The past couple of years have been quite a ride! I've quit my job, moved to another continent, begun to make sense of my NFOO (as much as one can), and discovered that I am worthy of being on the planet, regardless of what my Nsibs appear to believe! I've gone NC with 3 toxic siblings, and discovered that with most of the rest of my siblings, I have to be low contact for a variety of reasons - mostly because we accepted enmeshment as a way of life and it's a habit that's apparently very difficult to break. I have one sister who's on the same ride, who's working hard to figure out how to free herself from the craziness that is our NFOO. Thank goodness I have one sibling left - it's been so wonderful to have someone to work through this stuff with - it's so lovely not to have to explain everything! I see an end now to the confusion, the Wft? that hits you when N's work yet another dastardly two-step to make a scapegoat's life a living hell. The roles! The roles! To give up your family-given role is akin to treason - how dare you not be who we TOLD you to be? The effrontery of believing that you, fool, can be whoever you want to be, the person you were born to be instead of who we assigned you to be so that you could meet our needs! The role's the thing... I think I'm finally out - I've outted myself - I no longer want/need the role to feel like I belong to something larger than myself - I don't want to belong anymore. I really do want to be me, with all the scariness and insecurity and thrill that comes with that job!
Sometimes I bemoan how absolutely insane my NFOO is - really, with this many enmeshed people, it used to take one counseling session just to get the family tree organized! But without this level of insanity, I may not have connected all the dots - once you get it, once you realize the way N's and their ilk work, it gets harder and harder to NOT see it. I'm grateful to the Nsisters who made my mother's dying a circus of Nactivity, and to my brother whose inability to relate to me in any way outside of my family role took me down a painful path to the awareness that this is another relationship that will never be normal. Without those experiences, I'd still be wondering what was wrong with me instead of finally realizing that I had nothing to do with how this was set up, and I can't fix it. Fixing it was a big part of my role - now I'm taking up the family mantra: "That's just the way s/he is!" This, by the way, was not applied to me - but I'm now applying it to myself - "That's just the way I am!" It's wonderfully freeing - I highly recommend it to anyone trying to get out of the jumbled mess that is the NFOO.
Whoohoo! That's just the way you are! That's just the way I am.
ReplyDeleteI remember telling my sisters back in 2010, when they were writing me emails telling me to "filter" so I don't raise my parents' blood pressure, "I want out."
I said it, I meant it, I've done it. I skipped both niece and nephew's weddings last summer. Can you imagine?
Went for my father's 85th bday party and for the first time ever, stayed in a nice hotel ten minutes away from his house. He was furious--exploded at me within 45 minutes of my getting there (first visit in 3 years and he lost his temper). And you know what? I didn't care. Went back to the hotel. and watch cable.
Ha! Yes, hotels are definitely the way to go with NFOO's - and you gotta love hotel cable! I haven't attended too many family events over the years - we did the geographic fix, so it wasn't usually financially feasible - which was good. I'm not going to my sister-in-law's funeral - I feel like I did what I could while she was alive and my brother will probably ignore me anyway - and as another sibling says, "This is going to be the most dysfunctional funeral in the history of the world." Feel like I can skip that... Your father's b-day sounds like it was an event that would have been better avoided, too! I'm curious about what provoked the explosion - I know that with most N's it's just a perception on their part of a narcissistic injury,.. My father used to rage about the weirdest things - looking back, I see that it was mostly when he was at fault and wanted to throw the shame on someone else. What a sad way to go about life.
ReplyDeleteI wrote about it on Caliban's Sisters, back in September. You can find the entry talking all about what 'triggered' him, around Sept. 9th I think
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