By Joyce Alexander, RNP (Retired)
I often go to auctions and flea markets looking for “hidden treasures” to add to my collection of pottery and handmade baskets of split oak. One of the things I have learned to do is to look for subtle or hidden flaws in the things that I like to collect.
It isn’t uncommon to find pottery items that have been chipped or broken and then carefully mended. Sometimes the cracks are very subtle and difficult to detect. It isn’t unusual for me to see an item and get all “excited” about it, then upon closer inspection, find that there are some hidden cracks.
I got to thinking about the “hidden cracks” that are found in dysfunctional families as well. In my own, for example, we as a group tried to keep our “cracks” hidden from the community. As a teenager I frequently had something I wanted to do nixed by the adults with the phrase, “what would the neighbors think if they knew you did X, Y or Z?” It didn’t seem so much to be the actual act of doing something, but more about what the neighbors might think. Usually the thing I wanted to do that was denied was going to a school dance.
As I was growing up, I never thought of my own family as “abusive” or “dysfunctional,” though I did see other families with problems, such as alcoholism, infidelity or wife beating. My family would gossip about these people derisively, and I thought that our family was “better than” these other families because we didn’t engage in such antisocial behavior. (Little did I know!)
My uncle, the alcoholic wife beater
However, my mother’s brother (who I believe was a psychopath) was an alcoholic and a wife beater, but these facts were kept hidden from me and from the community at large until I was an adult. At that time, my uncle and his wife had (gasp!) gotten a divorce and he moved from out of state, where he and his wife had lived for many years, to our small farming community and built a house on part of my grandparents’ lands. (The part intended for him to inherit after my grandparents died.)
Of course, with him living in the community and being a “public drunk,” it was now no longer possible for my grandparents to hide either his alcoholism or his beating of his frequently changing girlfriends, who would run to the neighbors with black eyes, seeking immediate shelter. The cat was out of the bag and the community knew about my uncle’s antics. Even with this exposure in the community, my grandparents and my mother tried to keep up the façade, and seldom talked about what was going on with my uncle.
On the infrequent occasions when he would show up at our little local church and sit through a sermon, the hope was that he was finally getting sober. When he would go to rehab at the VA and spend a few days or weeks, the hope was again rekindled that this time he would change. Of course he never did.
My son, the murderer
When my son Patrick was arrested in Texas for murdering Jessica Witt in 1992, I, too, tried to keep up the facade of “being a nice normal family,” and kept the facts secret from all but my closest friends. If one of my extended family of cousins, or someone from the community, asked about my kids and where they were and what they were doing, I said that Patrick “lived in Texas and worked for the State of Texas.” This actually was “true,” as he was required by the Texas prison system to have a “job” inside prison. It wasn’t a “lie” I told myself, just not “the whole truth.”
Of course it was deception; it was hiding the crack in my “pottery” and trying to pass it off as “whole.” I felt shame that my son was a criminal. Somehow him being a criminal, a psychopath, reflected on me, and on my family. We weren’t really a “nice normal family,” but as long as I could keep the truth, the whole truth, from the community, then I didn’t have to feel the public shame of my son, my beloved son, being a common criminal, a monster. We could pretend to be a “nice normal family.”
Afraid to admit
When I first started writing articles here on LoveFraud, I posted them under my screen name of “Ox Drover,” because I still wasn’t ready to come out of the “closet” and admit publicly that my family was not “whole” and “normal.” Not ready to admit that I, as a mental health care professional, had failed so miserably in my own life.
As I healed, though, I came to realize that the shame is not mine, and should not be mine. I have done nothing “wrong.” I am not the one who killed Jessica, and I am not the one who should feel shame for Patrick having done so. Patrick is the one who should feel shame, though I know that he is actually proud of how violent his crime was.
I still don’t walk down the street with a sign of my back proclaiming “my son is a criminal,” but I no longer pretend that he isn’t, and if it is appropriate, I tell someone the whole truth, rather than cover it up.
Speaking in open court
Like many communities, especially small ones, the gossip flows hot and heavy. I have no doubt that people “talk about” the things that happened to our family back when the Trojan Horse psychopath, that my son sent to kill me, was arrested and caught having an affair with my other son’s wife. Both he and she went to jail/prison for trying to kill her husband and stealing money from my mother.
The day that I stood in front of the judge at the bail hearing for my daughter-in-law and the Trojan horse psychopath, and told in open court, in front of people I knew, what had happened, that they had been caught trying to kill my son, stolen money from my mother, and had taken “dirty pictures” in my mother’s home, I was so nervous I literally couldn’t see further than the ends of my eye lashes. My heart must have been beating 500 beats per minute as I stood there, baring for the entire community, the shame of our family falling apart.
It shouldn’t have been my shame, though. The people who did the bad acts should have owned it, but they didn’t. In fact, when the judge spoke to my daughter-in-law about her ties to the community (before he set bail), he asked her who she had in the community and she actually said, “Well, my husband’s family.” I almost choked that she would say such a thing after trying to kill her husband. The judge set her bail at $150,000. The district attorney said that without my “speech” to the judge, the bail would probably have been $2,500 or less.
The dysfunctional cracks in our family became totally public in that courtroom, and then again, a year later, when I had to testify at my son’s divorce hearing. I never did figure out why my daughter-in-law even showed up for the divorce hearing, along with the “support person” from the domestic violence shelter, where the court had released her when they let her out of jail, because she was homeless and had no other place to go. I found out later she had told the people at the shelter how she had been “abused” by her husband and his terrible family, especially me, the “mother-in-law from hell.” I never did understand why the support person with her from the shelter couldn’t figure out that my daughter-in-law was the one on probation, not her family.
Focusing on myself
Time has passed now, and I have started to focus on myself, my own enabling, my own cracks, and how I have patched them. The whole thing started out by focusing on “them” and how to cope with “them,” but now I am focusing on myself, focusing on the things I need to do to heal myself.
While a pottery vessel that is cracked can never be made “whole” again, it can still be functional and beautiful. I even sometimes now buy a piece of pottery I like, or a basket that has been mended, or one that needs mending, because I realize that being marred by chip or two doesn’t distract from either the beauty or usefulness of an item. Just as the “mended cracks” in my spirit and in my life I think don’t detract from either my own beauty or usefulness.
I also realize that the patina of wear and use in an antique item doesn’t make it less valuable than an identical item that is “new,” instead, they add to the value. We may not be a “nice, normal family” like my grandparents and my mother pretended we were, but there are some fantastic individuals in it, and those that are not “fantastic individuals” aren’t going to slime the rest of us with their shame. I’ll hold my head up both in my home and in my community, and if others gossip about us, that’s okay. If they are talking about me, they are leaving some other poor soul alone!
If you look closely you may see my Mended Cracks, but I’m no longer ashamed of them.
God bless.
Sky, what you said makes a lot of sense to me. My male friends are also telling me I should just ask him out for coffee to get to know him better. They also suspect he’s thinking he may not want to get involved with someone he has to see every week in class. And you’re right, the bottled up feelings gather momentum. I have such a hard time expressing myself and why it is difficult for me to bond. I really need to start expressing myself instead of holding things in. I’m not sure what to do with the bottled up feelings in the meantime. Writing doesn’t seem to help – I may need to try and get a few more counseling sessions. Two years of on and off counseling didn’t help with the neighbor, because really I just needed to have a talk with him. Talking to someone else didn’t get the right effect. It’s the holding things inside that’s hurting me at this point. I’d almost rather just tell the guy how I feel and watch him run away than to just hold this stuff inside. I feel like I need a relationship coach to tell me what to say and how to say it. I know I need to say or do SOMEthing.
I honestly don’t think it’s bad to let a guy know how you feel as long as you are not attached to the outcome. I think I could let go if he wasn’t interested. But keeping it inside is driving me nuts. This is my usual pattern.
If he was just some guy in my dance rotation, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But he really goes out of his way to look for me and dance with me whenever he can. He seems to treat me with a little extra care and attention than the other women in the club or class. It has just seemed so clear to me by his actions that he really likes me – whatever capacity I’m not sure. And I have not held back with him. I have told him my feelings every step of the way: “I have so much fun dancing with you”; “I love dancing with you.” “Look, you managed to make me smile in 2 minutes!”; “That dance was magical.” I say these things to him all the time. This just seems to make him come around more. So where do I draw the line? I think so much of my fear and anxiety is just a fear of letting him know how I feel. It seems once it is off my chest, I’ll feel better one way or the other. It probably wouldn’t hurt to go over and have some closure with the neighbor, too.
Star,
let your actions speak for themselves. Words just get in the way, sometimes. They create expectations.
For example, if I tell you that I have feelings for you and see a future of us as a couple…that would probably make you feel like your being put on the spot to make a decision right now, to respond right now.
Telling someone how you feel…I just don’t think it’s that simple. Perhaps you are misreading your own feelings, or you are misreading who he is and your feelings will change, then what do you do? Tell him that too? That’s unfair to him.
That’s why I say don’t tell him anything about your feelings, keep those boundaries. Instead, just ask him out and if he says yes, then just enjoy the pleasure of his company. Let that build naturally. There’s no reason to tell him how you fell and scare him away right now. Give it time. LOTS OF TIME.
And forget about the neighbor. He’s old news.
Thanks for all the advice. This is probably exactly what I’ll do.
Star,
You meditate yes? Have you ever meditated as a discovering journey adventure within yourself? Such strong attraction feelings, especially when they come too early when nothing much significant has happened.
Mentioning how you feel to someone is appropriate when there is an emotional relationship already: friends, dating. Outside of that revealing feelings creates a situation where you place or give someone else responsibility to do something about it when it’s too early. So, basically it’s a boundary issue.
Just like speculating on why he gives you attention and hasn’t asked you out is a boundary issue. You cannot know what is in another person’s heart or mind, nor can yur friends. There are plenty of reasons, and many will in the end have nothing to do with you. It’s just the result of feeling something special for someone and focusing so much on them that makes us project the same situation within them. Kindof like our naturally expecting empathy within other humans.
It isn’t easy to get to a state mind where your special feelings do not make you lose objectivity over this simple fact, but it can be done. And I think meditation can help you with that.
You may not be able to control how you feel about someone, but you have control on what these feelings do on your thinking. Those feelings make people think that we or him must act, and it’s why people advize you too or engage in the speculating. But we don’t have to act or do something, or follow some venus and mars rules. No need to think you fail at communicating or need to go to therapy for this particular issue.
If he likes you then all you have to be and do is being you. You just don’t feel totally you anymore for the moment, and out of center. Again meditation can help with centering.
Think of that pitcher again pouring energy. You’re pouring it into one cup with your thoughts of what to do, what to say, what to think. Even if that cup is a good cup it’s too much energy and responsibility for them, and it sabotages the situation.
So, please do a meditation and source your feelings but also source your mind and apply boundaries to them. 🙂
Darwinsmom, yes I’m a longtime meditator in the Buddhist tradition, and I meditate daily. This is an energy blockage in my communication area because I really need to express. I just spoke with my 80-y.o. friend who is like a surrogate mom to me. She is very wise and knows a lot about men because she has 5 sons who talk to her about women. She thinks I should just tell him I felt jealous when I saw him dancing with those other women. Just because it is genuine and authentic and the truth. I have to admit, when I imagined saying that to him, the blockage released a little. I think I will see if I can get some counseling sessions with a male counselor to talk this out a little this week. I am focusing too much on him but more because I’m afraid to just express myself. If I can just express myself, the energy can get unblocked and I can move on with my life. I want to do the thing that will bring me the most peace at this point. If it will bring me peace to just tell him I like him, then that’s what I’ll do. And I’ll let the consequences be what they are. It’s not my feelings for him but my fear of rejection keeping me stuck right now.
And as far as feeling something for someone I have danced with for almost 2 months, I do think it is totally possible to have a special feeling for someone and have a sense that someone can be “right” for you. I know a lot of happily married women who say they just “knew” right away that it was the man they would marry. I don’t think there is anything wrong with my feelings or that it is a sign of any kind of dysfunction or co-dependency. Thanks for letting me bounce this off you guys – I’m getting very clear on what is going on and what I need to do.
Relationships require a risk. For me the fear of rejection always gets in the way. I need to go through the fear and take a risk with my heart, because based on what has been going on, there is a good chance this man has similar feelings. And if he doesn’t, I will know and then I can move on. It’s the fear keeping me blocked. Not the romantic feelings.
Star,
That was a wise councel given to you. It is specific and tied to a particular situation, and authentic.
When I caution against telling your feelings or doing something, I mean declaring your attraction in a committed sense. Often that’s what we think we must do when other people advize us to be honest to someone about our feelings. Nor am I saying your feelings are wrong. I’m only cautioning you against how you let them govern you.
It is possible to have a special feeling for someone and sense they are right people by having contact with them. I can think of one such person myself in my life. And it has nothing to do with dysfunction or co-dependency at all.
Feeling something is never wrong and that would also include your fear of rejection. But we can give feelings too little power or too much. We can give them more power by seeing them as a blockage or by praising them sky high. Balance comes when you can accept them for what they are and as normal, rather than a handicap.
As for the “they knew right away”… I have heard it over and over from men and women. But imo it’s a romantic myth. Even when you think you know, you don’t and can’t know. It’s so often told in a positive light, but meanwhile we forget how many times we ourselves and others we have known close enough “knew” someone was right and they weren’t, even if they weren’t spaths. I think this belief of ‘knowing’ fastly accompanies a strong instant attraction always, and a lot of times it’s a miss and sometimes it’s a hit by chance. And these hits by chance is the myth being perpetuated.
Relationships are a risk. Also true. But you aren’t in one yet. We can take plenty of risks in our lives, but it doesn’t mean we should lambast ourselves for fearing a risk, nor force ourselves to do the opposite to make the fear go away. Instead it is wise to investigate that fear. We can have fears for all kinds of reasons: when we decide to act in a way that we know may not be the right time for it, when we are insecure about ourselves, when something in us senses that despite the “right” feelings we have we recognize we may not be right after all, when we realize we could fall very very hard for someone, when we’ve experienced a lot of rejections, …
I cannot tell what is the source of that fear for you, nor how much it is exaggerating things… but just as much as you cannot tell yourself not to like this guy, you cannot tell yourself not to fear rejection, no matter how much you want to. And there’s nothing wrong with you that you can’t, because well… it’s normal you can’t. But I’m very sure you will help yourself if you explore the fear in a meditation, as well as you can give it boundaries.
Anyway, the advice you got of what you can say to him seems a very good one.
BTW on the topic of meditation: don’t know the Buddhist type of meditation. But I take it you mean one where you seek peace and quite and an empty mind. When I meditate I do journey ones, full of imagery and almost physical experiences. I go to places and have adventures… it’s like a dream, but one where I’m very conscious. And they have always helped me understanding source of my feelings or what my life is like (example towards the end of the relationshit with the spath I ended up in a forest that had been used like a dumpster for toxic chemicals… stoof full of leaking oil and chemical barrels, and I heard a voice say: time to clean up the mess!)
Anyway, I wish the best for you and hope you can feel a sense of balance for yurself again with regards to both your feelings for this man as well as your fears. 🙂
I have made a new rule for myself and that is I will never ask a man out on a date. I have never had any shyness about it, being a child of the 60’s and the womens movement…and I still don’t see anything WRONG with it, but, I think that men like to set the pace, and they like to believe they are in control, and they like to pursue.
Remember that book,”He’s just not that into you?” I heard the authors on a talk show one time, and they advised against it, saying that you make him lazy and complaisant…they also stress that if a man is interested, there won’t be any guessing about it. You’ll know.
So, now days, I wait for them to show me. Patience is a virtue.
Ugh, it’s so hard to be patient! But I will try. Either he’s feeling it or he’s not though and whatever I do or don’t do probably won’t change that one way or the other. I just kind of want to know. I hate this not knowing where I stand stuff.
Meanwhile, back at my life in progress, I went out to a small club near me salsa dancing tonight. I met up with a few of my salsa male friends and a girlfriend from Zumba. We taught her the salsa steps; we all danced, and I danced with several other guys. Really good time. Great workout. I will just continue on with my life. He is often on my mind though. I wish I could get him off of it.
Kim,
I made myself the same promise. I was a woman who would smile at a man and use my finger to beckon them and ask them out on dates or grab them by the collar, pull them to me and kiss them. Often because of that impatience.
I really like that book, “He’s just not that into you.” Like it much better than the venus and mars on a date book, even though that contains wisdom too.
Star,
Yes wanting to know is what prompts us into planning some scheme on finding out. But I liken this process now to quantum physics. At quantum level we can never predict or even know both speed and location. You either know the speed or you either know a particle’s location. More, just looking (trying to find out) influences the results.
That’s where I get my current patience from. I will see the results when they are in, and not before. Meanwhile I’m supposed to do what I planned to do independently from it in my life, and focus on that. It works that way for jobs at the moment and it works that way on the department of romance too.
I only knew about having 2 hours of teaching hours in the school I’ve taught for eight years now. We had a new principal about four years ago. And she had little faith in me for a while, as I did not function optimally in that time. And she’s also someone who I don’t really trust when it comes to her saying, “Next year, I’ll get you some more hours.” Anyway, last year I made sure that I did those 2 hours as if it was a fulltime career, perfectly by the book. I started to hear from some colleagues she was being pleased with me, although I get mixed signals from her myself. And eventually in February she asked me to do a full time replacement of a math teacher who was being operated at the shoulder, and I did my duty to the T. Since my boundaries are better I had little or no conflict with the kids either in class. Kids even made raving reports about me. Still, that did not seem to give me more hours for this year, and school starts next week.
I went there yesterday for some paperwork in between my own retrial exams and since that teacher was being operated again I wanted to verify who would conduct and grade the math retrials that I had prepared last June (officially I’m not getting paid for it if I would) and as soon as she saw me she told me that she had more hours for me the whole year through: math and physics, plus again part replacement of the math hours of the teacher I replaced last schoolyear. I now have 9 hours. That’s still not even a half time at the same school, but it’s more than the quadruple of what I had. I told her that I was pleased that I was performing up to her standards now, and she didn’t really know what to say to that.
I could have fretted about this issue of work past summer, but I didn’t. I just focused on the new apartment, the decorating, the moving, and performing the responsibilities I did have well exactly as I’m supposed to for myself, for the kids and for the principal.
Same goes for the romance part. At the moment it is all happening behind the screens for me. Things have been put into motion, but a large part of the motion is happening in a black box that I cannot see, witness or hear about. I’ll see the results when they’re there. And yet I have no doubt that the results will come in around next month.
BTW I did a meditation last evening, and the first image and sensations was one of tree roots. And these roots were digging in the earth going deep and far and wide. I knew there was little point in the meditation to move beyond the root chakra, so I went with the treeroot experience into earth. The imagery changed into me tunneling in the earth; imagery of mine shafts that I was enforcing and exploring. I had hit gold in one of the mines, and the clump of gold that betrayed it kinda fell automatically into my hands. I didn’t have to do anything to pry it loose. It just fell into my lap. And as I looked at it, it resembled a sitting buddha to me… not carved, not created, not manmade, but like a cloud that has the form of something. It was like that with the golden clump.
Then I heard footsteps coming from the other side of the shaft. “Someone’s coming!” was the message. What to do now? Would I hide, would I walk towards the footsteps? I did neither, I just stayed put, with the gold in my hand and welcomed the arrival. The someone turned out to be the man and I gave him the clump of gold. The imagery changed again and I was standing in a home with him, where he asked to be part of building it along with me.
I didn’t meditate to find out about this… I only meditated to check up on the chakras, but it expresses what I know deep down inside of me of what is happening. And I also know that any initiative of my side, any energy I put into it would either delay or derail things.
In the past I would have been annoyed and going nuts with wanting to know, with wanting verbal confirmation, with prying out the whole plan, and going nowhere and instead fret with self doubts and fear of rejection. Now I regard that “not knowing” actually as something peaceful. I’m absolved from any responsibility on this, relieved of any planning duty. I don’t have to do a thing, except focus on my personal priorities of my home, studies and work. It’s very peaceful to just let go of “the knowing”, which is why I guess the gold resembled a buddha to me.
The last counselor I saw and several of my happily married friends think that there are some situations where it’s okay to ask a guy out. It goes against my grain as a woman, but I think speaking up can be empowering. If I’d done it with the neighbor, I probably wouldn’t be in this position right now because I would have cleared some of these rejection issues a while ago. But I didn’t because many people thought I shouldn’t and I listened to them. Sometimes doing the thing that’s the scariest can be the most empowering. I have done this with men on 4 occasions that I can count. The first time I was in college and had been pining over this guy for a few years. One night I marched up to his apartment and just told him how I felt. I was so scared I was shaking. I was so released after I did it that I felt like a new person. I was finally free of the fear. It didn’t even matter to me what the outcome was (which turned out to be another long story).
A few other times I took a risk with a guy, I always felt better afterward. Sometimes I got the guy – sometimes I didn’t. But now I’m just a chickenshit. The stakes are a little higher because this guy is marriage material. I kind of want to do things right. But at the same time, I don’t want to sit by the sidelines and let an opportunity pass me by.
I know several happily married men who told me they were too shy but their wives pursued them. The thought of pursuing a guy is mortifying to me. But I keep getting the message from my friends who are happily married that sometimes you have to suspend the rules. I am very very old-fashioned and I like the rules. But the rules have not gotten me what I want. 🙂
LOL I need a relationship coach – someone to tell me what to do and what to say every step of the way. I know there’s a whole language for speaking to men. There are people who write scripts for certain situations with men. I know there is a way to approach this man – I just don’t know what it is. I have a feeling that sitting and waiting won’t get me anywhere because of the unique situation of him seeing me dancing and flirting with other guys several times a week. He may never ask me out for fear that he is just one of the guys I flirt with. Guys are just as scared and insecure as we are, but we forget that sometimes. I am very attractive and popular at the clubs. If a guy is intimidated, he won’t make a move, because if he gets rejected, he has to see me several times a week for a year or maybe forever.
I will give it a little more time and continue to work on my detachment and self-esteem. But at some point, I may need to give the situation a little push, against my better judgment.