LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Things people say

Skylar wrote “Besides, when I go over there, they love bomb me with this really sad, pleading look on their faces. Hugs and all. The guilt starts there. They want forgiveness, but they won’t LET me forgive because they aren’t sorry, so instead I get saddled with guilt for not forgiving.”

I think this is a really good example of why NC is not just a good idea in terms of self-defense, but why it’s necessary to move on with our healing. These people can push buttons (and no one is better than family at that) and suddenly make everything about them. What they want out of the transaction.

When I was healing, I wrote hundred of letters to my ex. It was the way I processed. I sent a few of them, and they always included this at the end: “Do not write me back. This is not an invitation to communicate. There is nothing you can say that I want to hear.”

I am not suggesting this as a way for anyone else to get well. Quite the contrary. But the point I’m making was that I didn’t want this to be about him anymore than it already was. I was gradually working through a process of converting from a story in which he victimized me to a story in which he was a transient player in MY LIFE, a catalyst to some growth I hadn’t clarified yet, but it was about me, not him. And I know that anything that came from him would be the devil’s own temptation to think about what was going on with him, rather than what was going on with me.

I think that in healing we make great leaps forward in getting centered, learning our lessons, re-entering life, and then the universe tosses us another curve ball, another test in exactly the same lesson to see if we’ve got it yet.

And if we’re still not settled into the learning, we get to go through another lesson in exactly the same principal of healthy thinking and living.

What I hear going on in Skylar’s letters (and forgive me, Skylar, for talking about you in the third person, but you are sharing an experience that we’ve all gone through) is two things. One is that these people who are plaguing her are somehow exempt from the lessons she learned already, about not giving energy to people who drain her or make her feel bad. The other is the hope or desire or expectation that they can or will be something other than they are.

The first thing and the second thing may be caused by the same thing, some rule in our heads that our parents, our bosses, our spouses, our ministers etc. SHOULD match some idea we have about parents, bosses, spouses or ministers. And that idea of who they should be keeps us acting as though they were, and hoping that they’ll get into their roles.

So we are not responding to them as they are, but actually to our own disappointment and often rage that our expectations are frustrated. This, of course, bleeds out and becomes a factor in the relationship. And very likely, our method of communicating our frustrated needs illuminates more of their shortcomings compared to what we want them to be, and we are left even more frustrated and bereft.

If this sounds like I’m blaming us for the problem, I’m not. Or not exactly. The problem originates with the inadequacy of these people to perform in the roles they have in our lives. Whether they are good or bad people is not the point. The point is that they are bad for what we want them for.

My father was absolutely brilliant as a housebuilder. He served as his own architect and cabinet maker. His houses were jewels that are still treasured by the people who own them today and they speak of him with awe. So if his role in my life was to build my house, things would have gone swimmingly.

Unfortunately, as a child who was dependent on him for nurture, guidance and survival, I needed him to be something else. He was totally inadequate and I was harmed. I had no other choices at the time. (Imagine if children could go shopping for their own parents, how different many of us would be!)

And to this day, I carry feelings about that, because I spent my formative years in a kind of hell that I couldn’t escape. And it caused me to accept a lot of other hellish circumstances, because I was a skilled survivor in hell.

But ultimately, we have to recognize that other people are what they are, and that we are the only people that have true power over our lives. I had to get out of that crazy-house of my upbringing to get perspective on that. As Oxy said in her excellent essay yesterday, I was was caught up in the “particular” of the daily abuse and fear. But outside, in indepenent adulthood, my life challenge turned out to be to learn that I did have the power to choose and to direct my life into circumstances that weren’t neverending battles to protect myself, but safe and nurturing environments where I could use my gifts to do something meaningful for myself and the world.

I keep talking about making it about us, owning our own lives. Part of that, I think, is just getting a time-out from the people and situations that keep us on the defensive, that keep interrupting our attempts to live in peace with random boundary violations that we have to deal with. In a way, this comes down to a decision to stay out in an open field during a hailstorm or get under a tree.

Getting under the tree not only gives us a break from being battered by the ice pellets, but it also gives us time and space to think about what to do about hail storms in general. Especially if we’re standing under that tree looking out at a hailstorm that is probably never going to stop permanently, although it may slow down occasionally or even give way to a brief spell of sunshine.

This is what it is like dealing with people who are not what we want them to be. They are never going to stop being who they are, though occasionally they may seem to be more like our dreams of them. We can buy or build a strong enough umbrella to withstand the baseball-sized zingers they will occasionally throw. We can try to dig a tunnel through the field to the next tree, avoiding it but still being totally a victim to it. We can grab a piece of sunshine to get the hell out of there and not look back. We can even set up an ice company to get some profit of what is not going to change (like a lot of female stand-up comedians have done).

But one way or another we have to acknowledge what we’re dealing with. And doing that requires us to get out of the line of fire. So we can stop spending so much energy protecting ourselves, and start figuring out what we want this to mean to us. Or what our real options are in terms of having a relationship with these people.

Saying “I want to have a family” or “I want to love my parents” or “I want to respect my minister” or “I want to be a true partner to my spouse” — even though it may appear to be an unrealistic wish, given the circumstances — is actually a good and useful thing to think about. We are talking about our own story now, how we want our lives to be shaped.

We have the power to shape our lives to match our dreams, if we know what they are. But we do not have the power to change other people. So saying “I want my family to be people I can love” may be asking for a miracle. And we may have to ultimate get a bit more flexible in our definition of parent.

And to end this up on perhaps a wacky note, until I really got better a few years ago, I spent my life marrying or living with surrogate parents, or else I was the parent and they were the child. I was caught up in a drama of seeking the parenting that I lacked as a child — in particular the comforting and the guidance in learning to live. Nowadays, when I’m better, I realize that there is transient parenting taking place all over my life. People take a moment to reassure me when I express insecurity. I call up an “expert” friend when I’m facing a confusing situation. I have one person in particular that I see when I need to be reminded that anyone cares about me.

All of these relationships are both conscious and reciprocal. I’m open about what I want from them. They have things they want from me. We feel happy and smart about what we have found with each other.

And what about my father and my ex? Well, from the great distance that long-term NC offers, I know that I wanted things from them that they were unable to give. I can get mad about it, and sometimes do when I’m in my “child” self and grieving about my disappointments. But as a adult, with the beliefs I have as an adult, I recognize they were miscast in the roles I wanted to place them in. And there’s nothing I can do about that — either in changing history or changing them.

But it’s also true that I have a role in their lives. They saw me in a certain way that was related to their idea of how the players in their lives should be and behave. And for that reason, I don’t want contact with them. I don’t want to be dealing with their expectation or attitudes, which can trigger my disappointments once again. That is a drama from my past, and I’ve moved on.

Finally, as a lot of us have learned, if not about the sociopath then about family members, when we change it can have a suprising impact on the family dynamic. It doesn’t necessarily happen immediately, and there can be a whole lot of resistance first. But the impact of refusing to play the role we’re assigned and getting real about who we’re dealing with can be really healthy.

I hope this makes sense. And as usual, I apologize for the length of this post.