Ahhh, my family... what a bunch of coconuts... We're not a close lot any more, and really, when my mother became sick and died, the bonds undid fairly completely, as they often do. My parents and most of their contemporaries are dead or unpleasantly doddering, and I'm not in touch with my cousins (I'm an only child). A couple have reached out but it's just too painful, there are too many ghosts. There are just too many bad memories, too few good ones to unite we survivors. That's what I feel like, more like one of the few survivors of some catastrophe like a hurricane or a train wreck. I'm lucky to be alive and as relatively unscathed as I am.
At the same time, I do have to look at my family in order to understand ways I have of dealing with the world. Some of them are quirky, some of them are unhelpful, some of them are downright harmful to me and those I love. Luckily, I have a very good therapist to guide me through this, and a supportive community of fellow sufferers both in Overeaters Anonymous and in group therapy. While most of my problems end up at the refrigerator, it's not always OA business that goes on in my work, so I need other avenues of support.
An interesting book recommended by a friend is Elan Golomb's Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in their Struggle for Self . For a while, my therapist has maintained that my father's behaviour was narcissistic. Obviously, I was affected by his alcoholism, and diseases such as that have a certain narcissictic character, but there were other behaviours of his that were just as damaging to a child: his rages, and his unstated but very real attitude that his opinions must be my own. My mother and I were not his family, we were to be his harem. If that creeps you out, well, it does me too. The crummy boundaries stopped at the actual sex act, but just barely. And yet, I've seen this pattern reinacted over and over in the families of my friends (most are women) in recovery.
I've got a friend who is currently dealing with some very life threatening issues which are tied to her weight. It makes the diabetes and hypertension I had at over 300 pounds look rather like a walk in the park. I'm praying that she can deal with them and start dealing with the equally dangerous and possibly original threat that her family is posing to her life. I love this friend dearly, and she can be such a joy. She's warm and smart and funny. But she may not survive this.
I've got another friend who seems very depressed. In a phone conversation yesterday, every second sentence was a self-insult. Where did she learn that?
I had some very odd dreams last night. In the first one, we were moving to the center of Australia, buying a lovely house that was in a drought stricken area. In the next one, I was suddenly visiting a friend at a family home in another continent. This home was not the comfortable, prosperous one I'd seen in photos, it was a mean shanty in a dangerous city being run by tyrannical despots. And her elders were fairly despotic too, where the children could not speak or even be seen freely. We kept being shunted into the kitchen when visitors came. I was running home, to the relatively less frightening new home in Australia, but it wasn't certain that I would be able to catch my plane. Obviously, the dreams were exotic but dangerous. Of course, they were my dreams, which by nature are fairly narcissistic. In these dreams I feel threatened by significant dangers in exotic locales, and even when I flee it isn't back to real safety. I perceive a lot of danger to me and others. And I'm worried I won't be able to cope. I feel drawn to their problems, and I may be so worried about theirs, I lose sight of my self. It's an old pattern for me, back to my childhood when I'm worried about my yelling or drinking father and my fuming mother...
My sponsor has encouraged me to write about my caretaking of others in situations... I think I need some of that right now, going into the history of that in depth. Phew. This is tough.
No comments:
Post a Comment