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 patterns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patterns. Show all posts
Monday, March 18, 2013
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Battle Hardened and Attack Ready
I'm not a big believer in the pursuit of Why, particularly when it comes to the why of the way that Narcissists behave. I used to be. I used to be on an a quest to understand their actions, to comprehend their logic, to break all of the assaults and behaviors and manipulations down into little bite size pieces with explanation, coat them with the sweet sauce of exposition and make them more palatable for me to chew up and swallow.
I spent scads of time on this journey to understand. I wrote checks in an attempt to purchase relevance. I thinked and thought and thunk some more in my efforts to figure it and them out. The only answer I received had more to do with acceptance of their natures than understanding of their motivations; they do what they do cause they do it. But that was a different post.
In my failed Quest to understand the Holy Grail of Why They Do the Evils They Do, though, I did learn a lot. Most of what I learned concerned the How of their actions.
ACoNs are trained from day one to NotSee and to UnSee. We know the truth of most situations, in my experience, as we are generally intuitive, observant and highly attuned to the gestures and actions of those around us. These attributes are often keys to our survival. We know what's really happening, but we are forced by our Nfamily to carry those truths silently within ourselves and to keep mum. We know the truth of the evil deeds, but we are trained to protect the perpetrators from their own actions with lies. Then, in the ironic twist that is inherent to life with Narcs, we are blamed for their evil actions in the first place.
It's the definition of CrazyMaking. How does a child survive this paradox? We learn to UnSee, at least to the best of our abilities. Of course, it makes us sick and causes us great pain, but we become masters of denial.
So, when we try to get better, when we begin to walk a path we hope will bring us to healing, we often are surprised by the outright heinous, forcefully aggressive assaults that the Narcs begin to hit us with. We've been ingesting their lies for so long, making up our own lies to protect ourselves for so long that invariably at some point we began to believe them.
I remember telling myself that surely it couldn't have been as bad as I felt. They probably didn't mean it that way. I was being overly sensitive. I wasn't perfect either, and maybe I was being too hard on them.
No wonder I couldn't be honest enough to see their attacks for the declarations of war that they were; I couldn't even be honest with myself about the facts of the abuse I'd suffered at their hands. I was stripped to the bone emotionally and had no capability to understand my own actions, no less someone else's. Throw Narcissism in the mix and all bets of comprehension were off. It was all I could do to even cope.
In retrospect, though, I can see a clear pattern of escalation from the very first boundary that I drew with the N's to the final storming of the beach that resulted in No Contact.
In the movie Casino, Joe Pesci plays strongman Nicky Santoro, protector to casino veep Ace. His portrayal of the character is terrifying partly, I think, because Joe Pesci's what, five feet tall? Regardless of his small stature, no matter what he looks like or what he seems to be, though, he's a vicious, brutal killer. This is how Ace (Robert DeNiro) describes Nicky.
"You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead."
Set aside reason, forget about reasonableness. This is how Narc's against the wall of a boundary communicate; with an ever evolving and escalating series of attacks. Civil tools aren't going to get them to back off.
You want them to stop calling you to scream at you? They're going to call you to scream AND they're going to get someone else to call you to scream at you too. You ask them to stay away from your children? They contact those children in every way they can think of, even moreso than they've ever shown any desire to talk to them before. You change your number? They show up at your house. You call the police when they show up at your house? They show up at your work. You ask them to leave? They call your customer service hotline to complain about how you treated them while pretending to be a non-involved customer. You manage to find a way to cut them out of your life completely? They stalk you and find out who your non-involved friends are, make nice with them and try to turn them against you. You lock your doors? They peer through your windows. You move on? They hunt you down.
They do not stop. Ever.
They can go into a cycle of dismissiveness, sure. They'll move on at points, find new victims, stay away for awhile if they can find other sources of Narc Supply. Junkies can usually find a new supplier, you know (but that doesn't mean that they forget their favorite drug.) Mine did, and there have been times when I've been lulled into the deceptive calm; into believing that silence is equivalent to serenity and that maybe they've just given up, gotten over it, moved on. This isn't truth, though.
They are fully capable of changing their game, developing different tactics and strategies, and they're good at it. (This, more than anything else that I know of, speaks volumes about them. If they are capable of changing the way that they come at me to hurt me, then they are absolutely capable of changing the fact that they are hurting me. Simple math then makes it easy to deduce that the capability to change is there; willingness to do so is what's missing on their part.) I've made it hard for them to get to me, and this creates some space because they aren't willing to work that hard, at least not today. They're getting their fix somewhere else, you see, so right now at this very moment, I get a pass.
But I'm not off the hook from their attacks. I'm back-burnered, that's all. Sooner or later, I've no doubt, there will be a trigger (my money's on my oldest DD turning 18 in a couple of years) and then they will be back in force (probably coming at my daughters rather than me; predators always go for what they see as the easiest prey first.) We say in alcoholic recovery that the disease of alcoholism doesn't go away when we stop drinking, it just hangs out behind our backs doing push-ups and getting stronger, waiting for an opening to slither back into an active status. So too, I believe, are the Narcs lurking in the shadows out there, just thinkin' shit up.
I'm not a paranoid conspiracy theorist. I don't sit around detailing or stressing about the ways that they're planning to get me. I just don't ignore the truth anymore.
Almost two years ago, the DD's let me know that NSis and GCYB had been trying to contact the DD's via social networking. This was almost three years since the last time I'd spoken to either NSis or GCYB. We're talking absolute radio silence, not a phone call, a letter, nothing, nada, zilch. The DD's have always had private profiles, but we took the additional steps to systemically block NSis and GCYB (and the minions that I know of) from the DD's profiles. And I started checking NSis and GCYB's profiles once a month from a dummy profile. I didn't really want to know what was going on in their lives, but I know them pretty well. They've rewritten history to the point now that they really believe that I'm the bad guy, the catalyst of their unease and destruction. This works to my advantage in a way, because they're not careful, they stand so firmly on their false moral superiority that they don't particularly watch what they say.
I'd lay dollars to doughnuts that if they did succeed in getting a response from the DD's or making a connection somehow, they'd be crowing their success from the mountaintops. So, once a month, I check and see what kind of shit they're flinging on their cyber walls.
Two years ago just after Thanksgiving, NSis posted a whole bunch of pictures of the "family" as it exists today all dressed up and posed by the Christmas tree. And the title of one of those Norman Rockwell portraits of traditional family bliss: "FUCK YOU VANCI." Of course she used my real name.
After NM's drug induced and mismanaged near death stay at the hospital in April of last year, NSis posted a comment about how "all the family is here with us now." Then she followed it up with a clarification, "Well, all the good family." Then yet another clarification, "I didn't mean any of the extended family in [another state], just Vanci."
So, no. I'm not off the radar. The guns might be pointed in a different direction momentarily, but they didn't lose my coordinates, not by a long shot. So they'll come at me or they won't when they feel like it, and they'll escalate as they see fit. They never took my opinion or feelings into account in the first place, even when I was the glue that held their lives together, their indentured servant who spoke to each and every one of them every day. They're sure as fuck not going to take my boundaries or wishes into account now.
Just like Nicky Santoro, they'll keep coming at me, one way or another.
That's dark, isn't it? Frightening, even.
But guess what?
They can't touch me.
I've done the work to break the cycle, and there isn't a single person on the face of the planet that I care about who doesn't know exactly who the Narcs in my NFOO are, and exactly what they do. There also isn't a single soul I care about who doesn't know exactly who I am, what I've been through and what I stand for. They may have rewritten history in their minds, but I've got the facts, the proof and witnesses galore of what and who they really are, what it really is and who I really am.
I have truth on my side, and I stand ready for anything they can throw.
Come at me, bros.
And we'll just see who ends up in the (metaphorical) hole in the desert.
Love,
Vanci
I spent scads of time on this journey to understand. I wrote checks in an attempt to purchase relevance. I thinked and thought and thunk some more in my efforts to figure it and them out. The only answer I received had more to do with acceptance of their natures than understanding of their motivations; they do what they do cause they do it. But that was a different post.
In my failed Quest to understand the Holy Grail of Why They Do the Evils They Do, though, I did learn a lot. Most of what I learned concerned the How of their actions.
ACoNs are trained from day one to NotSee and to UnSee. We know the truth of most situations, in my experience, as we are generally intuitive, observant and highly attuned to the gestures and actions of those around us. These attributes are often keys to our survival. We know what's really happening, but we are forced by our Nfamily to carry those truths silently within ourselves and to keep mum. We know the truth of the evil deeds, but we are trained to protect the perpetrators from their own actions with lies. Then, in the ironic twist that is inherent to life with Narcs, we are blamed for their evil actions in the first place.
It's the definition of CrazyMaking. How does a child survive this paradox? We learn to UnSee, at least to the best of our abilities. Of course, it makes us sick and causes us great pain, but we become masters of denial.
So, when we try to get better, when we begin to walk a path we hope will bring us to healing, we often are surprised by the outright heinous, forcefully aggressive assaults that the Narcs begin to hit us with. We've been ingesting their lies for so long, making up our own lies to protect ourselves for so long that invariably at some point we began to believe them.
I remember telling myself that surely it couldn't have been as bad as I felt. They probably didn't mean it that way. I was being overly sensitive. I wasn't perfect either, and maybe I was being too hard on them.
No wonder I couldn't be honest enough to see their attacks for the declarations of war that they were; I couldn't even be honest with myself about the facts of the abuse I'd suffered at their hands. I was stripped to the bone emotionally and had no capability to understand my own actions, no less someone else's. Throw Narcissism in the mix and all bets of comprehension were off. It was all I could do to even cope.
In retrospect, though, I can see a clear pattern of escalation from the very first boundary that I drew with the N's to the final storming of the beach that resulted in No Contact.
In the movie Casino, Joe Pesci plays strongman Nicky Santoro, protector to casino veep Ace. His portrayal of the character is terrifying partly, I think, because Joe Pesci's what, five feet tall? Regardless of his small stature, no matter what he looks like or what he seems to be, though, he's a vicious, brutal killer. This is how Ace (Robert DeNiro) describes Nicky.
"You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead."
Set aside reason, forget about reasonableness. This is how Narc's against the wall of a boundary communicate; with an ever evolving and escalating series of attacks. Civil tools aren't going to get them to back off.
You want them to stop calling you to scream at you? They're going to call you to scream AND they're going to get someone else to call you to scream at you too. You ask them to stay away from your children? They contact those children in every way they can think of, even moreso than they've ever shown any desire to talk to them before. You change your number? They show up at your house. You call the police when they show up at your house? They show up at your work. You ask them to leave? They call your customer service hotline to complain about how you treated them while pretending to be a non-involved customer. You manage to find a way to cut them out of your life completely? They stalk you and find out who your non-involved friends are, make nice with them and try to turn them against you. You lock your doors? They peer through your windows. You move on? They hunt you down.
They do not stop. Ever.
They can go into a cycle of dismissiveness, sure. They'll move on at points, find new victims, stay away for awhile if they can find other sources of Narc Supply. Junkies can usually find a new supplier, you know (but that doesn't mean that they forget their favorite drug.) Mine did, and there have been times when I've been lulled into the deceptive calm; into believing that silence is equivalent to serenity and that maybe they've just given up, gotten over it, moved on. This isn't truth, though.
They are fully capable of changing their game, developing different tactics and strategies, and they're good at it. (This, more than anything else that I know of, speaks volumes about them. If they are capable of changing the way that they come at me to hurt me, then they are absolutely capable of changing the fact that they are hurting me. Simple math then makes it easy to deduce that the capability to change is there; willingness to do so is what's missing on their part.) I've made it hard for them to get to me, and this creates some space because they aren't willing to work that hard, at least not today. They're getting their fix somewhere else, you see, so right now at this very moment, I get a pass.
But I'm not off the hook from their attacks. I'm back-burnered, that's all. Sooner or later, I've no doubt, there will be a trigger (my money's on my oldest DD turning 18 in a couple of years) and then they will be back in force (probably coming at my daughters rather than me; predators always go for what they see as the easiest prey first.) We say in alcoholic recovery that the disease of alcoholism doesn't go away when we stop drinking, it just hangs out behind our backs doing push-ups and getting stronger, waiting for an opening to slither back into an active status. So too, I believe, are the Narcs lurking in the shadows out there, just thinkin' shit up.
I'm not a paranoid conspiracy theorist. I don't sit around detailing or stressing about the ways that they're planning to get me. I just don't ignore the truth anymore.
Almost two years ago, the DD's let me know that NSis and GCYB had been trying to contact the DD's via social networking. This was almost three years since the last time I'd spoken to either NSis or GCYB. We're talking absolute radio silence, not a phone call, a letter, nothing, nada, zilch. The DD's have always had private profiles, but we took the additional steps to systemically block NSis and GCYB (and the minions that I know of) from the DD's profiles. And I started checking NSis and GCYB's profiles once a month from a dummy profile. I didn't really want to know what was going on in their lives, but I know them pretty well. They've rewritten history to the point now that they really believe that I'm the bad guy, the catalyst of their unease and destruction. This works to my advantage in a way, because they're not careful, they stand so firmly on their false moral superiority that they don't particularly watch what they say.
I'd lay dollars to doughnuts that if they did succeed in getting a response from the DD's or making a connection somehow, they'd be crowing their success from the mountaintops. So, once a month, I check and see what kind of shit they're flinging on their cyber walls.
Two years ago just after Thanksgiving, NSis posted a whole bunch of pictures of the "family" as it exists today all dressed up and posed by the Christmas tree. And the title of one of those Norman Rockwell portraits of traditional family bliss: "FUCK YOU VANCI." Of course she used my real name.
After NM's drug induced and mismanaged near death stay at the hospital in April of last year, NSis posted a comment about how "all the family is here with us now." Then she followed it up with a clarification, "Well, all the good family." Then yet another clarification, "I didn't mean any of the extended family in [another state], just Vanci."
So, no. I'm not off the radar. The guns might be pointed in a different direction momentarily, but they didn't lose my coordinates, not by a long shot. So they'll come at me or they won't when they feel like it, and they'll escalate as they see fit. They never took my opinion or feelings into account in the first place, even when I was the glue that held their lives together, their indentured servant who spoke to each and every one of them every day. They're sure as fuck not going to take my boundaries or wishes into account now.
Just like Nicky Santoro, they'll keep coming at me, one way or another.
That's dark, isn't it? Frightening, even.
But guess what?
They can't touch me.
I've done the work to break the cycle, and there isn't a single person on the face of the planet that I care about who doesn't know exactly who the Narcs in my NFOO are, and exactly what they do. There also isn't a single soul I care about who doesn't know exactly who I am, what I've been through and what I stand for. They may have rewritten history in their minds, but I've got the facts, the proof and witnesses galore of what and who they really are, what it really is and who I really am.
I have truth on my side, and I stand ready for anything they can throw.
Come at me, bros.
And we'll just see who ends up in the (metaphorical) hole in the desert.
Love,
Vanci
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Surrendering the Outcome
I've been meditating a lot lately on the concept of 'surrender.' In recovery, this is a word that I hear thrown around a lot - one of those omnipresent buzzwords that enters into conversation through many different doors.
I hear people talk about surrendering to a higher power, surrendering their faults (or character defects if one prefers to church it up,) surrendering a drink or a pill or a joint and surrendering their will. That last is, in my mind, both overused and terrifying; to surrender one's will is to give up, as I see it, and to embrace powerlessness as a state of being rather than a spritual or emotional pain point that can result in growth.
Twelve-step programs are rife with amateur phraseology, and I think that most of it can be helpful. It's never caused me pain to think an action through all the way to the outcome, which is what is the action that the old-school slogan 'Think, Think, Think,' is intended to prompt. 'One day at a time,' another cue that's been around seemingly forever, reminds me that I don't have to spend today wallowing in the unchangeable past or stuck on the scary possibilities of tomorrow.
HALT - an acronym for Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? means to me that when I find myself in a particularly sour frame of mind - or with an overwhelming desire to escape my life with a mind-altering dose of self-medication - I have the ability to pause and to take this quick needs assesment. It's simple. Hungry? Eat something. Angry? Find out why and do some work on the root cause of the feeling in order to acknowledge the truth of why I'm feeling this feeling. Lonely? Call someone. Tired? Take a nap. All of these pauses take me out of my head and into the real world of nourishment, tangibility, interaction, rest. Often, the pause provides me with as much course correction as the ensuing self-care action does.
So, to use another common phrase, we 'take what's good and leave the rest.' The word surrender triggered a hot-button reaction from me for a long time, because I could only understand the definition of it as one of retreat, giving up, giving in and throwing in the proverbial towel. Eventually I talked to enough people and gained enough experience in my internal bullshit-o-meter to hear with my heart the best definition of true surrender that I know:
"Surrender doesn't mean that we quit trying to do anything, Vanci. It just means that we decide to continue to take the right actions in our life while giving up control of the outcome of those actions."
Wow. This gem was handed to me by a good friend who happens to give off these powerful Zen calm, peaceful vibes. When he walks into the room, I think... Ahhhhhhhh. So, naturally, I want what he has, which means that when he talks, I listen.
In the context of my Crazymaking FOO, this concept of surrender was a tough one for me to apply. My experience with all of them has been, to varying degrees, that what they do when they don't get exactly what they want from me is to apply massive pressure from any angle they can find.
As an example, several years ago, OS and YB lived elsewhere from the town that I lived in. NM and EF lived about 15 miles from me. The parents decided to take a trip to visit my siblings, and it was expected that I would watch their three dogs. No one asked, mind you, they simply told me when they would be gone and told me that they'd leave the house unlocked. It was spring, which meant that their extremely rural driveway was impassable. My two daughers were in 2nd and 4th grades, and school was in session. DH and I both worked full time jobs. There was no way that we could pack up our entire day-to-day lives and move the 15 miles out to the clan compound for a week, and, frankly, no normal person would expect this from a busy young family such as mine was.
I told NM and EF that I wouldn't be coming to stay at their house, but that I would make the 30 mile round trip drive each day - on my dime, of course, compensation for this was never a question - to check on their dogs. The pushback began immediately.
I received a phone call from OS in which she berated me for my selfish actions. I received a phone call from NM and EF asking me why I was making it so difficult for them to go visit OS. Was I jealous? Couldn't I find the time to do as I was asked for these people who had sacrificed so much for me? YB wanted to know why, just because I couldn't understand the bond that the parents had with their dogs, couldn't I help them out just this one time. The over-riding sentiment was that if I didn't buckle, didn't 'decide' to do exactly as I was asked, either NM or EF would have to stay home. This would, of course, be my fault.
I can't remember how that particular spiral of multi-faceted abuse and pressure ceased, but I'm fairly certain that DH - ever the voice of reason and as an outsider, he was always treated by a better code of behavior than I was - intervened and calmly asserted that A) the dogs would be fine and B) the negotiations were closed and if there was further talk about the situation it would be along the lines of which kennel the dogs could go to. We ended up driving the 30 miles round trip daily and checking on the animals, who were, in the end, fine.
In retrospect, this was part of the pre-pre-pre-Vanci rebellion. For about three years before I finally took real, tangible steps onto a path of healing, I made these tiny little forays into independence. I was beaten into submission every time, but with each little step toward freedom I gained valuable knowledge. Even the half-assed compromise that I made in the Great Dog Watching Rebellion - I mean after all I did spend a good 90 minutes each day for two weeks saddling up and driving out to the boon tillies to check on the dogs - was a step forward for me. Previously under the same circumstances, I wouldn't have even questioned that I was intuitively fulfilling an inappropriate expectation. They said jump...
Those little wins didn't feel great to me, and in truth my inconsistent here-and-there small scale balking against the puppet master's strings created a lot of conflict in the short term. I knew I didn't want to be their whipping girl any more, so I tried not to be. But I didn't yet know how to be anything else; I certainly hadn't re-connected with any part of my true self yet. So all I really knew in that time was that I didn't want to be what I'd always thought I was. It was an empty and lonely time, but those baby steps were crucial as the very beginning steps in building what would eventually become a strong foundation to a new, healthier life.
As I continued to take one step and then another on the ever-widening path to mental health and freedom from fear, I learned slowly and sometimes painfully about the concept of release through surrender. As I sought out and took the right actions - over and over and over again - I built up a play list of examples that eventually helped me to identify patterns.
A problem would arise.
It was my job to fix it.
I'd do everything within my power to do the right thing.
It still wasn't good enough for them, especially of my idea of the right thing varied from their idea of what I needed to do for them.
I'd apologize and cave in to complete whatever chore they had in mind for me in the way they wanted it done.
It would still be wrong.
And then...
A problem would arise.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Endlessly.
At some point the pattern became clear and I stopped apologizing. I stopped giving in. I started making little stands here and there. The issues that I stood on got bigger. I got stronger. Wham-o.
Now I embrace surrender, with the understanding that comes from acknowledging that I am responsible for me. That is all. Just me. When I do the right thing, I'm freeing myself from responsibility for any one else's reactions or feelings on the matter. I'm giving it up. Sometimes even the right actions create pain, and that is when I now know that I can use that. I can look at that pain and use it as a touchstone for growth.
When I am aware enough to identify those sore spots as areas that I need to tackle, work on, strengthen, it quickly leads me to gratitude. How lucky am I that I can see and feel these sick cycles and constructs that I was given for the awful bullshit that they really are? And how lucky am I that I have the tools now to recognize those nasty people, places, things for the festering wounds that they are and take action to clean them out so that I can move on with my life?
Damn lucky, that's how much. Damn lucky.
Love,
Vanci
I hear people talk about surrendering to a higher power, surrendering their faults (or character defects if one prefers to church it up,) surrendering a drink or a pill or a joint and surrendering their will. That last is, in my mind, both overused and terrifying; to surrender one's will is to give up, as I see it, and to embrace powerlessness as a state of being rather than a spritual or emotional pain point that can result in growth.
Twelve-step programs are rife with amateur phraseology, and I think that most of it can be helpful. It's never caused me pain to think an action through all the way to the outcome, which is what is the action that the old-school slogan 'Think, Think, Think,' is intended to prompt. 'One day at a time,' another cue that's been around seemingly forever, reminds me that I don't have to spend today wallowing in the unchangeable past or stuck on the scary possibilities of tomorrow.
HALT - an acronym for Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? means to me that when I find myself in a particularly sour frame of mind - or with an overwhelming desire to escape my life with a mind-altering dose of self-medication - I have the ability to pause and to take this quick needs assesment. It's simple. Hungry? Eat something. Angry? Find out why and do some work on the root cause of the feeling in order to acknowledge the truth of why I'm feeling this feeling. Lonely? Call someone. Tired? Take a nap. All of these pauses take me out of my head and into the real world of nourishment, tangibility, interaction, rest. Often, the pause provides me with as much course correction as the ensuing self-care action does.
So, to use another common phrase, we 'take what's good and leave the rest.' The word surrender triggered a hot-button reaction from me for a long time, because I could only understand the definition of it as one of retreat, giving up, giving in and throwing in the proverbial towel. Eventually I talked to enough people and gained enough experience in my internal bullshit-o-meter to hear with my heart the best definition of true surrender that I know:
"Surrender doesn't mean that we quit trying to do anything, Vanci. It just means that we decide to continue to take the right actions in our life while giving up control of the outcome of those actions."
Wow. This gem was handed to me by a good friend who happens to give off these powerful Zen calm, peaceful vibes. When he walks into the room, I think... Ahhhhhhhh. So, naturally, I want what he has, which means that when he talks, I listen.
In the context of my Crazymaking FOO, this concept of surrender was a tough one for me to apply. My experience with all of them has been, to varying degrees, that what they do when they don't get exactly what they want from me is to apply massive pressure from any angle they can find.
As an example, several years ago, OS and YB lived elsewhere from the town that I lived in. NM and EF lived about 15 miles from me. The parents decided to take a trip to visit my siblings, and it was expected that I would watch their three dogs. No one asked, mind you, they simply told me when they would be gone and told me that they'd leave the house unlocked. It was spring, which meant that their extremely rural driveway was impassable. My two daughers were in 2nd and 4th grades, and school was in session. DH and I both worked full time jobs. There was no way that we could pack up our entire day-to-day lives and move the 15 miles out to the clan compound for a week, and, frankly, no normal person would expect this from a busy young family such as mine was.
I told NM and EF that I wouldn't be coming to stay at their house, but that I would make the 30 mile round trip drive each day - on my dime, of course, compensation for this was never a question - to check on their dogs. The pushback began immediately.
I received a phone call from OS in which she berated me for my selfish actions. I received a phone call from NM and EF asking me why I was making it so difficult for them to go visit OS. Was I jealous? Couldn't I find the time to do as I was asked for these people who had sacrificed so much for me? YB wanted to know why, just because I couldn't understand the bond that the parents had with their dogs, couldn't I help them out just this one time. The over-riding sentiment was that if I didn't buckle, didn't 'decide' to do exactly as I was asked, either NM or EF would have to stay home. This would, of course, be my fault.
I can't remember how that particular spiral of multi-faceted abuse and pressure ceased, but I'm fairly certain that DH - ever the voice of reason and as an outsider, he was always treated by a better code of behavior than I was - intervened and calmly asserted that A) the dogs would be fine and B) the negotiations were closed and if there was further talk about the situation it would be along the lines of which kennel the dogs could go to. We ended up driving the 30 miles round trip daily and checking on the animals, who were, in the end, fine.
In retrospect, this was part of the pre-pre-pre-Vanci rebellion. For about three years before I finally took real, tangible steps onto a path of healing, I made these tiny little forays into independence. I was beaten into submission every time, but with each little step toward freedom I gained valuable knowledge. Even the half-assed compromise that I made in the Great Dog Watching Rebellion - I mean after all I did spend a good 90 minutes each day for two weeks saddling up and driving out to the boon tillies to check on the dogs - was a step forward for me. Previously under the same circumstances, I wouldn't have even questioned that I was intuitively fulfilling an inappropriate expectation. They said jump...
Those little wins didn't feel great to me, and in truth my inconsistent here-and-there small scale balking against the puppet master's strings created a lot of conflict in the short term. I knew I didn't want to be their whipping girl any more, so I tried not to be. But I didn't yet know how to be anything else; I certainly hadn't re-connected with any part of my true self yet. So all I really knew in that time was that I didn't want to be what I'd always thought I was. It was an empty and lonely time, but those baby steps were crucial as the very beginning steps in building what would eventually become a strong foundation to a new, healthier life.
As I continued to take one step and then another on the ever-widening path to mental health and freedom from fear, I learned slowly and sometimes painfully about the concept of release through surrender. As I sought out and took the right actions - over and over and over again - I built up a play list of examples that eventually helped me to identify patterns.
A problem would arise.
It was my job to fix it.
I'd do everything within my power to do the right thing.
It still wasn't good enough for them, especially of my idea of the right thing varied from their idea of what I needed to do for them.
I'd apologize and cave in to complete whatever chore they had in mind for me in the way they wanted it done.
It would still be wrong.
And then...
A problem would arise.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Endlessly.
At some point the pattern became clear and I stopped apologizing. I stopped giving in. I started making little stands here and there. The issues that I stood on got bigger. I got stronger. Wham-o.
Now I embrace surrender, with the understanding that comes from acknowledging that I am responsible for me. That is all. Just me. When I do the right thing, I'm freeing myself from responsibility for any one else's reactions or feelings on the matter. I'm giving it up. Sometimes even the right actions create pain, and that is when I now know that I can use that. I can look at that pain and use it as a touchstone for growth.
When I am aware enough to identify those sore spots as areas that I need to tackle, work on, strengthen, it quickly leads me to gratitude. How lucky am I that I can see and feel these sick cycles and constructs that I was given for the awful bullshit that they really are? And how lucky am I that I have the tools now to recognize those nasty people, places, things for the festering wounds that they are and take action to clean them out so that I can move on with my life?
Damn lucky, that's how much. Damn lucky.
Love,
Vanci
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)