The Vast Grey Ocean

[zazu]

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.

[Bluevermonter]

I understand you completely.

My dad died when I was 10 of a protracted kidney disease.  This was in 1965.  No grief counseling, no outreach in schools to kids.  No going to a counselor to talk about it.  Not allowed to go to wake or funeral.  Never even went to the cemetery.  My dad's family was so bereaved at the loss of their youngest brother and son, that his passing became the elephant in the room.  When I saw the aunts and uncles on his side, they would burst into tears at the thought of fatherless children.  Same thing on mom's side.  No one ever sat down w me and talked to me about what I was feeling.

Fast forward to the 1980's and a break-up of a not-no-serious r/s.  Except I was on the receiving end.  One day after work I started crying about the breakup.  About five minutes into the tears I was on the floor sobbing, realizing that I was mourning my dad.  I cried for a good half-hour.  After that I understood how not grieving at the time was not allowed because the grown- ups probably couldn't handle it.

So very different from your situation, but I get the part about not showing the emotions.  After that episode i could talk to family, especially mom about my dad.


I think my ex had the same problem.  Her mom was so outrageous that no emotion was safe, hence the grown-up ex only knows how to hide feelings.

[Kizzie]

Hi Zazu 

I also grew up with an NPD M and while she was covert rather than malignant, the messages were the same - "You don't exist except as an extention of me. You're reason for being is to feed my needs."  You said your post felt disjointed, but it was very clear to me what she did to invalidate and feed on you and others. So, I think you have definitely found your voice and will not be fading again any time soon   

It sounds like the vast grey ocean may just be shrinking in size   

[schrödinger's cat]

Zazu, I want to second that. I found your post very poignant and clear. I'm sad that you had to go through all this, and I so wish you could have had one sensible and reasonable person at your side to help you through this.

My situation was different from yours, but the end results are similar. I always assume that I could be fine if only I managed to have the right attitude about things. Or if circumstances are difficult to live with, I tend to assume I could simply just transcend them. That means I'm absolutely crap at asking for help. And the grief and the problems and all the rest of it, that always belongs to someone else. I'm always fine. And if I'm not, it's because I haven't got the right attitude and/or haven't yet enough gumption to pull myself up by my own bootstraps.

PASSER-BY: "Aaaaah!! An earthquake!!"
ME: "Oh, sorry. My bad. I'll try to snap out of it."

Even that mental image of the sea is familiar. It felt like this before my CPTSD got really bad again (about ten years ago): as if a huge dark massive wave was rearing up behind me. What you wrote actually explained that one to me. It had to be my own disconnected feelings. That would make so much sense. So thanks for bringing me clarity. And I hope you'll get out of your ocean soon. 

[morph]

Grey homogenous mass, no great discerning vivid features.    Looks innocuous enough but when you realise (insert: start to think) that any few gallons could kill you; it becomes quite overwhelming.   How to control such all pervading features of your life?

In my own way I can relate to that.   Thanks for the image!

Just on the death parts I had several memories come up in quick succession.

1)  M met my father and I (8 years old) on the road as I was driving back from school.  My father left us at high speed.   No explanation despite my questions and after 3 days when my father returned I learnt that my best friend Granddad had gone to a happy place to rest.   About 2 weeks later I learnt that he had died.   

2)  My elder, slightly handicapped, brother died when I was 20 - rushed home from work and went to hug my M - brushed aside because how could I possibly feel anything compared to a mothers grief.  Was later told what a relief I must be feeling!

3)  On my last but one trip to FOO (England) about 6 years ago I kept walking into the house as my close Uncle was leaving.   When I returned to Asia I found out that he had been meeting a Dr there and had prostrate cancer.  I asked for his new phone number but M would not give it to me as I would only upset him.   He died 2 weeks later.

Being deprived the learning and healing effects of grief doesn't give grief much focus or colour!   But its there all the same.   Hope we can all learn how to grieve (with tears preferably) and find a warmer place to live.

[schrödinger's cat]

That's a good point you make, morph, on how denial affects our grief. Or, hm, maybe "denial" is too narrow a word for it. Just - not being allowed to grieve at all.

One of my friends lived in another country, and they forgot to tell me when she died. I learned months afterwards, through a chance phonecall with someone else. I'm not even sure if I could have made it to her funeral, but to not even have the option...? I was devastated.

I'm guessing things were probably harder for you, because I'm a grown-up, I can process this and find strategies to deal with it. You didn't have all that. The sheer impact of this must have been enormous - being tricked out of your right to grieve. It must have been so sad, so confusing.

Which brings me back to Zazu's original post. Because isn't that behind most of our grief work? For some reason or another, none of us (I assume?) were really able to grieve our trauma while it was happening. And so often it was because no one admitted openly that our traumatic situation WAS traumatic. Or they didn't even let us think so within ourselves, as a secret we kept - they tried and tried to convince us of the opposite.  It's funny - now that I think of it, my grief about my past trauma does feel a bit like the delayed grief for my friend - there's this same shock, this same confusion and pain, almost like there's a sense of betrayal.

[morph]

That's exactly what it was Cat, "being tricked out of your right to grieve".   I remember being sad but the overwhelming emotion was confusion.   My M had already installed in me "correct" behavior for sympathizing with people in grief but here I was being treated in a totally different way.   Very surreal.    It was around that time that I actually had a theory going that I was just an experiment and not part of the same human race that my parents were!    Makes me think of "The Truman Show" now!

I was CHEATED out of so much and now I'm really angry but still don't know how to grieve and feel the way normal people do.

What do you think Zazu.   Is any of this giving more perspective to your ocean?

[marycontrary]

I am just starting to realize what a non entity I was to my folks. Does this sound familiar? And I have the gut level existential realization what mental and emotional handicaps these people were. Very sad the waste for all of us dealing with invalids as family.

[bee]

Zazu,
Your explaination of how your mother used/took/invalidated others emotions is spot on for my mother as well. I was especially stunned at how you described your mothers reaction to tragic news stories. My mother does that too.
Also, I get the ingrained invalidation. I too have internalized my mothers invallidation to the point of disbelieving my own experiences, physical and especially emotional.
My mother is also a master of using humiliation.
Thank you for sharing.
In my imagination I've given you a luxury yacht to make your time on the vast grey ocean more comfortable.(hope that is ok)