from the blogosphere

I am not as active a reading-and-commenting member of the ACON blogosphere as I might be. I post in spurts, when there's something I need to process in writing. I read in briefer spurts, having found in the past that reading a lot about narcissistic parents can end up causing me to dwell excessively on my mother, rather than living my own life. Does that happen to anybody else out there?

Right now, though, I'm feeling contemplative about my own family, desirous of connection with other ACONs who *get it*, and also emotionally secure enough to be able to take a dip in those waters without drowning.

A few things I've found that I think are worth sharing:

• Violet's post about stirring the pot and provoking drama on The Narcissist's Child. Wise, wise, wise words. Tread very thoughtfully and carefully when deciding to confront a malignant narcissist, and ask yourself: what is this likely to accomplish? What am I hoping to get out of it? In a nutshell: "If your NM is the rageaholic type, you aren’t going to accomplish anything good by rubbing her nose in her messes. In fact, taking any kind of overt action calculated to make her responsible for herself and her behaviour, anything you say or do designed to pry her away from her fantasies, rewritten histories, and sense of entitlement, will be met with resistance and, depending on her personality, could result in anything from a screaming match in which you are characterized as a liar who is picking on her to a full out assault that includes character assassination to not only the family, but to friends, lovers/spouses, in-laws, employers, and even the authorities."  Truer words were never written.

• Roots to Blossom's recent post about dealing with anger when you are the parent, Mommies Get Angry, Too. ACONs like us have to do a lot of healing and re-learning in order to raise emotionally healthy children.

• If you've been doubting your sanity and thinking that maybe your Nparents aren't really that bad, here's a refresher course from Sanctuary for the Abused on red flags that indicate someone is an abuser (or their victim).

• There's always something a little bit satisfying in knowing that other people have received crazy letter from their crazy mothers, too. Here's one, read by the daughter to whom it was sent: Letter from My Narcissistic Mother. 

coming back & fired the therapist

Howdy, there, fellow ACONs.

I took a break for a while after May. There just wasn't much to say, and I sometimes find that when I'm more involved in reading other ACON blogs and writing my own posts, that I think about my mother too much and get bogged down in it, which isn't good.  I also mentioned a knee injury a couple of posts back - that injury had me flat on my back for almost 10 days, and then I had four weeks of physical therapy. During the recovery period, I had to take a break from my daily workouts, which was really frustrating. I've never liked exercise at all, was suddenly ENJOYING running and working hard and sweating - how awful to be sidelined just when I had discovered the joy of it! I've been back to it for three weeks now, but I'm only going three days a week, so that I don't mess up my knee again. Hopefully with time I'll be able to do more stuff, more often. I lost 5% of my body fat during my induction phase (which had the six-weeks-off-for-injury in the middle of it, and only going twice a week at the end of it, so not too shabby!). My running time even with a still-slightly-gimpy knee is way, way better than it was before. Hooray for physical fitness! I'm looking forward to getting stronger and leaner and fitter.

On the mental-health side of things, I find summer to be schlumpy. It is way easier for me to stay motivated and active when the kids are in school and when it isn't 105 degrees outside. Anybody else?

Regarding the new therapist - I decided to stop going to her. There were a few red flags in the first session. She talked a LOT. She asked me for advice based on my profession and got off on a tangent about her planned vacation for almost twenty minutes! And at the end of that session, she called me a "Chatty Cathy." What?!?! I decided to chalk it up to first-time getting-to-know-you stuff and give her another go. Session two was still not great. She didn't seem to ask terribly insightful questions and spent more time telling me how great I am than challenging me to go deeper, work harder. I had said something about wanting to have a therapeutic relationship with somebody so that when I'm in a time of crisis, there is somebody who is already familiar with me. She responded that I shouldn't think of our relationship as "therapeutic," but that we're more like "friends." Um, no. I mean, I want to be friendly with a therapist. I want to be comfortable and able to chat. But I'm not paying you for us to have coffee and gossip. I'm paying for you to root around in my psyche and help me to figure my shit out. We are not friends.

So...yeah. No therapist at the moment. I would still like to have somebody I can go to when I'm having a hard time, who is already somebody that I know and trust and like, who already knows my story. But the thought of having to go through therapist after therapist to find this person is daunting, especially when I don't really need help right this moment.

Then there's this subversive thought of mine that keeps nagging me. The accepted wisdom out there in the world is that therapy is good for anybody. Every one can benefit from a little talk therapy, right? Well, I'm not so sure. It's a little ridiculous to think that every person on the face of the earth would benefit from the same narrow array of therapeutic solutions. I've come a long, long, long way in the last 15 years, and none of it had anything to do with a therapist. I don't regret not having a therapist through any of it. I thought hard, challenged the status quo, read lots and lots of books and articles, found other people who have had similar experiences, muddled my way through. Do I really need a therapist?

What do you think? 

Can everybody benefit from talk therapy? 

Are emotional coping and healing like diet and exercise, where different people may have different dietary needs and sensitivities, and build muscle tone and endurance in different ways? 

pseudonymous?

During the first year or so of my awakening from the ACON FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt), I kept fairly quiet, only discussing what was happening with my siblings (who were unsupportive) and friends (most of whom couldn't relate). After a while, I felt bolder and understood the importance of speaking out against emotional abuse, and started to write about it on my blog, which I maintain under my real name. I started out in oblique ways, alluding to personal feelings in a way that was sharing yet not spilling all the details. I felt an ethical duty not to out-and-out flame my mother in a public space, while still talking about personal feelings. People sometimes contacted me privately to thank me for saying things that they could relate to.

At the time, I accepted the risk of my mother reading what I was writing and recognizing herself in it, although I considered the risk to be very small. I had shared my blog links with her previously and been told, "I don't read blogs." At the time I maintained a private blog with updates about my children and a public blog with more general ideas and information. While it was unsurprising that my mother chose not to read what I wrote, it was still disappointing. Didn't she want to see pictures of her grandchildren? Didn't she care about the things they were doing or the thoughts I had? I didn't expect her to stalk the blog daily, but geez, wouldn't a grandmother/mother want to at least glance over that stuff once in a while? My husband's parents, for whom I had created the blog, loved it. I couldn't - and still can't - imagine one of my children saying "here's some stuff I wrote about my kids and my  own thoughts about the world" and NOT going to read it. I hope my kids will invite me into their lives that way! But my mom was all "meh", didn't ever ask for pictures of the kids (the in-laws clamored for an annual photo calendar and more), didn't ever care about what was happening in my life, and repeatedly re-asserted her complete disdain for blogging and disinclination to read mine. 

So even though I thought I would still write what I wrote even if she were a regular reader, I felt safe in the assumption that she wouldn't ever read it. 

Then one day, I discovered a comment from her on my blog. When I looked at the page views, I discovered that she had been reading through all of the archives, late into the night and then early the next morning. This gave me pause. I was feeling bolder about speaking my truth and having discovered other ACONs online, I felt more strongly than ever about the importance of speaking out loud. Could I still do this with her watching? 

The next few months were busy ones for me and my blog's spotty entries reflect that in their scattered subject matter - entries about home projects, professional development, thoughts about emotional health. I believe there was a total of one post in a four-moth period that had anything to do with her relationship with me, and that was only in a very, very peripheral way. Around the same time, I continued to reduce my already near-nonexistent family contact. My mother, feeling angry and threatened, attacked me to my husband. She informed him that my siblings consider me to be delusional. She accused me of focusing only on negative memories (which I made up, of course) and denying all the happy family memories. She lashed out about being "attacked" on my blog and stated that the blog was "hot reading" among the entire extended family. This is amusing, because the number of posts that had anything to do with her was a tiny proportion of the total content of the blog and because it took the idea of her being "trashed" on my blog to get her to even look at it to begin with. As for extended family - I'm assuming a cousin saw a Facebook link and asked an aunt what was happening, and that the aunt riled up my mother. Both the aunt and the mother remain stalkers. I haven't noticed any other suspicious frequent fliers and I doubt that it's really "hot reading". That statement reflects her concern about controlling her public image more than anything else. 

At first I felt righteous anger. How could she not see that what she was doing was exactly the kind of emotional abuse from which I was trying to extricate myself? How dare she try to silence me via more abuse? I mean, really, abusing me so I'll shut up about the abuse doled out in the past? Really?  Narcissists would be amusing if they weren't so damaging and infuriating. The problem is, it was working. I was having a hard time writing about anything at all, knowing that she was checking for new posts almost daily. 

Then she left a comment (caught by my spam filter; I had blocked her) on a post that had absolutely nothing to do with her, unless you count the fact that the parenting philosophy expressed in the post is pretty much the opposite of how I was raised. That did it for me. Gloves off. I didn't publish the comment; instead, I quoted it in another post about her so-called "unconditional love." Following that - and following her threat to sue us for grandparent's "rights" - I called it quits. I sent her an email requesting that she not contact me, my husband, or my children in any way. I made the estrangement public because I'm tired of the triangulation and whisper campaigns. She has not, of course, respected that request.  She continues to play siblings against each other, which has resulted in tense, very distant relationships between my brothers and myself. One brother in particular lashed out at me when I had the nerve to post a status on Facebook that mentioned my parents lurking around the outside of my home and yelling up at my windows. I mean, really! When you're being stalked, you should really consider the feelings of your stalkers and their cronies. This brother called names, flung accusations, and generally unloaded a lifetime of sibling resentment (courtesy of la madre) on me. He later wrote an email message to my parents and forwarded it to the rest of us. While its gist was supposed to be a "hey, stop bashing each other in front of me," he ended up kissing their asses, telling them what great parents and grandparents they are. He also admitted to them that he was rude to me. He has not directly spoken to me since, has not acknowledged how rude he was, has not offered an apology. Like mother, like son. The other siblings either stayed out of it, gave weak support to him, or chimed in and added to the pile-on. It was a lonely, lonely time.

The long-winded point here is that I have a tortured relationship with outspokenness. I want to speak my truth, but I want not to engage. I want to be anonymous, but I also want to stand up proudly. I want to be unaffected by thoughts about which people might be reading, but I *am* affected. My public blog has suffered over the last half year, halted by hesitancy over any topic that comes to mind. Do I look trivial? Do I look bitchy? Do I look like a narcissist, like my brother says I am?  (lack of comments doesn't help...I know an unfortunately large number of people who read but don't feel comfortable sharing their own thoughts in comments) I was "out of the closet" at first, posting as myself both in my own space and in other blogs' comments. Following my brother's blowup

So, use a pseudonym, or not? Link to ACONography entries, or not? Write whatever comes to mind, or not? For now I'm linking to there from here. Someday I hope I feel brave enough to link here from there. Or even not to feel the need for a pseudonymous blog at all. I hope one day all of us can walk in the light and speak casually about our experiences, both the good and the not-so-good, without fear of censure.