Friendship

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one”

C.S. Lewis And these are the friends I need in my life now - not those who want to ignore what has happened, not those who continue to make it happen in this generation - but rather those who have looked, have really seen, and have rejected the past to create a full and loving life in their new present.

When people show you who they are, believe them!

When people show you who they are, believe them!  -Maya Angelou

Oh, my goodness - how I need to learn this!!!!

Learning to be the real me

Whew.  So, I don't think I'm as nice as I thought I was - serving and pleasing people are not, as it happens, in my real nature at all - I'm really rather selfish and surly at times - and I'm OK with that for now!   I'm no longer happy to settle for relationships that are shallow and one-sided (That would be ME doing all the work and making things work out so everyone is happy - except me), If this is my life, then I get to live it the way I want to live it - and that means that I want relationships that are reciprocal - I get my needs met, too - and if that's too much for you, if you need me always to care for you while you can't be bothered to even keep in touch except when you need something, then that relationship is dead to me.  DEAD. TO. ME. There you have it!!!

OK, so I think I've gone from hurt to anger - and I'm probably going to be here for a while...

Courage

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

- Dumbledore in the fourth Harry Potter Book

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

- Winston Churchill

Ain't it the truth?

Sigh...

This whole process has been horrific, but the worst part is that I have to examine each and every other relationship that I have - really look at them and figure out how narcissism has affected these relationships... AACK!  Narcissism is like toxic chemicals - it can seep into all sorts of places and if you just accept toxicity in relationships, things can't get better.  It's odd not seeing the world though a toxic haze, but sometimes it just ain't pretty...  I really don't want this toxicity in my life anymore, but I've blindly accepted it for so long that it does seem like it's everywhere and some people that I thought were safe apparently aren't.  Sigh...

Our Rosita

In a little while, the vet is coming to put down our Rosie dog, who is almost 15 and has been a wonderful dog - not a particularly good dog, mind you, but a wonderful dog all the same.  She provided us lots of laughs with her bounding enthusiasm for life and her flat out refusal to fetch anything.  She's been an escape artist since we got her as a puppy from the pound.  Even at a few weeks old, she could climb paw over paw and escape from her cage.  She'd get to the top and just throw herself over - anything to get out!  When we tried to block her from the Christmas tree by putting a love seat across the door, she leapt it in a single bound.  She had odd little fears - balloons and plastic bags were near the top of the list - we said that she was part Chow, part Shepherd, and part chicken.  She didn't love other dogs-she tolerated small dogs but hated large dogs.  When she was happy, her tail would go up into a cute little curl and she always looked like she was smiling - and like she had just put on mascara.  She loved eggs - even into old age, an egg would make her jump around like a puppy.  Now she's arthritic and the medicine isn't really helping anymore.  She has diabetes insipidus and the medicine for that isn't doing much, either.  She's completely deaf (although she pretended to be most of her life...)' her eyesight is going, and she's begun to pace frantically around the house.  She gets lost in corners.  It's time...  Goodbye, dear Rosie - we'll miss you lots.

Nmother had no idea who I am

I was always amazed, when Nmother was alive,  how little she knew me - it was always difficult to believe that I lived in her house until I was 18 and she had absolutely no idea who I was or what I believed.  She seemed to make up who she thought I was - it seemed to have little to do with me, but more with what she needed me to be at any given moment.  She vacillated between thinking I was a liar and a compulsive truth-teller - the truth was somewhere in the middle as I was growing up, of course.  She sometimes thought I was smart and at other times accused me of being stupid - again, the truth was somewhere in the midst of that.  She accused me of being too religious and then too unbelieving - again, neither of those defined me, but it seemed that she sometimes needed me to be one way, sometimes the other.  And it had nothing to do with me - I was merely a prop in some drama she had going on in her head.  It was amazingly confusing, especially when I was a teenager, trying to figure out who I was and what I believed, to have the supposed adult defining me in various ways that made no sense. I got the oddest presents - picked out either by Nmother or WWW.  Sometimes we all got the same thing and sometimes I got what WWW wanted or liked - or something so obscure that I really had to wonder what it was.

And I wonder why it took me so long to figure out who I am - all those weird messages that had nothing to do with me...  Hmmmm...    

Can narcissists change?

I have a dear, dear friend who is disturbed by my contention that narcissists can't change. I think that most narcissists are chosen by Nparents from the cradle, just as scapegoats and narcissistic supply providers are chosen from the cradle and because of that, the die is cast so early that there aren't very many opportunities to be normal.  And why would a Golden Child even want to be normal?  The whole point of being the GC is to get what you want when you want it - and to depend on all other siblings to provide same.  Little motivation there!!  The other thing that my dear friend doesn't know is that she was never a narcissist - she had, like most of us who were raised by narcissists, some narcissistic tendencies that she has thankfully mostly shed with a lot of hard work and much prayer.  She's an amazing woman who is currently taking care of her elderly Nmother and how she's doing that is beyond me!!  She needs a lot of prayer, so those of you who are believers, please pray!

I'm not sure Winkies can change, either - they're so invested in the myth that they just can't see the manipulations - the MW in my NFOO considers herself "naive."  That means that she closes her eyes and thus can't see what's going on around her - very conveniently, this also helps her to protect the family myths.  W2 also doesn't want to see what's going on and believes that he's not in any danger from the 3 Weird Sisters, who are probably about to go on another rampage - there was a pretty grave narcissistic injury (pun intended) at the after-graveside gathering, so payment must be extracted. They may just recycle those of us they've already "ousted" from the family - it's getting to be a numbers game and if they oust one more, they'll be in the minority - and since numbers have played a huge part in my family, they probably can't afford to be a minority - it might make them look like the perpetrators...  Can't have that. 

So - if, as most psychology textbooks tell us, change happens as a result of pain or trauma, who is most likely to change in an NFOO?  NOT the GC, not the Winkies, not the Flying Monkeys.  That leaves the scapegoats and the providers of narcissistic supply, who are the only people with the motivation to change because  their  lives suck!!!  (Well, past tense that for those of us who are out of the mess!!)

The Coven

I read Raising Caliban for the first time yesterday (The blog is listed in my sidebar - if you haven't read it, you might want to - it's really good and provides a lot of food for thought.) and my brain is putting some things together in new ways, which I love!  In one of her posts,Caliban's Sister talks about her Nmother referring to her enabling children as her "support network."  This made me do a double-take, since it's so typical of narcissists to take a dysfunctional relationship and try to re-wrap it as something positive.  A relationship built on triangulation, deceit, and slander becomes a "support network."  How charming!

I did a little research on covens last week and discovered that a coven has to be more than 2 people and can have up to 13 people - I suppose that I should be glad that I don't have that many biological sisters.  Now, I know that the WWW and her Flying Monkeys are not really witches in the religious sense, but it does seem appropriate that they number 3, as did the 3 Weird Sisters in MacBeth. When shall we three meet again?  And they are each other's "support network" based on the same triangulation, deceit, and slander that Caliban's Sister's Nmother uses to keep her "support network" in operation. 

I heard a strange tale last week - apparently, when MW, W2 and the 3 Weird Sisters went to MW's cabin after the burial of Nmother's ashes, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth by WWW - and it was ignored both at the graveside and at the cabin - ignored!!!!  Poor WWW - now that Nmother is dead, who will continue the Poor WWW myth?  And it seems that the support network is weakening since the purpose of it was to attain reflected attention from Nmother - since WWW was the Golden Child, association with the GC got you points with Nmother, who spent most of our phone conversations reciting the woes of Poor WWW.  Do I believe that the Nfamily will now heal?  No, of course not - that would require actually facing up to the myriad myths that keep this whole thing going and I don't see that happening anytime soon - ever, really.  I think that what will happen is that the coven will decide to go after someone else, to feed off the blood of another victim to reinvigorate themselves - this will be started by the WWW and the others will rush to her side, habit and myth preventing any introspection about what they continue to do to their biological siblings.  And the myth continues in thunder, lightening, and in rain.  *(And the hurlyburly's never done!)

Death (of relationship) by a thousand cuts

I was reading Raising Caliban tonight (http://raisingcaliban.blogspot.com/search?
updated-max=2012-07-09T14:48:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=14&by-date=false)
and she talked about abuse by a thousand cuts:

"Is this abuse? It sure is crazy-making. And it is this
twisting of the terms of reality that narcissistic parents
have perfected that does so much damage to their children.
 These are just a very few examples of thousands of instances
in which reality is twisted, denied, revised, and I am 
gaslighted by the rest of the clan. Abuse by a
thousand cuts, perhaps."

She was talking about her Nparents in this post, and my
Nmother was an expert at this type of abuse - lots of
sniping, cutting people down with snide remarks, 
gossiping and lying about family, neighbors, etc. ,
but the WWW and her Flying Monkeys have perfected
this abusive technique and are even better at it than my
Nmother was - and she was good!  It's amazing 
how many years  I put up with abusive, degrading,and just
plain rude remarks from my NFOO - and then at my Nmother's
death, it all just clicked - the last cut was just that -
the last cut.  The relationships died - they had 

been weak and sickly for decades due to the constant abuse,
but the thousandth cut finished them off.  And in my mind,
they are buried deep - there is no resurrection possible
since the blood has been drained from them over years and
years of malicious cutting.  And my spirit is free!

                              

Weird planning

OK, so  I know this is going to sound oh, so strange,  but I've been thinking about my funeral.  No, I have no information about an end date or anything, but it dawned on me that I really don't want my Nfamily at my funeral and started wondering about how that worked.  Can funerals be private?  (It turns out they can.)  Can you send invitations to funerals?  (Turns out you can.)  Can you keep Nrelatives away?  (Well, yes and no...)  Of course, people with no boundaries at all can crash funerals, they can arrive uninvited at all kinds of events.  So why don't I want them there when I'll be past the point of caring?  I really hate to think of my real family having to deal with the histrionics and general brouhaha (Don't you love that word?) of my Nsiblings.  They have a way of making any family event uncomfortable, spreading lies, gossip and slander wherever they go, turning people against other people, whispering and wailing and generally being a menace.  I really hate to think about them anywhere near people I love and care about.  I have to explore this a bit more, but I think the plan will be multi-layered.  If they don't show up, do this...  If they do show up, say and do this...  Part of the memorial may have to be in a private home where they won't be allowed.  It'll be more work to plan, but my whole life has been complicated by narcissism, so why not this as well? 

What to do?

So for most of my life, I've been involved in "helping professions", not that there's anything wrong with helping people, but I think that the main reason I was in those professions is that I was conditioned to be a "helper", to give narcissistic supply to all the N's in my life.  Now I want to explore what I might have done had I not been raised by N's (whenever I start saying that I was raised by.....  , I think "wolves." It's not quite true because I was socialized, but in such an odd way!!

My mother was held up to us as the epitome of femininity, sophistication, and good taste.  She wore bright red lipstick  and for years, when the rest of the world wore jeans and pants,she continued to wear house dresses and heels.  She weighed less than 100 pounds most of her life and after babies, she exercised and dieted until the baby weight came off completely. Only when she was much older did she wear anything like bright colors.  She was torn between being the sophisticated college graduate and the Wisconsin farm wife, so she spent a good bit of her life being conflicted, but sophisticated won every time!!  When she divorced my Nfather at age 80 and moved into assisted living, my siblings began talking about how "cute" she was - I felt that it was belittling to speak of her that way, but she seemed to enjoy it, of course...  Looks are everything in my family - being small, young-looking, pretty,and sophisticated are everything!  When MW1 came to visit me last year, she actually suggested that I have breast reduction surgery - that was out of the blue!  Now that I have better boundaries, I'd use one of my one-liners on her - "I wonder why you'd say such a rude thing to me when you're a guest in my home."  At the time, I was too shocked to say anything!  I really have to get over that...

So - I'm taking a weaving class and I'm loving it!  The hand work, the colors and textures are so amazing!!   And it's not only femininity that I'm exploring - it's my artistic side, which was certainly never encouraged in my childhood.  Nmother  was considered the only "artist" in the family because she had done calligraphy in college - and just like no one could be as feminine as Nmother, no one could be artistic, either.  It's amazing how we weren't allowed to complete with either parent in any area - and if calligraphy can make one an artist, you can only imagine how limited we were!  (Not that I don't like calligraphy - I do - but it's certainly not the epitome of all art.) 

This is going to be fun!

 

Beware of ANA site!

BEWARE of ANA!  

Please read this posting and beware of Nbloggers who troll blogs meant for narcissistic survivors, steal their posts (a.k.a. Intellectual property) and publish them on their blogs with no credit given to the original blogger and no care given to place the words in the proper context.  

http://house-of-mirrors.blogspot.com/2012/08/malignant-narcissists-in-cyberspace.html

People willing to do this type of thing should not be trusted when they offer their "help".  Be cautious online and watch out for wolves in sheep's clothing. 

Shanty Irish Me!

Whew!  Had my first anxiety attack in a long time today.  Pretty scary, racing heart, wanting to get away, but I continued writing an email to my aunt, who was making "observations" about my mother, basically scolding me and telling me not to judge her too harshly.  To be fair, my aunt has absolutely no idea about my NFOO except what my Nmother told her, which of course was that she was the víctim and that my Nfather was so horrible and she was so frightened of him...  Malarkey.  She was a full partner in her children's abuse, setting us up and then walking away when the abuse began.  I'm so tired of hearing about what a saint she was, such a good Catholic...  (I'm not opposed to the Catholic Church - Nmother wasn't a good Catholic - she used even that to make herself look good.  What kind of Catholic mother sets her children up for abuse?).

So instead of being silent, I explained to my aunt as kindly as I could in an email about my NFOO and what went on there, including my mother's starring role in the abuse.  I may never hear from my aunt again, but since I haven't had much contact with her most of my life, that will be OK, although I was really enjoying our econversations about Nmother's FOO - lots of drama, lots of inter-family drama which I had suspected but really didn't know much about.  Of course, there was also my aunt's rendition of my Nfather's FOO, all of which she had gotten directly from Nmother's mouth, so the truth was not in it! One of the really funny stories that came of these conversations was that Nmother had told me that she had come home from college and couldn't get a job because grandfather had asked her to take care of grandmother, who had some pretty serious issues with "nerves.". It turns out that that's what happened to my aunt when SHE graduated from college 9 years later! WTH?  My mother told us a story about her life that had really happened to her younger sister - why?  Who knows?  It was a victim story, so it seemed to fit, I guess...

And honestly, if I hear the term "shanty Irish" again from anyone in Nmother's family (who are German Czechs)' I just may go ballistic - I am Half Irish and these are my grandparents they're using pejorative phrases for!  My mother used to do this and I would point out that I am half Irish, but she didn't seem to get it - or did she?  It's funny that the Ousted celebrate their Irish heritage, but the other part of the family acts as if they have no connection to the Auld Sod at all - avoidance of the "shanty Irish" label?  Hmmmm..  I have to think about that...  So maybe my spending 2 years in Ireland didn't help my position in the family?  AACK!  What a group!

Narcissist One, Narcissist Two

It's odd that my Nfather's narcissism, the wildly blatant malignant narcissism, full of screaming, glaring, finger pointing, and emotional and physical abuse, was so much easier to recognize and come to terms with than my Nmother's cold, judgmental, lips pressed together, neglectful narcissism, the narcissism that's been passed down in my FOO.  We were all so afraid of becoming our Nfather that we didn't see the real danger lurking behind the supposed victim, the parent who set us against each other, set us up for abuse by Nfather and then disappeared.  The first time a counselor asked me where my mother was when Nfather was abusing someone, I was really confused - where, indeed, was she?  I searched through all my memories and couldn't find her anywhere!  I'll remember that moment for the rest of my life - myth was shattered that day.  I wasn't from a family with an abusive father and a victim mother - the Nparents were on the same team!  There had been moments of partial insight before - I thought of them as Harryclara, one person inhabiting two bodies, since college, but apparently I hadn't been willing to go past that observation - emotional orphans resist making it official!

I can remember the WWW telling me that I was adopted, thinking that it was a hurtful statement, but I'd spent years at that early age dreaming about having been adopted - and dreaming that my real parents, the ones who loved me, would arrive one day to rescue me from my uncaring adoptive parents.  This in spite of the fact that I looked remarkably like my Nfather - you'd have thought this would have been an asset in a narcissistic home, but Harryclara had decided that feminine beauty resided only in my Nmother, so looking like Nfather was a decided disadvantage.

When Nmother and I had long talks at the kitchen table when I was a teenager, it was about Nmother's problems, depression, issues withNfather - I knew way more than I should have about their sex life - and pretty much how she couldn't take it anymore.  The next morning, if I said anything about our conversation of the night before, she either slapped my face or glared at me and said that she hadn't said that.  It's a wonder I survived my teen years at all, and no surprise at all that I entered adulthood totally unprepared!

Too much! Too much!!

A friend's father-in-law used to say, in his best Eyore-way, "There's always something to take the joy out of life."  Sometimes I feel that way - like if I'm "too happy", there will be a price to pay.  When I had my second child, a son, my mother told my husband,"(Pearl) always gets what she wants."  What?  Where did THAT come from?  If I asked for what I wanted in my FOO, I very specifically did NOT get it.  (Thankfully, my FOO had no control over what kind of children I got, so I had one beautiful daughter and one beautiful son!) All my life, I was accused of being too emotional, too intellectual (yes, both of them), too big, too loud, too shy, too out-spoken.  You name it, I was too much of it.   And being too much of anything came with a price, sometimes a HUGE price, depending on if someone was embarrassed by the too muchness.  I learned to watch carefully and not feel too much of anything at all - unlearning that numbness is scarey, but I'm getting there -  pretty soon, I'll be too much of anything I want to be too much of!!  

Supply no more!

I keep hoping that when I am no longer seen as supply by narcissists, I won't notice them anymore - right now, it seems that there are so many of them, but I think it's just that I'm über aware of them and they still see me as possible supply.  I am making progress in not being seen as supply and I'm slowly learning to speak truth to narcissists in a soft, slow voice - all those years of living in the South have paid off.

When my MNF was in an assisted living facility, only LS1 and I called him- he'd burned a lot of bridges - and I started every conversation the same way:
     Hello, Harry
     You should call me Dad.
      Hello, Harry.  These are the rules of the phone call.
      Oh, you always say that when you call.
      Yes, I do.  Here are the rules:  If you yell at me, if you swear at me, if you speak badly about anyone to whom I'm related by blood or marriage, I'll hang up.  Do you understand?
      You always say that.
       Do you understand?
       Yes, I understand.

5 minutes - he could never last longer than 5 minutes.  Our longest conversation occurred when I called him on my cell and the call dropped after only a few minutes.  I kept trying to call him back -  I got home, had dinner, and finally reached him.  I joked with him about him calling his brother as soon as the call dropped, but he'd been "talking to me the whole time" - he hadn't realized that I hadn't been on the other end for 45 minutes!  Yup, 45 minutes of him probably bad mouthing every single family member - thank goodness for poor cell reception in the rural South!

But I had a lot of practice setting boundaries and that's working for me now - and I don't have to say a lot - sometimes I don't have to say anything at all - today when a narcissist tried to shame me, I just smiled and walked away.  As I used to tell my students - just because something is true doesn't mean  it has to be said out loud.  And if it DOES have to be said, it can be said very meaningfully in a soft, slow voice.

An easy, breezy day!

Ah, it's Sunday and we have nothing that we have to do - maybe a long walk to the park or dinner out or reading or watching the Olympics!  It's sunny in the mountains and we often have lovely breezes to keep the equatorial sun from feeling too warm.  Ah...  I can weave and I plan to do some blogging on my other blog and there's the day.  Life is good in No Contact Land - I feel like my life is my own - which it is, of course, but who knew? It's just so amazing to feel this way, to have clear boundaries, to walk away from N's, to feel joy in my life, to know that God is in His heaven and all is right with the world!

Life is getting so much better!

My Nmother died last year on Christmas Day - it's been 7 months of painful, often depressing, and  incredibly sad processing of a lifetime of interactions with  narcissistic parents, narcissistic siblings, and enablers everywhere!  But the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be the sun!  I know that I'll never be completely finished with this task, that the damage done early lingers and I'll have to be watchful for my whole life, but it's now becoming habitual to watch, decide if I'm in danger, and get the hell out of Dodge before I'm involved in any way with a narcissist.  It's amazing how much more time I have and how much more brain space I have than when I was forever providing narcissistic supply to these crazy nutcases.  I really hope that some day I'll be at the point that they can't  identify me as narcissistic supply - wouldn't that be lovely?  Even more sun!  And the friends I'm making now are wonderful - I'm in danger only of bruising myself from pinching myself to see if this is a dream or my new reality!

Truth in numbers

So I realized yesterday that when I think of my "family"' I'm thinking of those siblings who I trust to have my back, who tell me the truth in love, who are willing  to go the extra mile for me, and who  are interested in who I really am and not in who they need me to be to satisfy the preservation of the family myth.  In truth, I don't have 6 sisters and 2 brothers - I have 2 sisters and 2 brothers, still more than many people are blessed with!  And I love these siblings with all my heart!

Update 6/16/2014  - If you started at the beginning, you know that I'm down to 1 sister and 1 brother - still more than many people have - and hopefully, this is the final count...