Hi all,
I haven't been around much due to setbacks that have made it difficult to communicate. I liken it to floating in a vast grey ocean, where the only emotions are misery and fear.
Maybe this setback will one day become part of recovery, because what set this off was uncovering a bunch of truths that sent me headlong into despair. Once I can work through these truths, it will be beneficial. Right now, though, it's just hard.
Writing this down may help sort this out in my mind. Sorry if it's disjointed - it really is a big mess of emotions, all twisted into bizarre shapes by my upbringing. But I do want to sort them out.
I mentioned here on the board once about how in the past I'd felt "haunted" somehow, and that it might have been related to grief but it wasn't clear how. Talking about it, my husband mentioned that what I described did seem most similar to grief, but enlarged exponentially and sort of split off, so it became a landscape I was living in, instead of an emotion inside of me.
Indeed, I had (privately) noted some months earlier that by the time I was 21, I'd already experienced more loss than I would ever recover from. At 21, I only suspected this, and hoped it wasn't true. but at my age now, I realize, it was true - the kinds of loss I had experienced by then were the kind that most people carry with them forever. This is just life - this is the past and I can't change it now, no matter how much I want to - it's the same, probably, for anyone who's gone through this sort of thing. But the revelation that came with this was what knocked me into the "grey ocean" - that as huge as the losses I'd suffered, I'd somehow shoved my grief aside because my emotions were invalidated. I wasn't "allowed" real emotions in my FOO.
Sorry if this this sounds nonsensical. It is quite peculiar. Who isn't allowed to have real emotions? The best way I can explain is this:
My mother is a malignant narcissist. I've learned through experience - If you are happy, she will knock it right out of you. If you are having a negative emotion, she will somehow feed on it. (No, I can't really explain, it's like a vampire though - the word "negaholic" describes her perfectly) She may try to take the emotions over- say, if you are angry, she'll become more angry. If you are sad, it's as if it's something you did to her. If you are grieving, she will use it for a sense of her own power. If there is a tragedy on the news, for instance, she seems to get an actual high off of it, as if it's a drug (When she crashes after the high wears off, there will be a rage). So, suffice it to say, it's not safe to have emotions around Nmom.
But there is another component to this, too. NM will invalidate other's feelings. it's as if she's the only one who is allowed to have real feelings at all. Just the other week I was shocked (but not surprised) to hear her tell a grieving woman that she had no right to feel sad over the death of her husband of 50 years - her life wasn't anywhere near as bad as NM's! This is pretty much par for the course for those outside the immediate FOO circle - so one can imagine how she treats those inside. So...in short, NM will feed off other's feelings while at the same time invalidating them and saying they don't exist or they have no right to them.
This is all background for my realization, really. In light of all this, I realized that, as a youngster, I'd imagined (or was told, maybe) that I'd be able to have real feelings when I was a real grown up, like NM. When I could think like her (she's big on wanting people to "think with her mind") then I would be a real grown up and know what it was like to have real emotions like NM. In the meantime, everything I believed I felt was made up or fake.
Nuts, I know. But it's true. All my life, no matter how much it hurt...it wasn't real. Only NM could hurt. Heartbroken? Made up silliness. Grief, loss? It somehow belonged to NM, instead. Things like being a victim of crime? It's as if it was all done to embarrass NM and shouldn't affect the victim at all. We should all feel sorry for NM's embarrassment at someone else's victimization. The victim has no right to feel anything at all, except maybe ashamed for embarrassing NM. As over the top as that sounds, that's exactly what it's been like for me and I daresay many other persons in NM's family. All my life, I was capable of the most peculiar thing - I could be suffering a physical injury and fully believe I was "just faking", despite crying from the pain. That's how much I'd accepted the invalidation of my feelings.
Well, the reality of this has finally hit me. That all that pain and grief I felt? It was actually real pain and grief. NM being the "real grown up" and the rest of us not being able to experience grown up feelings? Not true! NM's emotional age is very young, maybe 9 at the most, and usually younger. In truth, I've been more mature than her since childhood. I'd actually been grown up and had a right to my feelings all this time. My problem was that I'd believed her when she'd said all those things. She'd used humiliation as such an effective teaching tool, you see.
So, anyway, these last weeks it's as if I've been re-experiencing all these hurts and losses and griefs, but with the knowledge that they were real, that it wasn't just my imagination, that it wasn't just something I was imitating or learned in a book (a popular accusation - "you don't feel that way, you just read it in a book"), or trying to steal from NM, or anything else - it was real, grown up grief. Now I have to feel it that way.
It's hard, but hopefully, I'll get through it eventually.
I haven't been around much due to setbacks that have made it difficult to communicate. I liken it to floating in a vast grey ocean, where the only emotions are misery and fear.
Maybe this setback will one day become part of recovery, because what set this off was uncovering a bunch of truths that sent me headlong into despair. Once I can work through these truths, it will be beneficial. Right now, though, it's just hard.
Writing this down may help sort this out in my mind. Sorry if it's disjointed - it really is a big mess of emotions, all twisted into bizarre shapes by my upbringing. But I do want to sort them out.
I mentioned here on the board once about how in the past I'd felt "haunted" somehow, and that it might have been related to grief but it wasn't clear how. Talking about it, my husband mentioned that what I described did seem most similar to grief, but enlarged exponentially and sort of split off, so it became a landscape I was living in, instead of an emotion inside of me.
Indeed, I had (privately) noted some months earlier that by the time I was 21, I'd already experienced more loss than I would ever recover from. At 21, I only suspected this, and hoped it wasn't true. but at my age now, I realize, it was true - the kinds of loss I had experienced by then were the kind that most people carry with them forever. This is just life - this is the past and I can't change it now, no matter how much I want to - it's the same, probably, for anyone who's gone through this sort of thing. But the revelation that came with this was what knocked me into the "grey ocean" - that as huge as the losses I'd suffered, I'd somehow shoved my grief aside because my emotions were invalidated. I wasn't "allowed" real emotions in my FOO.
Sorry if this this sounds nonsensical. It is quite peculiar. Who isn't allowed to have real emotions? The best way I can explain is this:
My mother is a malignant narcissist. I've learned through experience - If you are happy, she will knock it right out of you. If you are having a negative emotion, she will somehow feed on it. (No, I can't really explain, it's like a vampire though - the word "negaholic" describes her perfectly) She may try to take the emotions over- say, if you are angry, she'll become more angry. If you are sad, it's as if it's something you did to her. If you are grieving, she will use it for a sense of her own power. If there is a tragedy on the news, for instance, she seems to get an actual high off of it, as if it's a drug (When she crashes after the high wears off, there will be a rage). So, suffice it to say, it's not safe to have emotions around Nmom.
But there is another component to this, too. NM will invalidate other's feelings. it's as if she's the only one who is allowed to have real feelings at all. Just the other week I was shocked (but not surprised) to hear her tell a grieving woman that she had no right to feel sad over the death of her husband of 50 years - her life wasn't anywhere near as bad as NM's! This is pretty much par for the course for those outside the immediate FOO circle - so one can imagine how she treats those inside. So...in short, NM will feed off other's feelings while at the same time invalidating them and saying they don't exist or they have no right to them.
This is all background for my realization, really. In light of all this, I realized that, as a youngster, I'd imagined (or was told, maybe) that I'd be able to have real feelings when I was a real grown up, like NM. When I could think like her (she's big on wanting people to "think with her mind") then I would be a real grown up and know what it was like to have real emotions like NM. In the meantime, everything I believed I felt was made up or fake.
Nuts, I know. But it's true. All my life, no matter how much it hurt...it wasn't real. Only NM could hurt. Heartbroken? Made up silliness. Grief, loss? It somehow belonged to NM, instead. Things like being a victim of crime? It's as if it was all done to embarrass NM and shouldn't affect the victim at all. We should all feel sorry for NM's embarrassment at someone else's victimization. The victim has no right to feel anything at all, except maybe ashamed for embarrassing NM. As over the top as that sounds, that's exactly what it's been like for me and I daresay many other persons in NM's family. All my life, I was capable of the most peculiar thing - I could be suffering a physical injury and fully believe I was "just faking", despite crying from the pain. That's how much I'd accepted the invalidation of my feelings.
Well, the reality of this has finally hit me. That all that pain and grief I felt? It was actually real pain and grief. NM being the "real grown up" and the rest of us not being able to experience grown up feelings? Not true! NM's emotional age is very young, maybe 9 at the most, and usually younger. In truth, I've been more mature than her since childhood. I'd actually been grown up and had a right to my feelings all this time. My problem was that I'd believed her when she'd said all those things. She'd used humiliation as such an effective teaching tool, you see.
So, anyway, these last weeks it's as if I've been re-experiencing all these hurts and losses and griefs, but with the knowledge that they were real, that it wasn't just my imagination, that it wasn't just something I was imitating or learned in a book (a popular accusation - "you don't feel that way, you just read it in a book"), or trying to steal from NM, or anything else - it was real, grown up grief. Now I have to feel it that way.
It's hard, but hopefully, I'll get through it eventually.
Thanks for your comments. I'm glad the post had some value 
I spent a whole week last month watching his videos - very helpful. I admit at first I was thinking, no way will he understand, no way will he get it (being so used to people not "getting it") especially coming from a martial arts perspective and all...I thought he would just say "suck it up!" lol. but I was very pleasantly surprised. 
I'll describe it here, because it may be part of C-PTSD.
I'm sorry you all have had similar experiences. It's really not fair, is it? Really, what did they expect would become of us, not even being allowed healthy, human, self-soothing behaviors? Even animals in the wild are able to lick their wounds. 
