me alone and without ties to those around me, without support from people whose goal is not to hurt me, I know their secret now and I have for awhile.
They don't know how to form meaningful relationships with anyone; they only know how to use and be used, hurt and be hurt. They can't fucking stand it that I am absolutely surrounded by people who love me and whom I love back, because that's something that they will never, ever have for real. The closest they ever came was when they had me all scapegoated and slavishly in their service, and that's never going to happen again.
My oldest DD is turning 17 within the next couple of weeks, and what she's decided to do for her birthday is to go to a nearby town with a group of her girlfriends for an outing. She's known some of these girls since kindergarten, and she's close with a couple of the girls' moms, which is something that I am entirely grateful for. The more people she has that love her in her life, the better off she is, in my opinion. She said to me, "You don't mind that I won't be spending my whole birthday with you, do you?"
To which I laughed and smiled and told her that I love her but that spending your 17th birthday with your life-long girlfriends is the healthiest thing in the world. Youngest DD had her 15th birthday a few weeks ago, and our house was filled with seven 14-15 year old girls, some of which have been friends since kindergarten as well. I cooked for them and cleaned up after them and other than that, I stayed out of their way and let them have their night, which they took full advantage of until they crashed out at four in the morning.
Man, it's fucking awesome to see my girls living in that sea of friends, held up by the joy of their relationships that have nothing whatsoever to do with me. Cycle: broken.
Love,
Vanci
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Narc Flavored Malnutrition
Jonsi's got a fantastic post up about the role of food as a weapon and control tactic in the Narc Parent's arsenal, specifically relating to her NMIL and how she's used food and body image related to weight to hurt and abuse her children, both as children and now as adults. It's a good read and I highly recommend it (and Jonsi's always in-depth non-ACoN point of view) to anyone who is an ACoN or a parent. Hell, I'd recommend Jonsi to anyone just looking for a good read!
I responded to her post that I don't have a lot of of the issues that I hear other ACoN's talking about when it concerns food, and I was referring to some of these more common problems that I've heard about:
Using food as a comfort/replacement for affection.
Overeating as a compensatory indulgence in order to feel full in at least some way.
Undereating or dieting unhealthily in order to gain the approval of others (especially N's.)
(And please, please, please don't infer that by my saying that I don't have these particular issues that I am somehow judging people who do or that I think I'm in some way better than or less than people who do struggle with these very real issues. It would break my heart if you thought that, cause it's just not true. I have puh-lenty other issues, trust me.)
In that comment on her post, I went in to some detail about how I have a DH who does feel love most easily through acts of service, and that my cooking for him has been a good part of our loving relationship. He has food issues from childhood, mostly along the lines that his mother is a terrible, horrible cook. I'm sorry, but there's just no other way to describe the alleged food that she makes. Everything starts with a can of generic cream of something soup and ends with mayonnaise; everything. Here's a good example: When DH and I had been living together for about six months, he got home from work as I was making dinner. He's drawn like a magnet to pots and pans on the stove, and he lifted the pot on some potatoes I was boiling to make mashed potatoes.
"What's this?" he said.
"Potatoes," said I, "What's it look like, silly?"
"But these are starting to get mushy," he said.
"Duh," I said, "they're supposed to. They'd be kind of hard to mash if they didn't!"
"These are for mashed potatoes?" he asked, seriously confused.
At this point, I was starting to get pissed. He was taking up far too much space and time in my little kitchen with his silly questions. "How the hell else would you make mashed potatoes?" I asked, tersely, I'm sure.
And this was his answer, "Well, they come in a box and then you add water."
"Have you ever had mashed potatoes made with real potatoes?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said.
So... the moral of the story is that DH likes him some Vanci home cooking, the kind that starts with real food and includes all the major food groups and ways of preparing dishes and is informed by a knowledge of spices and seasonings and doesn't involve a whole bunch of processed junk thrown into a casserole dish and covered in potato chips. Or mayonnaise.
I shop and cook and he does laundry and handles maintenance. It's an act of love for me to put healthy meals on the table and it's an act of love for him to make sure that there's oil in my car or that my pants aren't wrinkled on the hanger. It's part of a good relationship, not the manipulation tool that Narcs seem to like to make it.
As I said in my comment over in Jonsi-land (which is a rather nice place to hang out, btw,) one of my DD's has a serious disease that involves a food allergy, and most of what she's reactionary to can be avoided by avoiding processed foods. It's not easy, especially on a budget, to cater to her needs, but it's necessary. So, every meal that she - and therefore we - eat has to be cooked at home from scratch in order to keep her healthy. Food in this context takes on a different meaning as an act of love. I prepare food for her (not separately, we all eat the same things but our meals are designed around what she can have,) as an act of service and love to keep her healthy and to provide something that is not easily gotten anywhere else.
It took me a long time, though, to see food preparation for my family in this light, because one the ways that the Narcs screwed me up with food was to make the kitchen my 'job.' Indefinitely.
I believe in the value of involving children in the household as a means of teaching both responsibility and self-care, and my DD's have had age appropriate chores from toddler-hood. When they were three the chores were simple things like picking up their own toys (with help, of course,) and putting them away. Now that they're older, they do their own laundry and have one household chore a day. Dishes or vacuum, those are the chores now, and they rotate back and forth on a daily basis. Then we all pitch in for the weekend deep clean. No big deal, right?
But I, as a child from about eight on to the best of my memory, I was responsible for dishes and the kitchen. Every single day. NSis mowed the lawn and worked on her tan in the Summer and her chores switched around in the winter among various things - sweeping or maybe vacuuming. I can't remember what she did, but I know that it wasn't dishes. Cause, you know, I was doing those. GCYB usually had physical chores, being a boy and all. I, though, I did the dishes. Eventually it became my job to cook, first for myself and YB, then for the family. So, obviously after years of being forced to cook for everyone and forced to clean up after everyone, I saw this as a tedious chore. It took a long time for me to understand that love really can the secret ingredient, and what turned the corner for me on that was DH's absolute JOY in my meals. He'd get so excited - "Are these real green beans!?!" he'd ask, "they're not mushy!" having never really tasted anything but green beans from a freezer bag or a can before. My personal favorite: "Wow, I didn't even know there was a spice called marg-oh-ram!"
And the gratitude that he displayed and modeled for the DD's, man, that was my first experience with being appreciated for my giving of my time, talent and food. It was a change from the, "Maybe you should try cooking it longer" comments and the, "I guess I just don't like chicken anymore." So ingrained was my 'job' of feeding my family that for the last five years prior to NC that on both Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, I packed up my entire kitchen and hauled all the food (that I'd paid for) to my NParent's house and prepared all of the dishes apart from one or two for the entire family and anyone they'd seen fit to invite. They live fifteen miles out of town in the middle of nowhere, and we have serious winter and bad roads here, but it was my job to bring the feast to them. And my kids were 9 and 11 when I got away. I usually ended up helping with the dishes, too. Who does that? More importantly, who expects that?
I'm so glad that I didn't let them permanently ruin cooking for others for me, because I am a good cook and I've found that cooking for others is something that I really enjoy doing. It's always an act of love for me. In fact, if I could, I'd invite you all over right now to a dinner party and I'd go all out to make you a nice, healthy, loving meal which we'd all enjoy together. Doesn't that sound like fun?
I thought about Jonsi's post throughout the day, though, and I came across something else that it brought up for me, and this is a bit uncomfortable as I'm going to talk a little about sexual abuse, so I can understand if you need to check out now.
I have a lot of blank spots and shady memories from my childhood, and some of them have cleared up in the last five years of LC/NC. A lot have had to do with the sexual abuse I endured from my father and the fact that my mother had knowledge of it and allowed (encouraged?) it to happen or at the very least refused to compromise her lifestyle to protect me from it.
At around nine or ten years old, in the fourth grade, I started gaining weight. Some of this I think can be attributed to the onset of puberty, which was pretty early for me. Some of it though, I can now see was a defense mechanism. My four years older NSis was shaped like a woman at that point and I remember talk in the NFOO about how our bodies were changing. Not nice talk. Weird, weird comments about how shapely my legs were becoming or how full her chest was. Weird, weird, gross, nasty stuff. I remember becoming distinctly aware of attractiveness in a new (to me) way. Attractiveness would make me more of a target.
I also remember gaining weight and thinking, "Good. Now I'm not attractive." What I couldn't really voice and haven't really acknowledged until now is that the unspoken next part of that conversation went something like, "Maybe now he'll stop touching me." I distinctly remember discovering my curves over the next few years and hiding them to the best of my ability - not out of fear of being made fun of at school, but so that ENF wouldn't see them.
Ugh. That's fucked up. Sooooooo fucked up.
I also remember that when I did become uncomfortable with my weight - around 12 - I expressed a desire to lose weight to NM. And she put me on Slim Fast, quite possibly one of the worst nutritionally deficient starvation diets that anybody could be on, especially a 12 year old. My gawd, I can't even imagine.
I'm sure it was a punishment of some sort, a manipulation of my fragile psyche and body. I don't know what she got out of it, but I sure didn't lose any weight. (That happened when I got out of their house at 17.) I do remember, though, that we suddenly started going out to dinner at restaurants a lot, something that we'd previously not done, and that when the waitress came to take our orders, ENF took great pleasure in informing the server when it came to my turn to order that, "She won't have anything, she's on Slim Fast." What a horrible thing to do, what a horrible embarrassment to feel (for me and the server.)
I look at this now and I wonder how I have ever had a healthy relationship with food or my body. But a big part of my healing journey has been to accept that I am lovable and I am good. My body is only the vessel, and I take care of the vessel as best I can. What's really helped on the body health side of things has been taking care of the internal beauty. Once I started getting that dialed in, the physical part seemed to follow and I fit my own standards for what I want to be physically. All in all, I wouldn't change a thing.
And that's a bona-fide miracle.
Thanks again to Jonsi for bringing it up.
Love,
Vanci
I responded to her post that I don't have a lot of of the issues that I hear other ACoN's talking about when it concerns food, and I was referring to some of these more common problems that I've heard about:
Using food as a comfort/replacement for affection.
Overeating as a compensatory indulgence in order to feel full in at least some way.
Undereating or dieting unhealthily in order to gain the approval of others (especially N's.)
(And please, please, please don't infer that by my saying that I don't have these particular issues that I am somehow judging people who do or that I think I'm in some way better than or less than people who do struggle with these very real issues. It would break my heart if you thought that, cause it's just not true. I have puh-lenty other issues, trust me.)
In that comment on her post, I went in to some detail about how I have a DH who does feel love most easily through acts of service, and that my cooking for him has been a good part of our loving relationship. He has food issues from childhood, mostly along the lines that his mother is a terrible, horrible cook. I'm sorry, but there's just no other way to describe the alleged food that she makes. Everything starts with a can of generic cream of something soup and ends with mayonnaise; everything. Here's a good example: When DH and I had been living together for about six months, he got home from work as I was making dinner. He's drawn like a magnet to pots and pans on the stove, and he lifted the pot on some potatoes I was boiling to make mashed potatoes.
"What's this?" he said.
"Potatoes," said I, "What's it look like, silly?"
"But these are starting to get mushy," he said.
"Duh," I said, "they're supposed to. They'd be kind of hard to mash if they didn't!"
"These are for mashed potatoes?" he asked, seriously confused.
At this point, I was starting to get pissed. He was taking up far too much space and time in my little kitchen with his silly questions. "How the hell else would you make mashed potatoes?" I asked, tersely, I'm sure.
And this was his answer, "Well, they come in a box and then you add water."
"Have you ever had mashed potatoes made with real potatoes?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said.
So... the moral of the story is that DH likes him some Vanci home cooking, the kind that starts with real food and includes all the major food groups and ways of preparing dishes and is informed by a knowledge of spices and seasonings and doesn't involve a whole bunch of processed junk thrown into a casserole dish and covered in potato chips. Or mayonnaise.
I shop and cook and he does laundry and handles maintenance. It's an act of love for me to put healthy meals on the table and it's an act of love for him to make sure that there's oil in my car or that my pants aren't wrinkled on the hanger. It's part of a good relationship, not the manipulation tool that Narcs seem to like to make it.
As I said in my comment over in Jonsi-land (which is a rather nice place to hang out, btw,) one of my DD's has a serious disease that involves a food allergy, and most of what she's reactionary to can be avoided by avoiding processed foods. It's not easy, especially on a budget, to cater to her needs, but it's necessary. So, every meal that she - and therefore we - eat has to be cooked at home from scratch in order to keep her healthy. Food in this context takes on a different meaning as an act of love. I prepare food for her (not separately, we all eat the same things but our meals are designed around what she can have,) as an act of service and love to keep her healthy and to provide something that is not easily gotten anywhere else.
It took me a long time, though, to see food preparation for my family in this light, because one the ways that the Narcs screwed me up with food was to make the kitchen my 'job.' Indefinitely.
I believe in the value of involving children in the household as a means of teaching both responsibility and self-care, and my DD's have had age appropriate chores from toddler-hood. When they were three the chores were simple things like picking up their own toys (with help, of course,) and putting them away. Now that they're older, they do their own laundry and have one household chore a day. Dishes or vacuum, those are the chores now, and they rotate back and forth on a daily basis. Then we all pitch in for the weekend deep clean. No big deal, right?
But I, as a child from about eight on to the best of my memory, I was responsible for dishes and the kitchen. Every single day. NSis mowed the lawn and worked on her tan in the Summer and her chores switched around in the winter among various things - sweeping or maybe vacuuming. I can't remember what she did, but I know that it wasn't dishes. Cause, you know, I was doing those. GCYB usually had physical chores, being a boy and all. I, though, I did the dishes. Eventually it became my job to cook, first for myself and YB, then for the family. So, obviously after years of being forced to cook for everyone and forced to clean up after everyone, I saw this as a tedious chore. It took a long time for me to understand that love really can the secret ingredient, and what turned the corner for me on that was DH's absolute JOY in my meals. He'd get so excited - "Are these real green beans!?!" he'd ask, "they're not mushy!" having never really tasted anything but green beans from a freezer bag or a can before. My personal favorite: "Wow, I didn't even know there was a spice called marg-oh-ram!"
And the gratitude that he displayed and modeled for the DD's, man, that was my first experience with being appreciated for my giving of my time, talent and food. It was a change from the, "Maybe you should try cooking it longer" comments and the, "I guess I just don't like chicken anymore." So ingrained was my 'job' of feeding my family that for the last five years prior to NC that on both Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, I packed up my entire kitchen and hauled all the food (that I'd paid for) to my NParent's house and prepared all of the dishes apart from one or two for the entire family and anyone they'd seen fit to invite. They live fifteen miles out of town in the middle of nowhere, and we have serious winter and bad roads here, but it was my job to bring the feast to them. And my kids were 9 and 11 when I got away. I usually ended up helping with the dishes, too. Who does that? More importantly, who expects that?
I'm so glad that I didn't let them permanently ruin cooking for others for me, because I am a good cook and I've found that cooking for others is something that I really enjoy doing. It's always an act of love for me. In fact, if I could, I'd invite you all over right now to a dinner party and I'd go all out to make you a nice, healthy, loving meal which we'd all enjoy together. Doesn't that sound like fun?
I thought about Jonsi's post throughout the day, though, and I came across something else that it brought up for me, and this is a bit uncomfortable as I'm going to talk a little about sexual abuse, so I can understand if you need to check out now.
I have a lot of blank spots and shady memories from my childhood, and some of them have cleared up in the last five years of LC/NC. A lot have had to do with the sexual abuse I endured from my father and the fact that my mother had knowledge of it and allowed (encouraged?) it to happen or at the very least refused to compromise her lifestyle to protect me from it.
At around nine or ten years old, in the fourth grade, I started gaining weight. Some of this I think can be attributed to the onset of puberty, which was pretty early for me. Some of it though, I can now see was a defense mechanism. My four years older NSis was shaped like a woman at that point and I remember talk in the NFOO about how our bodies were changing. Not nice talk. Weird, weird comments about how shapely my legs were becoming or how full her chest was. Weird, weird, gross, nasty stuff. I remember becoming distinctly aware of attractiveness in a new (to me) way. Attractiveness would make me more of a target.
I also remember gaining weight and thinking, "Good. Now I'm not attractive." What I couldn't really voice and haven't really acknowledged until now is that the unspoken next part of that conversation went something like, "Maybe now he'll stop touching me." I distinctly remember discovering my curves over the next few years and hiding them to the best of my ability - not out of fear of being made fun of at school, but so that ENF wouldn't see them.
Ugh. That's fucked up. Sooooooo fucked up.
I also remember that when I did become uncomfortable with my weight - around 12 - I expressed a desire to lose weight to NM. And she put me on Slim Fast, quite possibly one of the worst nutritionally deficient starvation diets that anybody could be on, especially a 12 year old. My gawd, I can't even imagine.
I'm sure it was a punishment of some sort, a manipulation of my fragile psyche and body. I don't know what she got out of it, but I sure didn't lose any weight. (That happened when I got out of their house at 17.) I do remember, though, that we suddenly started going out to dinner at restaurants a lot, something that we'd previously not done, and that when the waitress came to take our orders, ENF took great pleasure in informing the server when it came to my turn to order that, "She won't have anything, she's on Slim Fast." What a horrible thing to do, what a horrible embarrassment to feel (for me and the server.)
I look at this now and I wonder how I have ever had a healthy relationship with food or my body. But a big part of my healing journey has been to accept that I am lovable and I am good. My body is only the vessel, and I take care of the vessel as best I can. What's really helped on the body health side of things has been taking care of the internal beauty. Once I started getting that dialed in, the physical part seemed to follow and I fit my own standards for what I want to be physically. All in all, I wouldn't change a thing.
And that's a bona-fide miracle.
Thanks again to Jonsi for bringing it up.
Love,
Vanci
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