We are approaching another 'holiday season' in the US. Where life changes tone for many and family becomes the Zeitgeist. For those of us who have a less warm and fuzzy experience of family, this bombardment is psychologically and even physically painful. So I'm checking my armor and tightening my straps. But that's not what I want to write about.
Rather, I've been mostly struggling with how to process what happened to me and what that means regarding them. No contact sounds easy, but I've found they are so imbedded in my psyche I just carry them around with me...and it's this I am struggling with.
They were utterly ill-equipped to raise a child. Both children of abuse in an area and a region where this was not discussed and they never even sought treatment. I bear the scars of their neglect, their physical abuse, and mostly, mostly the emotional and developmental scars of their own mental illness.
I recently reached a break through in therapy that unlocked a lot of the guilt and doubt. Far too briefly, thet had to do with underetanding how I could have turned out as functional as I did. How did I not end up in jail or dead, both of which came within a few blinks...but I made different choices in the literal last second. Diverted a killing attack, swerved just in time, decided not to swallow that pill, yank the blade, or pull the trigger.
This, and their radically different attotude in more balanced times make me doubt myself...along with their constant conditioning to do so. So what then? I hate them and am thankful for them (I cant call it love). I am angry and I pity them. I don't know that any solution exists here. They are complex and unstable, so my reactions are as well.
I get that intellectually. But this does little to settle the emotional side.
The best I can do is drop moralizing and judging and just see it for what it was. They were very sick. They refused to see it because of the same sickness. They replicated their abuse intentionally and unintentionally. As I did to my child.
The big, universe-sized difference is that just like I found the good path in spite of their dominanating influence toward destruction, I also have set about making what I can right with my kid. Where they did not, have not, and as of last interaction showed no signs of even being able to see what they had done.
Sad, pitiful. And angering. So jog on with your cutesy reconcillation stories and maudlin commercials. It's nothing more than emotional porn. And that ain't my fetish.
