Day 29 My personality trait relates to being wronged

Whooie, what a journaling session today’s prompts initiated! Not certain I’m finished as I wanted to stop a few minutes to share before the feelings settled down.

Backstory: I am a person who over my long career, was exceedingly successful by retooling myself. I never expected to get so far. But I applied what I learned from watching others, paid for my own education knowing I would need a sheepskin, and one-by-one removed all of the outward barriers that set me up to fail earlier in life. How I did this is a testament to my determination and to my desperation.

I experienced a lot of satisfaction from overcoming my past, but at no time was I comfortable. I was filled with the fear of failing, “being found out” and not being rewarded for my hard work. None of these ever came to pass but they tormented me, driving me harder and harder each time a new challenge or assignment came my way.

Bingo! Perfectionist.

The bad actors in my early life are:

1. A depressed, self-absorbed alcoholic mother.
2. A whore-mongering birth father who left us when I was 7 years old.
3. A cruel and remote mentally unstable stepfather.

These people taught me that if I wanted their attention, I had to be perfect, I could not express anger, sadness, hurt or have opinions, and that they were too occupied to take care of me so I’d better do it myself. They also taught fear of every imaginable kind, they taught deal-making and shrewdness (in pursuit of every penny or morsel of food) and that it was wrong to want or ask for anything. I ran away from home when I was 9 leaving a note. Too scared to stay out after dark, I returned. My mother was not happy that I had returned but rejected me because she was preoccupied with her own fears. She shook the note I’d left in my face. I had only wanted attention from my desperate act, to be noticed, held and told we missed you!

Not the first time, and likely not the last, through journaling I’ve told them how I felt then and now. But I am ever-amazed at the redemptive power of my honesty and self-compassion.

I can totally tie my outward successes to proving my worth. An interesting outcome was that my mother relished my success, cheering me on as a reflection of her own unfulfilled desires. I also dreaded receiving her mushy letters. My stepfather even bragged as though he had a hand in it. I never trusted these belated accolades. Too little, too late.

 

Oh mountain girl! I love how tough you are! Amazing person. I can see the little 9 year old. How I wish I could have rescued her.

It’s really hard to turn off— or to turn down —that great big survival engine you’ve got roaring. Super hard. Mine’s blazing too. (I used to lie in bed and plan how I could run away at the same age.) I also finished my college degree in the wee hours of the morning, with 3 kids under age 6 and a house full of daycare kids, because my abusive husband’s behavior was leaning closer and closer toward violence.

We both knew we needed reliable careers. It was do or die. And we weren’t quitters

Now our “career” is to heal! And art will flow from our fingertips, joy from our hearts, and love will bloom all around us like a rose garden. I say, no slowing down to die. Full steam ahead, to live!

 

I've been touching on my dad more lately in writing. He was also a serial cheater as well as drug and alcohol abuser and they divorced when I was 5ish. I had a relationship with him through childhood and adolescence but really learned who he was in adulthood and saw for myself what a bitter and selfish person he was. Now he's in a nursing home after a battle with sepsis and I struggle to feel badly about it. I have had the vaguest notion that there are things from childhood I don't remember happening with him but nothing that has surfaced for me.

This resonated with me because someone said to him once how well he had raised me. Nope. Not even a little bit did he take part in "raising" me. We just spent a few weekends together. Funny how others like to take credit for who we become when it's good but not when we struggle!

 

@Rusty Red -You are really getting in touch with your feelings. That’s good! (I think maybe our fathers were twins.)

 

Hugging you across time and space! Loving that young mother, admiring her guts, being her friend.

And now, you’ve captured the action/reaction by using the term “great big survival engine” that’s hard to modulate once activated in childhood. But it once served us and now it doesn’t. And our children are living their own lives without us. And to a very large extent, we’re free to just be. And to make healthy choices for ourselves as we are now doing. Closing the wounds and tending them well. Encouraging the best parts of ourselves and loving the worst.

At this moment, I’m so damned hopeful and inspired to polish me up real nice and pretty just for the pleasure of doing it. Pleasure. A lovely, lovely feeling, unappreciated until you no longer feel it.
Godspeed.

 

One of Nicole Sach's earlier podcasts talked out people pleasing, guilt and shame around our elders who "raised" us. When people get very old, we tend to really just give into our culture cultivated thoughts about how we must respect, and basically fawn to them, especially as people pleasers. Nicole points out we can still be polite, and show kindness but retain a any distance we need to keep our own boundaries, and we don't even have to like that person. Sometimes we just have responsibilities to the people we don't really want to be around.

I think you are doing an excellent job around this @Rusty Red. It's hard. I found that in my family, my role was to support my parents emotionally, because my sister refused to (and keep her boundaries, and I look up to her for this!) even when I didn't want to. I'd just fawn and people please to the controlling parent who's control masqueraded as kindness and compassion. These were very hard habits to break, especially when I totally wanted to divorce myself as being the "emotional support child" - but this was my expected role in my family, one I was raised to do. It wasn't until the end of this parent's life, when they could no longer do those controlling things that I found peace. You are well on your way!

 

Ha! Love this! Let’s do it! ❤️