In the series on recovering from traumatic relationships, this is the third article on grieving and letting go. It is an extension of the last one, which discussed exploring the past to understand our patterns of belief and behavior. This is about how we do it and what we find. Or rather about how I did it, and what I found
Unpacking frozen memories
This week I reached out to someone whose name is part of my history. She was once the lover of a man I regarded as the great love of my life. He was an alcoholic poet who died when I was 23. She is a poet too. I found her web site, read a poem about the first time they made love, and wrote her an e-mail to introduce myself.
She wrote back, asking about his life and how he died. I tried to answer her factually, but found myself drifting over and over into how I felt about it all.
She asked if I ever wrote about him. I told her that, when he died, it was as thought my memory was wiped. I couldn’t remember his voice or the joking banter that was part of our everyday conversations. Except for photos, I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I was so angry, it took me four years to finally grieve him and let him go. At that time, I dreamed about him, and those memories are more vivid than our life together. If I could write anything, it would be only my story. I couldn’t reproduce him in prose. I wish I could.
I wrote a second letter, apologizing for going on and on about my feelings. I tried to tell her more about our life together, getting lost again in telling her about how it was for me as more and more memories returned. Then, within the same day, I wrote her a third letter. Apologizing once again for dumping all this me, me, me on her, a stranger. Telling her it wasn’t my conscious intention when I wrote her, but I was using her to unpack those frozen memories. That’s what she was seeing in these letters.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve done this. Through the years of recovery, I’ve reached out several times to lost people in my history. Always thinking I was just writing to say hi, and then finding memories flooding me. The one the sticks in my mind was an e-mail exchange with my high-school boyfriend, who broke up with me after we begin attending different colleges. It happened at the same time that my mother threw me out, because I’d tried to tell her what my father had done to me and was about to do to my younger sister. My mother accepted my father’s lies about a 13-year-old seducing him. Before this boy broke up with me, I finally told him the truth about me. Then he told me he wanted to date someone else at his new school.
He remembers only the sensible break-up of two teenagers going to schools in different states. But talking to him reopened what I was living through. I was at the edge of adulthood, abandoned by everyone who cared about me. Until then, I survived on an illusion that I could have a “regular life” by pretending it never happened. Now I saw that I was going to pay over and over. I felt how my personality tightened around fear, determination to ward off new monsters, and a hunger for something I called love, but now think was simply safety.
This was one of the foundations of behavior and belief I described in the last article. These events shaped much of what happened later. I didn’t have to think about it intellectually. I felt it. The insight shined like a light on the future of that young adult.
I had to stop talking to him. I was starting to say cruel and provocative things to him, sniping he didn’t deserve. Because in insight, I also saw him as he was, as well as my mother as she was, from the vantage point of the distant future. He too was entering his adulthood, actively shaping his future. How much of his potential could I expect him to sacrifice for a girl who was truly messed up? Would he fight my father? Was there anything fair about expecting him to take care of me, when he never would have gotten involved with me if he’d known the truth? Likewise, my mother, what did I expect from her? She was beaten down, trying to survive with her three younger children, and she was afraid of my father and afraid to leave him. She chose their survival.
I could see how my father’s behavior had damaged me and how my damage burdened other people. It wasn’t my fault or theirs. Whether they took on my burden was a decision about their lives, their resources, what they could handle. I had no choice, but they did. And they had more than me to consider.
I could see how it all came together. Without thinking about the word, I forgave my boyfriend and my mother. Instead of being angry, I mourned for myself, that young girl with no one but herself to depend on. It could have been different. But it was what it was. She had to move on, wounded but with no time or place to heal. She would create a life that reflected the reality of those unhealed wounds. And in understanding this, I forgave myself too. I stopped thinking I was stupid or selfish or incompetent or lazy or anything else. I was someone who lacked the resources that a lot of people took for granted, and I did the best I could.
Inside the myths
The more I crack open the “truths” of my life to discover what is really inside them, the more I come to realize that luck is a big factor. Perhaps that is too light a word for what I mean — the random way that events coalesce at a moment in time.
The great learning of the angry phase is that we are not responsible for what we cannot control. Our traumatic encounters begin with location and timing. If things had been a little different, we would not have been there. Beyond that, we did not want to be hurt or ask for it. Other people have their own histories and structures of behavior and belief. We did not create them and we cannot control them. If they had been different, it would have come out differently.
In the angry phase, we spend time dissecting what happened, finding what to blame on the circumstances and on the people who hurt us. We look outside ourselves for the reasons our good intentions attracted such bad results.
Twenty-five years after this husband died, another man drove me into healing myself. I believe he is a sociopath. In getting over him, one of the things that moved me from anger into grieving and letting go was a jarring realization that there was nothing I could blame on the sociopath that didn’t seem to be equally true of me. He was using me and he didn’t care about my feelings. True, but I also wanted him to be what I wanted him to be. And though my methods of coercion were more socially acceptable as “expressions of love,” their intention was to persuade him or guilt-trip him into giving me what I wanted.
The same was true for lying or obfuscation. Whatever he hid from me, I hid as much from him. I didn’t share what I really felt or wanted. I kept posing as an adult when I had a wounded child’s needs for unconditional love and complete safety. The same was true for being selfishly uncaring about what I wanted. I claimed to be committed to making him happy, but what I really meant by “happy” was him loving me and making a forever commitment. .
If I had accepted what his words and behavior were telling me about his capacity to give me what I wanted, that would have been the time to decide whether I liked or loved him. No blame. No fault. He fit or he didn’t. The truth was he didn’t. I wasn’t lucky that way with him. His life might have been improved by me, but the opposite wasn’t true. This was a frog, not a prince. It was that simple.
Luck turned on its head
As I get older, and keep cracking open the bits of mythology that make up my beliefs about my own life. I sometimes find surprises.
Writing the former lover of my dead husband, my memories opened up. Because I read her poetry and remember a few things he told me, I knew that she wasn’t certain about him and ultimately sent him away. She knew he was an ex-con. She knew he always had a bottle of beer in his hand. She knew he was seductive and smooth. I understand why she passed on him. She had professional stature, life equity, something to lose.
It was different for me. I was barely 20, desperate for a new life. Equally desperate for acceptance, because I felt like a freak. I had a soul-killing clerical job, no money, no clue of what to do next. I had heard things about him.That he had stocked the library shelves in a brand-new prison and was literate, had read everything. He was already a published poet, and people spoke of him with awe and affection.
When I met him, I saw a big handsome man with a background as bad as mine who had made something extraordinary of himself. The booze and drugs, the terminal liver disease, our shared ability to ignore the fact that he was engaged to another woman somehow just added to the mystique. I looked at him and saw a future that was better than anything I could create alone. That night I stayed with him and never left.
I told her how it began. And then I told her about the end. Watching his character and intellect deteriorate as his liver failed, the blessing of his death in a car accident, my angry refusal to grieve him until I had a psychotic break four years later. But, by the time he died, I had a profession. I was a writer. He fed me books, taught me to edit, gave me rules of writing and thinking which serve me to this day. He left this girl, 13 years younger than him, a new future.
That’s the mythology. In the first letter, I wrote “I was lucky.” I meant lucky to find him, but the words stayed with me after I sent the letter. As I told her more in the second letter, I found myself looking at me through her eyes. My myth of a great romance began to shrivel to the story of a vulnerable child-woman and the out-of-control addict she had chosen as a replacement daddy. I would do anything, accept any treatment or circumstance, as long as he would stay alive and keep convincing me that he loved me. Yes, he was charismatic and funny, brilliant and talented, and probably more tolerant of my childish neediness than almost anyone else might have been. But it was a dead-end ride and I wouldn’t get out of it without more damage.
By the time I was writing the third letter, I was not telling her about the times he had hit me. The ways he made me carry his grass, because he was already a three-time loser. How, when we were broke, he wanted me to start whoring. How our open marriage was a license for him, not me. How when he became too bored writing the trash novels that supported us, I did it alone. Or how, at the end, he kept getting into serious accidents with other women, until he eventually died in a car with a woman who barely survived it.
In the myth, these were blips in a mostly charmed life with someone who understood me and who my horrible life into something interesting and glamorous. But now I remembered that the last time he went to prison, it was because of a tip by a woman he was living with, who was supposedly working her way through college as a prostitute. I thought about how people with my background make up the majority of prostitutes. The woman who tipped the police about the suitcase of grass in his trunk had gotten rid of him, like the woman poet, like the wife before her, another beautiful and gifted woman who fell in love with him, corresponding while he was still in prison, but gave up on him after his drinking created grief, chaos and endless expense. Like me, they probably all loved him after he was gone, but they got rid of him, because he was dangerous to them and himself.
Looking back at him, another damaged child with a terrible background, and me, who was hungry and bright but with no boundaries or any idea of what a good relationship looked like, I realized that I was luckier than I knew. Lucky that he wasn’t well and needed someone to take care of him. Lucky that, except for a brief scary period, we made enough money writing that he didn’t go back to dealing or trying to turn me out. Lucky that he was probably more kind than he would have been under other circumstances, and that I had the opportunity to see the best more than the worst of him. Lucky that I came out of it with a way to support myself so I didn’t have to submit to the next “rescuer” that came along.
Like the situation with the man who couldn’t be what I wanted him to be, this was a confluence of circumstances. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I wouldn’t have seen him as I did. Nor loved him and mourned him as the soul mate whose good influence stays with me to this day. If he hadn’t been too broke to escape from Albany, I never would have met him. If either of us had more resources, it never would have happened. But I was lucky. He was what I needed him to be, and I was that for him.
Who is under those sacks of cement?
Writers treasure people’s peculiarities. Stories would be boring without them. But, to write well, it is also necessary to dig under the stereotypes of good and evil. My husband’s story didn’t begin with prison, or the dope-dealing or pimping. I knew a few things about his early life, but in retrospect I know more from just seeing how he responded to trauma. He refused to be broken. It was something I loved about him, but it also spoke of entrenched habits of trying to ignore or bury pain. We had this in common.
We thought we were brave, but I’ve come to think it’s braver to face the truth. Which, in our case, was a dance of the walking wounded. Facing truth can take romance out of a story, but facts may be more nourishing. Truth may lead to spontaneous forgiveness, as I forgave my old boyfriend and my mother. It also can show us that we did the best we could. We see the burdens we are carrying and the innocent and good soul who is trying to bear them.
Blaming ourselves is a function of anger. Realizing that we are not perfect, that we live with handicaps, is part of grieving and letting go. Facing it doesn’t mean we give up trying to heal. And forgiveness has nothing to do, ultimately, with the people we are forgiving. It is a choice of what we want to care about, what burdens we decide not to carry. Being mad at a sociopath for being a sociopath and exploiting or hurting us is like hating the sun for shining and giving us sunburn. Facing reality empowers us to deal with it. Wear sunscreen. Trust conditionally.
The best reason to invest in healing from unresolved trauma is because it is crippling. It blocks our ability to mature through experience. It constricts personality structure with fear-based blinders and self-limiting rules that should only be interim strategies, rough protections until we see through what happened. The more we understand the confluence of events, most of which had nothing to do with us, the more trauma tends to lose its glamour and terror. It becomes simply a variety of human experience that we integrate into our knowledge of the world. When we stop mistaking a snake for a goose, because we now know that snakes exist, life becomes that much easier, safer and richer.
In the next piece, we will talk more about the relationship of fear and forgiveness. Until then
Namaste, the unchangeably innocent spirit in me salutes the unchangeably innocent spirit in you.
Kathy
Hi Kathleen
I dont comment on the site often, but I follow your articles religiously. They act as milestones along the path of sequential healing for me.
What I see more of now is that it is not only healing from the psychopath, but dealing with all the periferal relationships around it, that were a supporting structure of it. And the anger towards those who helped make it what it was, even though they are not themselves disordered. It makes me angry that no-one seems to have the strength, or the insight, to offer the help that is needed, and when it is needed. They cant even listen.
And so, you are on your own. Yes, eventually, you work things out. Years go by, and slowly you heal your life. But those failures endure.
I can see how a series of abandonments led up to me wanting a sort of redemption. And the N recognised this, and pretended to be it. I had bad luck, and he was a frog. But I did what we all did, and hung on as if my life depended on it, suffering all the hurt and degradation that goes with it.
Now he is gone. And rather than wanting redemption, I value other things. Healthier things.
I look back on those abandonments that conditioned me, that prepared me for him, and that made him possible, and I am enormously disappointed. These relationships are still there – parents, siblings, friends. I look at these relationships with very reduced expectations, and with reduced affection. Trust is conditional here too, not only with new partners.
So the N is the personification of emotional poverty. But that poverty is really systemic, much broader than him.
It really can be a heavy burdon healing from all of this. Looking at all your relationships in the harsh light of day.
I thank you for your sharing, and I thank you for the redemption you offer by sharing yourself. What I get from this site, and from you, is the kind of advice that I should have received from others much closer to me.
Dear kathy,
It is amazing to me that the “ignorant and wounded” young woman I was at 20 didn’t end up dead in a gutter somewhere or in prison for being with the “wrong person at the wrong time” as I too sought safety and security, validation and love.
I was fortunate to have had older, wiser, and caring friends in the form of more seasoned adults who steared me gently away from danger and into at least a semblence of a “normal” life which covered my festering wounds of emotinoal abandonment from my egg donor, and the physical, emotional and other abuse suffered at the hands of my P-sperm donor. Luck? Good fortune? Yes.
And, like you so eloqently put it in your essay, I’ve been reopening those memories and looking at them from a different perspective as I healed, forgave them, forgave myself, and moved closer to the city limits of Healing.
Last night I stayed on the phone til 3 a.m. with a friend who was telling me she had diagnosed herself as “Histrionic Cluster C”—I laughingly assured her that my professional opinon was that her “problem” was not that, but instead the anxiety, pain and depression (she had stopped taking her anti-depresant medication) from her yearly years of sexual abuse from both her parents AND her siblings and their friends, from the massive abuse of a mother who viewed her as a possession whose sole duty was to take care of “Mommie dearest” who IS a psychopathic abuser….my friend’s reaction to her early sexual, physical and emotional abuse was to live a chotic and miserable life, looking “for love in all the wrong places” until she eventually ended up with a viiolent and abusvie psychopath that she finally escaped from.
Now, my friend, like you, and like I, is examining her past memories in the BRIGHT LIGHT OF DAY, instead of sweeping these under the rug of fantasy.
She is a sweet, caring and wonderful person, who is still feeling her way along the road toward the city limits of Healing, and in my opinion, doing a damned fine job of it. I BOINKED her lovingly on the head with my cast iron skillet and told her to quit being so damned hard on herself, and to get back on her antidepressant medication and to stay on it! (She admits it makes her feel better and less depressed and anxious!) DUH!
Going through our own attics and basements and storage lockers for all these old memories I think is part of the clean out process and the healing process and the journey that we are all making here at LF.
You described your journey so well, thank you for sharing. (((hugs))))
Grant, the therapist who helped me manage my emerging incest memories told me that if it if happened today, rather than back in the 60s, it was more likely the my situation would have been identified. And that I would have found help, rather than waiting most of my life to work through the traumas.
I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know that there is much more professional awareness of child abuse today. And many more of us survivors who are not afraid to speak up. It was a major milestone in my life when I found the words and the courage to say that my father raped me.
As far as the other people go, it’s an extremely difficult situation. This kind of extreme family dysfunction seldom occurs in a vacuum. In my case, there was a lot evidence that my father was physically and emotionally abused by a psychopathic father. My mother, though not coming from as terrible a background, lacked emotional support from her mother. The combination was explosive, and their children all suffered. And my generation’s children suffered.
In these situations, especially in the suffocating closed environments that tends to happen in these families, it can be very hard to find internal resources. And in the end — though I understand your anger and frustration — it doesn’t do much good to get angry at people who are emotionally out of control or unable to save themselves.
It’s one of the reasons that, as some part in this healing path, a lot of us get to realizing that we are really angry at God. For dumping us with problems we didn’t deserve, and making us climb out of these pits of disadvantage.
And oddly enough, sometimes getting it down to that fundamental level helps. Because sometimes that conversation comes down to the fact that it’s not God’s lack of caring, but God’s in faith in our ability to to not only climb out of this mess, so common here on Earth, and help stop the cycle. We can do it, if we believe in our right to do it, our own essential goodness, and our inborn power to become a positive force.
I believe in healing. That’s what you see in all of my writing. I believe that we can heal out of belief in our victimhood into belief in our power. We can live meaningful lives in which we find happiness through envisioning and following through on our highest dreams.
I can’t tell you how many people I know who don’t believe in it. Whose best idea of what is possible to kill their pain, or find revenge, or control everything. Good people whose real potential is still imprisoned in the static of shame for things that were never their fault and the confusion caused by the embedded authority of the abusers in their emotional systems.
In all the reading and therapy and self-work I’ve done, I think the most helpful thing to me has been a casual study of Buddhism through the years. Buddhism is built on a vision of emotional freedom and absolute respect for the divine spark that is at the center of all of us. It doesn’t match with our own culture, which is based on power heirarchies. But if we even start to believe that there is something absolutely and unchangeably good and wise in our centers, and the work of healing is to clear the away all the emotional garbage between our consciousness and that source of goodness and wisdom, it gives us a mental model for what we’re doing.
My articles are, in a way, dharma talks. Meant to spark ideas about what is possible. Meant to inspire new visions of who we can be. Gently, with no demands, just invitations.
Undoing damage is, at the end, finding ways to lay new mental paths, as well as returning to our essential innocence. Damage is nothing but the mind’s response to terror by carving emergency solutions in our neural networks. They are not meant to be permanent. We are naturally built to abandon them when we discover we survived and sort through what really happened and learn from it. But in a world where there is too much reinforcement of fear, too much reliance on pain-killing activities, and too little expectation of healing, we can get stuck in our emergency solutions.
This is a hard place to heal in. A hard place to believe in it at all. But believing it in it probably the most important thing we can do for ourselves. It’s not different than believing in God. In fact, maybe it’s the same thing. I’m not a particularly religious person in the conventional sense. But I believe in the God in me. Believe that if I can clear away all the emotional residue of trauma and to create a clear path to that living light in me, its influence on my life will make me happy and peaceful with myself. And it will guide to the best ways for me to use my power for healing, joy and racial evolution.
Being open to the unexpected helps. One of the points of my article was that our good comes from unexpected places. In so many ways, my husband made me the person I am today. In conventional terms, he was a bad bet. If I wanted to look at him as a source of trauma, he was. All the women who got him out of their lives were smart to do so. But I needed and angel and I believed in him. Through circumstances that included the fact that he was dying and tired, he shared the best of what he had learned with me. The fact that we were both so profoundly damaged and resourceless put us together. And it was our good luck that we both needed comfort and someone to trust. If our lives had been different, if we had less money or if we were on an upswing that gave us a sense of power, we might not have been so kind to each other. But it was one of those lucky confluences when we were both prepared to be grateful, and my belief in him turned out to be right.
It could have been different. A disaster. And in the condition I was in at that age — damaged, resourceless, desperate — it could have been the end of me. But even then, I believed in the potential to change my life, to take any crumb the world would give and run with it. And I think that character trait is another hallmark of people who get well. We want it. We really want to be something more than a carrier of our abusers’ toxins.
We just never know who our angels are going to be. Our job is to want something deeply. To really work at refining those wants so they are the best and highest we can imagine. As the Buddhists say, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. They may not be who we expect. My mother and high-school boyfriend were not my healers or teachers in those early adult years. A dying, alcoholic poet with a criminal background was. Maybe a lot of it came down to my absolute belief in him as my angel. But I wasn’t wrong. He had it in him. Many people do, if that’s what we’re looking for.
Namaste, my friend. Thanks for posting.
Oxy, I feel like, on some dimension where all this inner work is happening, you and I are walking this path together. Thanks for your great post.
Your story about your friend made me think of something. Her feelings about being histrionic might be that she’s overcoming her acquired programming against taking herself seriously. Or about deserving to be recognized and accepted for who she is. Or about being empowered to tell her own truth without thinking that punishment is the natural result. Maybe there is something in her that’s going “No, no, you’re not allowed. Who do you think you are? You’re not the boss of these things and you’re getting too big for your britches.”
It’s the inevitable internal battle when we start taking how power back. Being histrionic for a while is part of healing. I mean, look at LoveFraud. All of us go through that phase, just like we go through being angry. And accepting it as part of the healing process, allowing ourselves to be whatever we have to be — which includes not caring whether other people don’t approve — is a good thing.
Besides being histrionic is just a life strategy. It becomes a personality disorder if it’s the only tool in our tool chest. But it’s there because it’s appropriate for certain circumstances. Making a lot of noise, demanding to be heard, believing that our problems are serious, feeling like we deserve attention and support — well, I can dig it.
If I were writing article about this, I’d wind it up with “Namaste, the healthy and deserving squeaky wheel in me salutes the healthy and deserving sqeaky wheel in you.”
And, as you know, I’m with her one the antidepressants, if she can stand doing without them. My pain led me to my truth. But if it’s so much pain that it gets in the way, of course, it’s better get a little pharmaceutical help to turn down the volume a bit, so we can get on with the work. That’s why God gave us epidurals.
I love you, sweetie.
Kathy
Thanks Kathy,
I think I went PAST “histrionic” and went to HYSTERICAL in the middle of the worst of it and for a while afterwards. Actually, considering where my friend “started out” (a severely abused child from the “Poster family for abuse”) I think she has made a remarkably “fast” journey toward the city limits of Healing. She is maintaining a job she enjoys, keeping her home nice, visiting with family and GOOD friends, but still a bit lonely I think, and like all of us I guess, wants a GOOD relationship with someone, but there’s no one in sight. At least though, she is no longer taken in by the first P that flashes a smile at her.
Depression sometimes puts a black pall over everything, and I think that is where she is as far as the depression. It also distorts your thinking, making you feel “helpless” to help yourself. Making you feel “hopeless.” Makes decision making very difficult as well. The antidepressant medications (unlike tranqualizers) don’t make you not care about your problems, or make you euphoric, but they bring your cranial chemicals back to the base line “normal” so it is easier to process your emotions AND your logical thoughts without the overriding dark emotions distorting it all.
Plus, there is actually some permanent chemical changes done to our brains by the severe trauma, some of which are permanent according to some of the research.
Like the article Liane wrote about the “defeated mouse.” I have seen the same thing in abused dogs, that totally “defeated” mind set. It takes a lot to get it out of humans or animals once they have been ground into the muck so deep and for so long, and so traumatically. Been in that black abyss and have the tee shirt, or two or three! Humans or animals just get to a point that they “give up” and don’t even try to get up, because they have always been abused by everyone and defeated. Their trust in themselves to succeed is gone.
My grandfather who was somewhat of a horse whisperer taught me about this when I was learning from him to train horses. A “balky” animal is one that refuses to pull and just hunkers down and takes their whipping, not resisting much, because they feel it is inevitible, and they will not even try to pull the wagon. It is because the animal was repeatedly hooked to a wagon or plow that was way too heavy for them to pull, and try as they might, they were unsuccessful, and then they were beaten because they were unsuccessful as hard as they tried.
They come to think that they are UNABLE to pull ANY wagon or plow and that they will always fail, and that they might as well not even try, as they are going to fail AND get a beating as well.
There is a way to get this out of the horse’s head, but first you must know what CAUSED the horse to think like this, in order to over come it. Beating them more will NOT solve the problem, but instead, convinces them that they cannot pull it over and over again.
There are other times when a horse’s behavior is definat that a few sharp slaps will get them “motivated,” but again, you must know what the animal is thinking and apply the correct training to the situation.
I have seen the same thing in bosses “whipping” employees that were at first very willing and tried very hard to do their jobs, but becasuse the job assigned was IMPOSSIBLE to do under the circumstances, the boss would “whip” the employee to try to make them work harder and eventually the employee would “balk” just like the horse and just expect to be “beaten” by the boss. Some employees will hunker down and take it, and others will just walk away.
I was “beaten” by a psychopathic boss once, and I found out later she had done the same thing to everyone in the office to show her power. Others just took it and walked on egg shells around her, expecting a periodic beating for “no apparent reason,” but I resigned, which totally suprised the boss. first, because I COULD easily get another job, and secondly because I would NOT stand for an unjust and arbitrary beating even if I had no job prospects in the offing.
Just as the horse can be taught “learned helplessness” so can we humans, by repeated abusive treatment and “beatings” (physical OR emotional) to where we won’t try. Gettin gout of THAT stage is difficult, and once we have realized we are NOT helpless victims, then we CAN take back our power and process the past, and look forward to the future with hope, REAL hope!
Thanks again for sharing your wonderful article.! (((hugs))))
Kathy: Thank you for your personal courage, digging deeply within yourself to come up with these insights, and then being so generous as to share with us.
I’ve been unpacking my own trunk of memories, and re-examining the mythology. You describe it well.
“I could see how it all came together. Without thinking about the word, I forgave my boyfriend and my mother. Instead of being angry, I mourned for myself, that young girl with no one but herself to depend on. It could have been different. But it was what it was. She had to move on, wounded but with no time or place to heal. She would create a life that reflected the reality of those unhealed wounds. And in understanding this, I forgave myself too. I stopped thinking I was stupid or selfish or incompetent or lazy or anything else. I was someone who lacked the resources that a lot of people took for granted, and I did the best I could.”
Thank you for putting this into words. I’m doing the best I can.
“Namaste, the unchangeably innocent spirit in me salutes the unchangeably innocent spirit in you.”
Quote of the day from kathy:
And forgiveness has nothing to do, ultimately, with the people we are forgiving. It is a choice of what we want to care about, what burdens we decide not to carry. Being mad at a sociopath for being a sociopath and exploiting or hurting us is like hating the sun for shining and giving us sunburn. Facing reality empowers us to deal with it. Wear sunscreen. Trust conditionally.
Kathy: Thanks for another great article! I was especially struck with the part “The best reason to invest in healing from unresolved trauma is because it is crippling. It blocks our ability to mature through experience.” Really sums up my life thus far, I never matured through experience, thanks for your help!
Kathleen, Once again, a timely blessing in prose. Needed to hear that. All of that. Can’t even limit it to a quote or two. I feel so stuck and so powerless at the moment like I’m waiting for the hangman’s noose and the floor to drop out. Once again, the victimizer has the power, and I can only pray for an enlightened judge and victory come court on Tuesday. I did get up and out of town this weekend to see family and friends. Debated it and decided that pity party in the fetal position was not how I wanted to spend my weekend off. I find myself unable to work the past few shifts that I have been scheduled due to the elevated heart rate, the nasty effects of my new beta blocker which only makes me feel like lead and dread, and the inability to quiet my mind and my fear that he will succeed in taking my nursing license from me with his lies. But tomorrow I see my doctor again and will explain my stress and my fears and hope for new meds and new insights. Thank you for sharing yourself and your wisdom as I find hope and healing potential in all you share.
Kathy,
You are a courageous soul to share on such a deep level of intimacy with us who are on the path of happy destiny. My journey has been unique to me, as have all of ours. It seems hard to fathom that it has been nearly 2 months since I removed myself from the P. Now I understand those who say that the bondage was just removed. It is finally behind me, and when I occassionally think of my time with him, it seems as if it was in another lifetime. I have ME back. I no longer hate him, as I realize that is a waste of my time and energy, and I’ve already devoted too much time to that. I really feel I have been placed in a place of neutrality, and am now in therapy (EMDR), working on the issues that were buried under the relationship with the P. There are no words to express my gratitude to all of you who were of utmost help in the early days and weeks. God Bless You All.