My Entire Life was Choreographed…

 

My Entire Life was Choreographed…

(and that just sucks that I was never free...)

Truism: People will reenact -- from a position of power -- whatever drama, or trauma, they suffered as a child…

My mother's childhood:

Fact: 

My grandfather (my mother’s father) isolated my mother (and her four siblings) from people who might have helped her.  Then, he beat and terrorized her (and her siblings).   He wasn’t a good provider.

Her mother (my grandmother), stood by and didn’t protect her, or her siblings.  Instead, my grandmother disappeared into the Bible, and the supernatural. 

So, this was my mother’s childhood, in a nutshell.

She was a young adult in the 1950s.  She had a decision to make; the choice to  take one  -- of two -- routes, in life. 

Door number one: She could go to a psychiatrist who could help her process her abusive childhood by repeating, “I…was…innocent!  I didn’t deserve that treatment, and I will not visit it upon my children!”

(Instead, she took...) door number two:   In order to relieve her unresolved anxiety over her abusive childhood, she spent years (decades) planning how to reenact it, on us.

My mother was attractive, and college educated (at a time when women only went to college to get their MRS degree.) She could have married anybody.She had her pick of the litter.

Instead, she married a man (my father) who abused her before marriage, got her pregnant (yes, she had consensual sex; I know), and  helped her get a back-alley abortion. She became infected, and very, very ill.

When she recovered, she married my father…and had five children by him.

Here’s the reenactment: 

• He beat and choked her, 
• He beat and terrorized us, 
• She didn’t protect us,
• He wasn’t  a good provider.

This served three purposes:

#1.  He beat and terrorized us, which relieved her unresolved anxiety over her own childhood.  She knew we were innocent, so this was proof that she must have been innocent.

#2.  It gave her a kind of cheap nobility.  By the mere act of standing next to him, she looked innocent (she wasn't: she was the puppet-master).  But she could appear pure as the driven snow, when in fact, it was...

#3. ...abuse-by-proxy.  He did her dirty work.

Now here's the proof that she wasn't so pure:  If she was the innocent party in all of this, then -- if by chance -- one of her children escaped the abuse and rose above it, achieving a good, decent life, she would be overjoyed, wishing this child the greatest of success and happiness.

Um, that's not what happened.

I (out of my four siblings) am the only one of her five children who escaped her event horizon, and married a good man and live a good life.

She hates my guts, and is constantly -- unceasingly -- scheming to suck me back into the evil that is her life.  To set my feet onto the desolation that was to be my chosen path (chosen by her).

Golden Child vs. Scapegoat: Illustrated.

I used to be an illustrator, and I love charts, so I decided to chart this.

"I will fight no more, forever." -- Chief Joseph.

Contract Negotiations, or, The Evil Parent Knows Exactly Why Their Adult Child Cut Them Off...

      If you go to a site called, "When the Ties That Bind Unravel," (here)(NYTimes.com) you will see hundreds of letters from the cut-off parent crying, "Foul! My child won't tell me what I did wrong. This isn't fair."

     You'll see hundreds more from adult children who made several attempts to tell their Evil/Narcissistic(?) parent, "This is what you did wrong. You are still doing it. This is unacceptable.  Change, or I will leave forever."

      Then it all follows the same script:
    The parent refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing, thereby instantly cutting off any chance of...

A) An apology, and,

B) A promise to alter the unacceptable behavior in the future.

      The Adult Child  leaves, to save their sanity...and their soul.

     The parent then runs around sowing chaos and discord among the relatives, cutting off any friendships the Adult Child might dare to have with relatives-in-common, and simultaneously gaining a ready-made audience for all the teeth-gnashing and wailing that follows.

     If the Adult Child felt any tender, tattered bits of love for the estranged parent, all of that is burned to ashes by the parents' final betrayal.

      Here is how the script played out in my house.

     Having reached a breaking point, at the age of thirty-eight, I went to my mother with an offer.

     My mother is an attorney.  She specialized in contract law. She understood exactly what was on the table. These were not the exact words, but -- much like negotiations in subtler countries such as Japan -- everyone present understood exactly what was being said.

     I said, "You will recognize me as a sovereign entity. You will recognize my husband as my new family. You will follow the rules of basic, human behavior in all interactions with me, and my family."

      "If you choose not to do this, then I will walk away...forever."

      My mother thought about that for less than a second (which is really all it takes) and said, "No. I reject your offer, and here is my counter-offer."

     "I will control-freak you until the day one of us dies. I will control your body, and your mind. I will dictate where your body is on what holiday, and I will dictate your thoughts as to your siblings, and me."

     "I refuse to recognize your husband as family.  I refuse to acknowledge your sovereignity. Your one right and true family is me, and your siblings."

       "You are allowed no other family, ever."

      I thought about that for less than a second (which is really all it takes) and I said, "No. I reject your offer," and I walked away from the table.

Forever.

      Contract negotiations are -- quite literally -- as old as mankind. Point, counterpoint, parry and riposte. Nothing was left off the table. Everything, including all small print and addendums, was completely understood by both parties.               

  

Ta-Dah! My New Book -- "How to Leave Your Family of Origin."

How to Leave Your Family of Origin.

As promised, under (self-imposed) deadline.  200 + pages, lots of large print, graphics and flow charts. (You'll see why if you buy it -- apparently I "think" in PowerPoint.)



 Please post your stories (and replies) on a new site: http://evilpeopleiknow.com/

Read the home page, then click, "Message Board" in the upper left corner, and post any message.



Chapter headings:


Chapter 1: Who to cut off.


Chapter 2: Why would you cut them off?


Chapter 3: How to cut them off.


Chapter 4: What to expect after cut-off.


Chapter 5: Where will everybody end up?


Chapter 6: When they die.


I apologize beforehand for the (breathtakingly) high price.  It costs $27.80 on Amazon.com for a paperback.  They (CreatSpace -- Amazon's self-publishing site) tell you that you can adjust the price.  What they don't tell you (until after you published) is that their base price will be very high for graphs and colors. (Sigh.)


I am working to put out an e-version, but the transfer of graphs (and colors) is complicated. 


Please let me know what you think!

Update:
ebook on Kindle, $9.00:

http://www.amazon.com/Leave-Your-Family-Origin-ebook/dp/B007HI7Y34/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1362277630&sr=8-2&keywords=how+to+leave+your+family+of+origin 

What I'm Doing Lately...

Hi, Everyone!

I have not lost interest in this blog; rather, I'm on fire writing a new book about cutting family ties.

It takes me about a year to organize, illustrate and publish, so I have a tentative publish date for summer of 2011.

The pain on these pages was enough to move me to write a How -to manual.

Thank you for your patience...

And here are some words of wisdom to get you through the Holidays:

Stop eating their sh!! and asking for seconds!


Just...effing...stop.

Now.

1 (800) 442-HOPE (4673)

A "warm-line," (as opposed to a hot-line,) for people who are not suicidal, but want someone to talk to....

But…I’m a nice person!

Evil preys more easily upon a person’s virtues than his vices.


Think about it: I absolutely loathe the saying, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” Of course you can. Crooks (for the most part) can’t cheat other crooks. Crooked people are paranoid, and therefore almost always on the lookout for anyone taking advantage of them. Why wouldn’t they be on the alert? They (the crooks) are always on the take, so they assume everyone else is. “Everyone else is out to get a piece of the action,” is their thinking.


But good people aren’t. We are good, so our default mode is always to think the best of someone.


When they screw us over, we think it was an accident.


When we work up the courage to confront them about it, we believe their lies (too numerous to list here).


When we finally come to the realization that they screwed us over on purpose, we forgive, because...


• We don’t want to believe the worst.
• We don’t want to be “like them.”
• We hope our forgiveness causes them to change.
• We are morally lazy.


Let’s address these points, one by one:


1) We don’t want to believe the worst.
Believe it. Evil is real...and it is everywhere.  Life would be so much better if I could get good people to believe Evil exists. That is the first step in eradicating it.


2) We don’t want to be “like them.”
Calling someone out on their evil behavior -- getting right up in their face and saying, “You WILL NOT treat me that way, anymore!”-- is not being, "like them."
They treated you badly when you were innocent of anything. They did it just because they felt like it. You didn’t provoke them: they blamed you after you confronted them. A post hoc rationalization that doesn’t fit the facts.


3) We hope our forgiveness causes them to change.
Magical thinking. It just lets them know what a sucker you are, and eggs them on. Red flag to a bull.


4) We are morally lazy.
It takes effort to finally -- after weighing all the facts -- decide that someone is “Evil.” They are not old, or tired, or senile, or forgetful, or mentally ill or high, or just don’t know any better. The Evil act (or usually, “acts”) is willful, premeditated, and vengeful.


And that’s just the first step. After deciding they are Evil, well…now you have to act on it. You can confront them (a waste of time) or get them out of your life (the best of all possible worlds).

Remember: the enemy knows you have a tendency to forgive: they’re counting on that.