that girl is poison

Back a while ago, I started working on an event with a woman (we'll call her H) who had gained a reputation as being something of a controlling bitch. There were other people working on the project, several of whom really disliked working with H, but while I had friends who disliked her, I had had no personal dealings with her, and as such, she didn't push my buttons. I volunteered to handle her when she got really micro-manage-y. It turned out that she and I worked very productively together, and the event was a big success.

I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I knew that some other people found H objectionable, and I could see how her personality would rub people the wrong way, but I also saw good things about her. Talents, nice character traits. Strong organizational skills, good business sense, quick sense of humor. When I had a personal crisis, she was one of two people who stepped up to support me. Going into a second year of the same event, I asked her to head it up with me.

In the second year, it went off very well again - on the surface of things. Behind the scenes, it was rough. While our friendship was blossoming in many ways, it was also often hard to be her project partner. H seemed to crave conflict. She nitpicked and alienated our allies, making it very difficult to work with them. She focused exclusively on the financial aspects of the event, dismissing the importance of community and mocking people who disagreed with her. At the end of the planning, she antagonized several people to the point that it was not possible to have any kind of civil discussion with them. Meanwhile, she picked fights with people on her Facebook wall and mine, but when called out on her aggressive behavior, would always claim "she started it first" or say that she was only saying logical things. It was very hard to pinpoint exactly what was wrong with what she said - usually her offence boiled down to her tone, which was often sarcastic and condescending to the other people. Very slippery, very hard to prove, and she was quick to point out what other people were doing that was so bad. She was innocent! They were the jerks!

This was difficult not only for our event planning, but also socially. Several friends voiced their disbelief that I could be friends with her and then distanced themselves from me. (H disliked these people intensely, often saying very ugly things about them, and would tell me that I needed to choose friends of a higher caliber. That higher caliber, of course, would include her.)  This hurt. I felt very socially unmoored.

One friend - who is still a friend - remarked that she thought an especially interesting thing about H was that she was so similar to my mother. I should mention that this friend is also a psychotherapist. She wondered if maybe becoming friends with somebody like my mother would prove to be healing. At the time, I thought this was ridiculous. She was nothing like my mother! I mean, maybe the overbearing, always-insisting-she's-right thing, but other than that? Nothing like.

But even as I enjoyed some aspects of our friendship, the rest of it bothered me. How could I be friends with somebody who could be so openly horrible to other people? Why would I be friends with a person who so frequently talks about other people in a disrespectful, mean way?

By the end of the second event year, I couldn't deal with her alienation of people any more, at least from a project-runner standpoint. I made certain that we would not work together for a third year. I feared that she would discover that I asked for the higher-ups to "fire" her.  It felt like an act of betrayal. At the same time, I knew I couldn't stay sane AND stay her friend AND work with her. The best I could hope for was two out of three.

I went forward with the event planning on my own, building a great team along the way. As the months passed, I frequently noticed how efficient our meetings were and how everybody enjoyed working with each other. At the same time, I felt more and more bothered by this friendship. Was it even friendship? I was forced to admit to myself that I didn't really like her. I found her to be fun sometimes, but I also felt hounded by her every time my phone's text alert went off. I felt constantly scrutinized by her - once she determined/learned about an area of weakness for me, she brought it back up over and over again, telling me what I should and shouldn't do about it. She knew that I dislike conflict, but instead of respecting that, she acted like it's a character flaw and took every opportunity to stir up conflict in spaces (online or physical) around me or to tell me about conflict she stirred up in her own life. I would frequently receive copies of her email and text exchanges with other people, expecting me to agree that the other person was horrible and she was clearly their moral and intellectual superior. All I saw in those exchanges was that she behaved abominably toward those people, often hurling insults and accusations at them. All this, while defending her actions as "only trying to help" or "just saying what's true."

As time went on, I also thought about how she disrespected emotional and physical boundaries. When she did this in a social setting, people semed uncomfortable, yet unwilling to rock the boat because confronting her would be more uncomfortable. She was always unwilling to accept criticism - everybody else was wrong, never her.

I realized that she could not stand being ignored. Text messages had to be answered immediately. Invitations had to be accepted. Friends had to be available when she wanted them to be available. This was tiring, but it was just as tiring to try to come up with legitimate-sounding excuses for not accepting an invitation or ignoring a phone call. She could smell a vague answer or a social lie a mile away.

All of this, so like my mother. My perceptive friend was very right.

My mom frequently complained about my father - too passive, not intelligent enough, not her equal. H did this, too. She was clear that she thought her husband was a moron, a child. She talked about sex as if it were a chore. I remember hearing that from my mother, too. Of course, when somebody else's marriage was under scrutiny, my mother and H both proclaimed their marriages to be highly superior to all others. H frequently felt sorry for various husbands whose wives she despised. Her child was also better than all others - a perfect, perfect child. More beautiful than all others. Better behaved than all others. Smarter than all others. More talented than all others. I heard an endless litany of her child's perfectly perfect perfectness. All other children's had glaring faults that were repeatedly pointed out, the kids referred to as "little bitches" or "little assholes", the parents' values and parenting skills called into question or outright sneered at. (Her daughter is smart and attractive, but not outrageously so, and her behavior is pretty normal for a kid her age.)

I found myself acting more irresponsibly around her. While my actions are my own actions, it seemed significant that I started drinking more and more and more wine and/or liquor. With that came staying too long at her house or needing to crash there overnight occasionally. I broke plans with my husband. I was too tired to engage with my children. I neglected other friendships. My responsibility, but like I said, significant.

I was so tired. So. Tired. It was exhausting. I didn't want to be her "friend" any more.

One day, I received yet another screenshot of somebody else's Facebook post. I was supposed to sneer at it, deride the other woman. But the woman had done nothing wrong. Furthermore, this woman was my friend. What kind of person would mock my friends to my face and expect me to laugh and join in?

All done.

I let her know that I needed to "take a break." I knew, though, that the break would be permanent, because I knew that with her, there was no in-between. Once we had been that enmeshed, we could not go back to being casual acquaintances. I did it over email, feeling a little guilty that I wasn't doing it face-to-face, but I knew that if I did so, she would bend the truth or get belligerent with me, and that there was really no use in having a conversation. I didn't want a conversation. I wanted to deliver a simple message: I cannot be your friend any more.

Almost immediately, I felt a pervasive sense of relief. It was like the proverbial pain that you don't notice until it stops - you didn't realize how much it hurt until the pain was no longer there. Then, ah, bliss! No pain! I realized that I had been carrying so much tension all day, every day. Friends told me that they thought I hadn't been quite myself, that I seemed to be censoring myself. I realized that I had been, because I knew being myself would bring criticism, and I didn't want to deal with the drama.

She took it about as well as could be expected. She lashed out at my son for "humiliating" her daughter at school (he asked her friends if she had a crush on him, and they told him that she did). Then later she contacted my husband with a list of excuses for her "recent" lack of empathy (there had been no recent change in behavior). Later still she tried to play the hero when my son was injured at school, and boasted about her heroism to anybody who would listen.

I've heard from a mutual friend that she talks shit about me. I don't particularly care. I don't think anybody important to me would ever trust anything she says. The mutual friend also tells me that she herself wants to break up with the mean friend, but isn't sure how.

I have never broken up with a friend before. Total number of relationships in my life that I have shut down this way: two. My mother, and my toxic friend.

When my psychotherapist friend said that she thought this friendship could be very healing for me, I never imagined that it could both be an awful friendship AND a healing one. I stood up to the toxic woman. I exorcised her, and in doing so, validated my choice to cut contact with my similarly-poorly-behaved mother. It showed me that my values are consistent and that it really is painful to put up with somebody who constantly crosses boundaries and slings poison. It reminded me to live in my truth and stick to my ideals, and to value the kind and compassionate people in my life.

By the way, the event that we had previously planned together? I ROCKED it without her. Best event in the history of the organization, both as a social function and as a fundraiser. And no behind-the-scenes drama.

*mic drop*

sometimes broken is better

I recently had a visit with my father's sister, who is one of only two relatives with whom I'm in regular contact (there are a ton of aunts and uncles, and a very large extended family).  It seems to be the case that when I'm spending time with my few remaining family contacts, that the issue of my parents comes up at least once, and we really have to dig into that for an hour or so.

My aunt is a fairly conflict-avoidant person, and also doesn't like to give the impression that she's judging anybody or spreading gossip. This means that she says only vague things most of the time, although slowly slowly slowly she's relaxing more and being more open about the fact that my mother has always been awful to her, and that my father has been very passive in order to avoid rocking the boat. But mostly the sense I get is that she's super-uncomfortable with the family yuck (as siblings/extended family so often are) and naively optimistic about the possibility of everybody forgiving each other and holding hands and singing kumbaya.

So this time around, in addition to a heavy dose of "you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family" from my uncle, the main theme was "healing." My aunt is under the impression that my mother is getting really freaked out about the possibility of never seeing me again. My aunt thinks that this dawning realization is causing "a change" in my mother and she advised me to remain "open to healing." She encouraged me to attend a family wedding alone, presumably so that I will be 100% available to this "healing" with my mother.

What exactly do people think that healing will look like? This seems to be part of the "you just need to sit down and hash things out" overly simplistic advice file that people dip into so frequently. They seem to imagine that all that is really needed is for the two of us to each take turns sharing our sorrows while the other one patiently listens. Presumably, this would be followed by a good cry and I-love-yous and hugging and everybody would understand each other and live in peace and harmony forevermore.

I found myself feeling so defensive, because there are a bunch of assumptions that people carry with them into these "helpful" discussions. Perhaps I'll write about the bulk of those assumptions later. Right now, I want to focus on one in particular: the assumption that estrangement is always the worst outcome, and that the ultimate goal is reconciliation, AKA happily ever after.

In response to this, I want to quote myself: 

Family estrangement is considered such a sad thing in our society, but nobody considers how absolutely wonderful it can be from the point of view of the person escaping an oppressive, soul-sucking relationship.  It's the kind of wonderful that makes you want to spin in a full skirt in the middle of a breezy meadow.

I like not having my mother in my life.

No, I love not having my mother in my life.

I don't love not having a loving mother figure - that kindof stinks sometimes - but my mother is not ever going to be one. I'm working with what I have here, and I am pretty darn happy to have zero contact with the woman who gave birth to me.

It's erroneous to assume that a fractured family is a miserable one.

I told my aunt that if my mom is really changing, if she's really serious about "healing", then she'll take action. Words mean nothing to me. I'm not going to let her pour out hear heart to me at a family wedding and I'm not going to go to therapy just because somebody says she wants therapy. But I'm not going to extend any invitations, because I've done a lot of my own healing, and have no desire to have a relationship with my mother unless and until she heals herself. I told my aunt and uncle that honestly, the onus of reconciliation is on my mom, if she wants that, because I'm a happier, healthier person without her in my life.  I'm ok with never seeing her again. I don't see it as a crack that needs repair.

If real change happens, I will know it when I see it. I'm 100% open to that. Open, but not holding my breath.

I'm going on with my relieved, happy, skirt-twirly, motherless life.

Sometimes letting a cracked thing just be broken is better.

on the up side

It's a funny kind of up side, and might not sound like one, unless you're an ACON. 

My oldest son is hitting the very beginning edges of puberty. We're not dealing with body odor and hair in strange places and long showers and such yet, but oh, the mood swings. It's bringing me back to when I was his age, and emotion was JUST SO INTENSE, out of the blue. Gotta love those hormones.

I spend a lot of time lately feeling like I am totally failing at this mom stuff. The pre-teen challenges make me feel so, so, SO out of my depth. Babies are easy. You change their diapers and snuggle them and feed them and carry them around and their needs are met. Preschoolers are a little more challenging but you can still keep one step ahead and figure out strategies for handling the tougher days. And there are oodles of books and websites and people in general out there in the world handing out information about little kids and ideas for how to live with them. But this. THIS. I have no idea what to do with preteens and teenagers. I have had no role models for how to be a great parent to a teen. There are very few books about interacting with adolescents and guiding them in a way that jives with how I want to raise my kids. I am SO lost.

Suddenly, kiddo numero uno is very, very, very aware of people all around him. People who can see what he's doing. People who can hear everything he says. People who might be JUDGING him. I can see little adolescent insecurities getting their nasty goblin fingers around his guts. And I know so well, having been that age once myself, that there is no amount of logic that will convince him that other people are not paying close attention to him. That it really doesn't matter what you wear, that you can just get over being insecure and not care.

He and I were in a children's clothing store the other day. This store carries a comfortable brand of underwear that kiddo #1 has been wearing for years. Recently, I have retired some of his underwear because they are worn out or too babyish (airplanes and cartoon moose are a definite no-go now). So I suggested that we pick up a package or two of new ones. He immediately started looking angry and upset.

Me: "what?"
Him: "I don't need any underwear."
Me: "Yes, you do. You don't have enough pairs and some are wearing out."
Him, between his teeth, getting pissed: "I Don't Need Any Underwear."
Me: "We're buying some. You prefer solids, right? No stripes? I know you don't want the other patterns."
Him: "MOM. I Don't. Need. Any. Underwear."

By this time, he looked really mad and he was starting to tear up. Apparently buying underwear is a big deal. I didn't know it was a big deal. Besides, he needs some. I ignored him and went to look through the rack. They were missing his size, so I asked a saleswoman if they had any in the back. She went to look. I turned back to kiddo #1 and his eyes were wide with RAGE and brimming with tears. I was irritated with him. He does need new underwear. He was being unreasonable. What's the big deal? It's just underwear!

What I wanted to say: "OH. MY. GOD. Will you GET OVER IT?!?! NOBODY is looking at you. NOBODY is paying attention to you. NOBODY CARES that your mom is buying underwear for you. It's JUST UNDERWEAR. THIS IS NOT A BIG DEAL."

What I actually said: "Honey, almost everybody buys underwear. There's nothing embarrassing about it. Even that saleswoman probably buys underwear, and sometimes she probably asks people for help. It's not a big deal."

Less than perfectly empathetic, eh?

The saleswoman came back and told me that they were out of his size, so we left. He was fuming. I suppressed the desire to roll my eyes.

But then, as we walked to the car, I suddenly got it. It IS a big deal to talk about or be seen buying underwear in public. Not to me, but to him. This is his reality. And I am not going to be able to logic him out of this. There is not going to be a convincing argument. Because he has hit that age - the age at which everything is embarrassing, especially if your parent is doing it. Oh, god. Are we there already?I thought back to being his age and embarrassed, and said what I think pre-teen me would have wanted to hear: "I'm sorry that that was so embarrassing for you. It didn't occur to me that it would be embarrassing."

After getting to the car, I checked in with him to see if he was still mad. He was, so I waited a while, and after he had cooled off, this is what I said: "So, I'd like to know how I could do things differently so you're not so embarrassed. Right now you don't feel like you need underwear. Sometime in the future you might need new underwear. What kind of plan should we make so that you can let me know what you want, but you don't have to feel embarrassed?"

I realized that my kid is in the perpetually-embarrassed stage, I apologized to him for not getting it, I thought about whether or not it's absolutely necessary to ask him in public about underwear (it's not) or to shop with him for it (also not). There are other ways to do this, ways that respect his right to be an awkward, self-conscious pre-teen. He will grow up later. He will, one day, be a twentysomething guy who can walk into a store and buy a pack of underwear without a care. Ok, maybe it will take him until 30. But it'll happen. Right now, this stuff feels hugely important to him, those feelings are very real, and I can recognize his feelings for what they are without getting my own panties in a bunch about it.

I'm sure I will embarrass him again in the near future, and again, and again. I'm also sure that there will be times when I'm not willing to change what I'm doing, and he will be forced to deal with his own embarrassment. But there will also be lots of times when I decide that I can give the poor hormonally-addled, frontal-lobe-growing, mortified kid a break. Because I have the ability to empathize and show compassion. And THAT is the up side, my friends. 

wonder twins: how to get us into therapy

Wonder Twin powers, activate!! In the form of...an emotionally healthy individual!

As previously mentioned, I have a dear friend who deals with similar dysfunctional-mom and clueless-dad problems with her own family flavor. She and I didn't know about our shared mom issues until well after we had become friends, and it continues to amaze us just how similar some of our family crap is. She is the first person who ever really *got it* when I talked about my mom, and we have kindof doula-ed each other through growing up and becoming our own women. (I'm sure her sense of humor has helped a lot along the way - the phrase "open up a can of wacky" will forever be a part of my vocabulary, thanks to her. And she has joked for years about us being the Wonder Twins.) Her dad has been ill for a long time (much, much worse than my dad) and has significantly worsened in the past few years, resulting in heightened family stresses. Crisis does a lot to bring out the best and the worst in us, and in this case, it resulted in her already-nutty mom totally destabilizing and leaving her kids in the lurch, faced with making some serious decisions about their father's health care AND managing their crazy mom. Her mom has always been hard for my friend to deal with, but the shitstorm that rained down was just THE LAST STRAW for her, and she cried no mas, and launched her own truth campaign. She attempted ultra-low-contact in a way that reminded me of what I first tried: avoiding her, still letting grandkids see her, trying to communicate only through email. It doesn't work well. For me it was a stepping stone to no contact. For her? Who knows. She's happier and healthier than she was before, she's working through a lot of her own psychological junk, and she's hopeful that eventually there will be some form of relationship or non-relationship that will work for her. For now, though, it's tricky, what with a dying father with whom she still wants contact. She and I were messaging each other recently and there were a lot of moments in there that felt worthy of sharing. So here are snippets, shared with her permission and sometimes rephrased.

"Asking somebody to subvert themselves to an unhealthy dynamic in the name of family love and harmony is not ok. It is not a loving thing to ask."

This was with regard to siblings who give us the "she's your mother, this is causing drama within the family, could you just get over your issues and be normal?" treatment. What's really going on is that they lack empathy and fortitude, probably because they were parented by the same hot mess that you were. They cannot understand that your experience is not the same as theirs. They do not relate to the discomfort you feel in the presence (physical or via mail/phone) of your parent. They can only focus on how queasy they feel about the parent being upset and the "drama" resulting from your standing up for yourself. It's a selfish approach. It is not really rooted in love and compassion.

Here's an example of a relatively healthy sibling stance: my sister expresses clearly that she sees how my mother treats me and that she remembers other things my mother has done to all of her children in the past. This provides validation and compassionate witness to me. She does not feel that my choices require her to make the same choices, because she recognizes that she and I are separate people with separate needs and separate relationships with our parents. She has laid down FIRM boundaries with my parents and defends them when necessary. She refuses to get into drawn-out fights and she has let my parents know that she will NOT be put in the middle of their issues with me. That is a sibling who gets it. How she ended up this well-functioning is beyond me. My friend also has one sibling who mostly gets it, although he is currently hitting up against the limits of his compassion. Hopefully that will change, because I know he has been a saving grace for her. We also discussed a couple of standard maneuvers the dysfunctional parent employs. First, act clueless. "I don't know what you think I did...I still have no idea what your problem with me is." This, despite the fact that you have basically been trying to tell them for your whole life. Second, the therapy stick. They hit you with this in one or both of two ways. 

1) "You need therapy to work out your anger issues." Here's the thing: therapy shouldn't be the thing we do to fix the ACON. It should be the thing YOU do, mom, because you honestly want to know your kid and do the work required to get along with her. It doesn't count as therapy if all you do is complain about your kid to the therapist. It only counts if you're seriously working to figure out what your own garbage is. Honestly, if my kid decided he didn't want to speak to me, my first reaction would be to wonder what I did, not to tell him that he needs therapy. 2) "I want you to go to therapy with me." This is sometimes worded as a supposedly-selfless invitation, sometimes as more of an order. Problem is, therapy isn't magic. No therapist in the world can go *poof* and make a family all happy-happy-joy-joy just because you all showed up and sat on his or her couch.

My position is that if my mother really wants to go to therapy with me, really and truly, I need to see a few things from her first. I passed this along to my friend, who liked it so much that she ended up crafting a letter to her mother around this idea. No more "I don't know what I did" and "let's throw therapy at this problem." Here are what she and I think should be the pre-requisites shown before an ACON will go to therapy with a parent.

a) Elocution. The dysfunctional parent should demonstrate that she is aware that she has taken actions that were inappropriate. She should give specific examples of inappropriate behaviors and describe the ways in which these behaviors were harmful. This should be devoid of victim-blaming or excuses. This shows personal insight, responsibility for one's own actions, and empathy for the experiences of another.

b) Remorse. Expressed verbally. Preferably put into writing. Tell the wronged party how you feel about your own actions, and give a sincere apology, without excuses. 

c) Evidence of a willingness to change. This could be in the form of written expression of things she plans to do in order to create positive change, actions they have taken that show that they have taken you seriously and are changing the way they do things, or other positive behaviors.

Integral to this is the idea of SPECIFICS. Saying "I know I did some inappropriate things, and I'm sorry, and I plan to change" doesn't mean anything. It's not that easy, lady. (Not that we've ever been given even that much.) This is definitely a time when more is better. Actions speak louder than words. Love is a verb. And more cliché yet totally true things. She and I agreed that what we had seen thus far from both of our mothers was a) identifying us, the daughters, as the sole causes of all dysfunction, or b) completely ignoring reality by acting as if nothing is wrong at all. It is also important that the dysfunctional parent express these things directly to the estranged child. If you want it badly enough, you will figure out a way to get it to the kid, no matter how non-contact they want to be. It's not good enough for a sibling to tell you "she's really upset, she cries, she really loves you, she really wonders what she did wrong." Um, no. If you've told somebody else that you miss me and want things to be right, but you haven't told me, it doesn't count. The parent also needs to do her own work. You can't look on somebody else's paper for this stuff. From me to my friend:

The whole "give me an example" thing that, yes, I'm sure your mom would do to try to pin you to the wall is just lame on her part. If she wants to go to therapy, she needs to have enough self-awareness to think of at least one thing, ON HER OWN, that she thinks she could have done differently. History has shown me that no matter what the child in a dysfunctional family comes up with, the parent will explain it away. And, frankly, the mere act of batting away your objections is a sign of poor insight and lack of empathy in itself. They could at least get half-credit by listening when you tell them about the things that bother you.

Non-empathetic response: "I never did that" or "You were being unreasonable" or "you're taking that out of context" or any such defensive / offensive response.

Empathetic response: "I didn't realize that affected you in that way. Can you tell me more? My intent was ____ but it sounds like it didn't come across that way. How could I do things differently in the future?" 

Children of broken parents often hear that we are avoidant, and this comes up in the therapy discussions. They fail to realize that there's a difference between avoidance and exercising healthy boundaries. I can't see how it would be at all useful to go to therapy with a person who has shown zero signs of being a person who would be able to participate meaningfully in said therapy. Therapists aren't magicians. I should toss out there that neither she nor I think that either of our mothers will actually ever be able to make amends. I would LOVE to be proven wrong in either case. But neither of us is holding our breath. ;)

So, do you all have anything to add to our list of pre-requisites for starting to mend fences? What would it take for you to begin to trust your parent again?

arrested development

During my college years, I majored in psychology, with a special interest in child development. This is a common focus for women in their late teens, and I suspect it's even more common in women who come from dysfunctional family backgrounds (somebody want to do a study on this?). At the time, I was under the impression that my family of origin was normal and healthy, and that my mother had successfully risen above her dysfunctional family background to become an emotionally balanced and fair parent. I carried this misinterpretation of my childhood with me through my studies, scoffing at the section of a textbook that outlined the reasons why spanking is ineffective at best and harmful to the child at worst, and smugly deciding that my wonderful mother's parenting fit best in the "authoritative" column rather than under the "authoritarian" heading.

via Foundations Counseling

The thing is, at the same time as I was so sure that my family's way was the right way, I also carried with me a history of struggle with my mother. Her "all ways are my ways" Queen of Hearts demeanor, her quick temper, her inability to see things from my point of view and insistence that I see things from hers, her black and white sense of right and wrong. It was this background, nagging at me from the corners of my mind, that cried "Aha!" when I studied Piaget's concrete operational stage of psychosocial development, especially as its transition into formal operations applies to adolescents, and its relationship to Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

Adolescents still in the concrete operational stage of development think of themselves as unique; this is a phenomenon known as the "personal fable" and is responsible for what we think of as teens' selfish egocentrism. It's the reason a teen thinks that her zit is enormous and the focus of everybody's attention, the reason teens think nothing bad will happen to them if they take risks, the reason they believe their parents cannot possibly relate to their experiences. It's normal for a child, and not normal for an adult, who should have matured into higher reasoning abilities. During Kohlberg's conventional level of moral development, which would typically describe children from about age 9 to adolescence, a child's moral sense is other-focused. Morality equals doing what other people (teachers, parents) expect you to do and fulfilling obligations. So a young teen is simultaneously engrossed in themselves and has a sense of right and wrong that hinges upon following orders. They think in black and white, fundamentalist, rule-based ways.

The personal fable: parents just don't understand.

Theorists believe that most people do not proceed past this conformity-based or law-and-order-based level of moral reasoning and grow into post-conventional reasoning based on human rights or universal human ethics. When I learned about Kohlberg's model, I considered that my mother's development might have stopped at the conventional level. I also realized that her development had halted around the time that some very significant, traumatic events happened in her life.

My mother did not have the nicest of childhoods. I suspect that this is true of most narcissists. Granted, lots of people do not have fabulous childhoods, but some special cocktail of genetics and environment comes together to create the perfect mix to breed narcissism in some unfortunate individuals. In her case, her father was a narcissist who was emotionally demanding and abusive, and physically abusive, as well. Her parents had a large number of children, too; as a parent, I know just how each additional child divides your time, attention, and emotional energy further, in a way that seems to expand exponentially rather than linearly. Her family belonged to a religious faith that is rigidly controlling, emphasizes obedience, and discourages critical thinking. This combination of factors made for a backdrop that would not provide sufficient flexibility and emotional support for a normal adolescence, much less one as troubled as hers: her mother fell ill when my mother was in her early teens, and died several years later. Her father descended into alcoholism in his grief, and was either extremely neglectful or violent and demanding, with very little in between. My mother lived in fear of him both as a child/adolescent and as an adult. She craved his approval but virtually never got it. She wasn't really free from him until he died, and even that is questionable. As time went by, I would recognize that I felt similarly about her.

So I assumed that my mother's moral reasoning had somehow just gotten stuck at the age she was when her mother got sick and died. I didn't know how this would happen, just that it seemed to be true. But just recently, I have been studying frontal lobe development. More specifically, the development of the prefrontal lobe, that part of the brain responsible for emotional balance, attunement to others, bodily regulation (stress response), response flexibility, fear modulation, empathy, insight, moral awareness, and intuition. Most of these abilities don't come online until adolescence, and prefrontal lobe function isn't usually at its peak until the early 20s.

prefrontal lobe and limbic system, via The Dana Foundation

You can picture the front of your brain like a closed fist, with your thumb tucked under your fingers. The four fingers over the fist represent the prefrontal cortex - the outer layer of the very front of your brain that is responsible for rational thought, decision-making, your sense of ethics, and self-control. If you lift up your four fingers, your tucked-in thumb represents the location of parts of the limbic system, involved in emotion, aspects of motivation like reward and fear, and regulating heart rate, blood pressure, and attention. If you've ever heard somebody talking about the "lizard brain" or "reptile brain," this is it. Your limbic system is you, stripped of all your higher reasoning and judgment, stepped back through millions of years of evolution. In a healthy, calm adult, the prefrontal cortex can take motivations from the amygdala (part of the limbic system) and decide whether or not to act on them. In times of extreme stress, the prefrontal lobe may be overwhelmed and go "offline", leaving the person to act on the impulses from their limbic system. Now imagine what happens if the prefrontal lobe is underdeveloped - emotion can much more easily overwhelm it.

"a pretty handy model of the brain", via Daniel J. Siegel, MD, Mindsight

One way of thinking about overwhelming the prefrontal cortex, thinking about lifting up those four fingers, is that a person whose prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed has "flipped their lid", leaving the limbic system to do the driving. You've probably seen this in children; a temper tantrum or meltdown is a great example of an underdeveloped prefrontal lobe being very easily overwhelmed.

While reading Mindsight, it suddenly occurred to me: trauma causes change in brain chemistry and function. Could it be possible that an abusive upbringing and/or the death of a parent would impede the development of the prefrontal lobe? Is narcissistic personality disorder an effect of screwed-up frontal lobe development?

I haven't found research that specifically pertains to this, perhaps because it would require the identification and cooperation of folks with NPD. But here's a synopsis of what we know: 

"Children exposed to maltreatment, family violence, or loss of their caregivers often meet diagnostic criteria for depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, sleep disorders, communication disorders, separation anxiety disorder, and/or reactive attachment disorder."  - Complex Trauma in Children and Adolescents

"In adolescence the brain goes through another period of accelerated development. The pruning of unused pathways increases, similar to early childhood. This process makes the brain more efficient, especially the part of the brain that supports attention, concentration, reasoning, and advanced thinking. Trauma during adolescence disrupts both the development of this part of the brain and the strengthening of the systems that allow this part of the brain to effectively communicate with other systems. This can lead to increased risk taking, impulsivity, substance abuse, and criminal activity (NCTSN, 2008; Chamberlin, 2009; Wilson, 2011; CWIG, 2009)." - How Trauma Affects Child Brain Development

"It is assumed that patients with NPD might have reduced affective neural component of empathy. Further evidences are needed to validate this hypothesis...there are various forms of empathy dysfunctions in psychopathology such as antisocial personality disorders, psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorders and autism, which seem to reflect selective impairment of one or several components of the neurocognitive architecture of empathy." - The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: implications for intervention across different clinical conditions

I suspect that the theory I started working on nearly twenty years ago - that my mother's emotional maturation was halted by the traumas of her early teens - is probably valid.

Now, here's the thing - it doesn't mean that it's ok for a person with impaired frontal lobe function to be a jackass to another person. What it does mean is that they are truly impaired, and as such, expecting normal, healthy behavior from them is unrealistic. We know this about narcissists. They are unlikely to recognize their impairment, and equally unlikely to seek therapy to change their thought patterns and behaviors. But they are not, as I so often see them described, evil.

I often remind myself that "nobody wants to be an asshole." If our narcissistic family members had had a choice, they would not have chosen to be who and what they are. They are not the devil incarnate. They are very, very broken people, more deserving of pity than hatred.

At the same time, understanding the sources of their dysfunction and feeling sympathy for the immature children in them does not mean that we are obligated to lay down and subject ourselves to bad treatment. We don't owe it to them to fix them or to stick around and suffer out of some disordered idea of family obligation.

If anything, this model of NPD encapsulates how I feel about my mother. It's a tragic situation. She deserves pity and love, but cannot get it because of the particular way she is broken. I would like to give it to her, but cannot because it would require putting myself in harm's way. I find it uncomfortable to sit with this version of "how the hell did Mom end up the way she is?" because it removes the comfort of saying "this person is just a jerk who deserves shunning." It invites the awkwardness of knowing how imperfect human relationships are, that these two hurting, motherless women cannot ever help each other. In the end, that is the true wound that I have to heal, and the true legacy of narcissism.

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? 

self-care

Almost a month. I had wondered how long I had been checked-out of the ACON world, and looking at my last entry tells me: almost a month. That doesn't seem so terribly long, but when I think what it represents - that I haven't felt a deep need for fellow-ACON connection, that I haven't felt a deep need to share what's in my head - it's significant. It means my mother is, at the moment, taking up a little less space inside my head. That's a very good thing.

I've found myself busier - or at least busying myself with different kinds of things. In the last month I have:

- done a lot more reading than usual
- started to see a new therapist
- re-examined my eating habits and tweaked them so that I'm snacking less and re-balancing the veggies vs. bready carbs
- focused more on good hydration
- joined a daily workout team
- cut down on some overcommitments

As a result I have:

- been more reflective in peaceful, productive ways
- gained muscle and lost some fat
- felt a lot better inside my body
- felt more emotionally and physically resilient*

*this is excepting the knee injury that I've inflicted upon myself, which I am currently resting and icing. OW. Nothing like hobbling and humbling yourself to make you slowwww way down and realize the value of being fit.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was just a week into the new workout regimen and excited that I was already gaining some upper body strength, a friend said "Claire, I'm really proud of you. You're taking really good care of yourself in lots of important ways. That's really inspiring." And I felt like, YEAH, I am taking good care of myself! I'm making changes not because I want to be thinner and look a certain way (not that I would complain), but because I want to feel good in my own skin. It's not about appearances. I want to be strong and flexible. I want to be able to run and jump and play with my kids. I want to foster a physical and emotional state that forms a good springboard from which to handle all that life throws at me (and what I throw myself into). When I'm 80, I want to be feisty and strong and still having adventures.

For the first time in my life, I'm enjoying exercise. I mean, really enjoying it. Ok, in the middle of an intense workout I'm a tiny bit miserable, except that I'm loving it. I could never understand my athletic, fitness-addicted friends before. Why would you want to hurt like that? But now I get it. It feels strong. It makes you able to do more. (And it feels great when you stop.) Since hurting my knee a week ago I've been itching to get back to my early-morning exercise and have even started some ab work and weights at home so that I don't lose all my progress. Who is this woman? I think I like her.

What are you doing to become an even better, more cared-for version of yourself? Why are you doing it?



(PS: I just realized I used this photo before...time to start building a stock photo library for myself. More reason to heal up the knee so I can get down on the ground with my camera again!)

front row seats

Another visualization from my friend's therapist, which I've fleshed out a bit. This one pertains to situations in which you choose to interact with your abuser (my friend has chosen NC in order to give herself a break, but knows that, due to current affairs in her family, she will be interacting with her mother in the near future). 

Imagine that your Nparent is running a video projector (I picture it as the old-timey silent-picture type). S/he plays movie after movie after movie over and over and over again, without cease. It's a 24/7 picture show. The projector is casting its images onto you. 

Tou reach for a screen and set it up between yourself and your parent. Now the images can no longer be projected onto you. Instead, they are cast onto the screen. The images on the screen have nothing to do with you. They are old movies, being shown again and again by the projectionist. 

While reflecting on this today, I thought, you may have been given complementary front-row tickets, but you don't have to go to the show if you don't want to!

ticket image found at Alpha Stamps
vitascope illustration from Who's Who of Victorian Cinema

hooks and suckers

A friend is going through her own ACON-ish situation right now, although in her case, her mother probably has borderline personality disorder. The two disorders are very similar, and my friend's family dynamics are startlingly similar to mine. For that reason, she has been talking to me a lot lately, because she knows that I've BTDT (been there, done that) as far as crazy mothers go. Hey, at least there's some benefit to a crazy family - you can support other people with crazy families and all of you can reassure each other that you're not all alone. Yay!

The other day she was talking about a therapist she visits, and shared a visualization that the therapist had described to her. Caution: not for the squeamish.

Imagine looking down at yourself and realizing that your body is covered with hooks and tentacles. These things didn't all latch onto you at once; they were attached to you one at a time, over many, many years. You didn't ask to have these hooks put into your flesh. You didn't put them into yourself.  The suckers clinging to your skin restrain you and prevent you from moving about comfortably.

Picture yourself removing them one at a time. You have to work slowly. Some of the hooks go quite deep and you carefully detach them while trying not to cause more harm. It takes a long time, but you finally pry every last sucker off of yourself, and you throw them all away. 

It's not the most perfect analogy, but I do think there's something to the idea of the things dysfunctional parents do to their children being like barbs that stay embedded in their skin, causing more harm the longer they stay attached. To think of their tentacles holding their children back. We ACONs must work slowly, gently to undo the years of harm.  Some of the hooks and suckers take longer to remove than others. Some come away easily, and some are quite painful to extract. Some have been inflicted more deeply than others - we may carry some like shrapnel, buried within us for the rest of our lives. We may have to heal around them if we can't excise them.

Going no-contact helped me tremendously in getting enough time without new hooks being thrown at me so that I could start to remove the hooks that were already there. I don't know if I'll ever be hook-and-sucker-free, but I do know that I've removed enough of them to move about much more easily. And if I ever have to be around that hook-slinging octopus ever again, I'll remember to wear armor and be ready to duck.

octopus illustration via The Graphics Fairy

fish hooks via Clip Art ETC

this place, this time, this spring

An updatey post that ended up longer than I had originally intended.

In the past week, I had a visit from my sister and also spent a morning with my sister-in-law (wife to brother #1) and her children. The filling in this relative sandwich was the Easter holiday, which I know my extended family (siblings/nieces/nephews/parents) spent together at my parents' house, celebrating with the annual egg hunt and dinner. The difference between my sister and my SIL has never been more dramatic. My sister and I were always close, but she's much younger than I am, so it wasn't really a relationship of equals beforel it was a little-sister-looking-up-to-big-sister thing. During the last few years I've been getting to know her as an adult, and she is seriously a rock, a compassionate witness. She's insightful and articulate in general and about our family in particular. One of these days I must blog about her perspective on the fam. She is the one and only sibling who is able to be accepting and validating to me while simultaneously keeping an open, relatively-drama-free relationship with all of the other members of our family. I have made a point of not discussing my parents with my siblings in recent years, or at least not being the one to bring it up and controlling what I do say even then, but during her overnight visit last week, we just talked and talked and talked, and it was SO cathartic. I think I have needed that for a long time, and it's good to have a fellow daughter of my mother to talk to.

On the other hand, there's my SIL#1. Our relationship is a strange and awkward dance. During some phases of life we seem to have a lot of in common, and be able to talk about lots of important things together, especially parenting-related things (we parent similarly, and our parenting beliefs don't get a lot of support from my parents). During other phases, she's stand-offish or even disapproving of me. She's consistently reserved in how much of herself she lets out, and that's ok, but it makes it hard to really connect. We do. not. talk. about my family, or about my currently-nonexistent relationship with my brother (she only plans things with me at times when he's not around). She has been pretty maddeningly, purposefully neutral ("I can see both sides...both of you are hurting...your mother really loves you...") about my parents, despite their shabby treatment of her in the past. It was very, very strange to know that she and my brother and their kids had just spent the previous day at my parents' house, but for it not to come up in conversation at all. I mean, regardless of my estrangement from my parents, that visit and the holiday in general are what's going on. It's weird to get together with somebody and have them not mention at all what's going on in their life - heck, not to mention the holiday that happened YESTERDAY. It felt like the elephant in the room - or the elephant in the playground, rather. 

I don't know what to make of these relationships. I'm so happy to have some closeness with my sister, and yet ever so slightly mistrusting of her. I don't want to get burned, but I'm happy like a puppy about her support of me, and I really crave the sisterly adult relationship that we're forming. I don't know what to do with the relationship with SIL#1, who isn't open with me, whose children are related to my own and are beloved by my own, who can't tell me the day-to-day details of her life because she doesn't want to talk about anything related to my family, and whose husband has avoided me for nearly a year because he thinks I'm a narcissistic bitch. 

The bookend to this week of tricky relationships is that I had a first-time appointment with a therapist this morning. My reasons for seeing her are threefold. The first, most important reason is that I live with mild depression and moderate anxiety, for which have been taking medication for almost three years, and I want to continue to develop the ways in which I work with those parts of who I am. The second reason is that my oldest son seems to have inherited his father's and my anxious/depressive tendencies, and as he cruises into pre-adolescence, it's getting harder for him to deal with negative feelings and harder for us to support him. I'm working on finding a therapist for him, and I also want support for myself as a parent who also experiences these tricky personality traits. And thirdly, I'm going into therapy because while I've certainly worked through a TON of my family stuff on my own, it's obvious to me that it's never really going to go away. The sibling relationships are hard. The way my mom pops up from time to time in my life is hard. Trying to figure out what to DO with my childhood memories and feelings is hard. So I need support. For all of this stuff. 

I've never had a long-term relationship with a therapist, despite many years of thinking through my family dysfunction. I visited an LCSW three times over my Christmas break when I was in college and engaged, but that was because my mom thought I was crazy. (It did help, but only because it gave me some perspective on who SHE is and how to avoid being drawn into fights with her. In the meantime, she crowed about how the therapist "fixed' me, which, of course, should be credited to her, the genius mother.)  My husband had a few visits with a therapist about a year ago, and I went with him to one session. I also have friends who are therapists, and have talked in general about some concepts as they apply to dysfunctional families. But I have not had an actual, ongoing, self-imposed course of therapy. And it's time. I don't have any particular goals, except to have a person who can help me to sort out hard things as they arise. I don't have a particular time frame in mind - this could last months or it could last years. 

The woman I met this morning, who was highly recommended to me by my family physician, felt warm and easy to talk to. I liked how she drew all kinds of history out of me, especially since that morning I had been wondering where the hell to start. I'll admit that at times I thought maybe she was a little chatty, and maybe she's sharing too much about herself (should I know anything at all about her family, or that she's related to somebody I know?)...but the thing is, those things don't feel like red flags. They just felt like getting-to-know-you first-session stuff. They feel like the way I *want* to relate to my therapist. I actually don't like it when people are uber-"professional" and never reveal a single iota of personal information about themselves. It feels cold and I can't relate to somebody like that. I absolutely LOVED that her first selection for a homework assignment for me was reading a book that is actually one o my favorites. I told her it's the book that saved my sanity. Good sign that we're on the same page! I also discovered that she's not super-religious, which was a concern for me, because my beliefs fall closer to secular humanism than to the staunch Catholicism with which I was raised or the Baptist school of thought that's very pervasive in my Southern town.  I had been worried about the ability of a conservative fundamentalist Christian therapist to put their own beliefs aside in working with me. I'm interested in her other homework - to check out The Book of Awakening and see what I think about it, and to read about dysthymia and see if it clicks with me and my family history more than cyclothymia or depression, which were my previous assumptions about myself. I'm not sure it fits, but I'm willing to explore. So I'm going back in a couple of weeks.

I stopped on the way home and bought The Book of Awakening and also If You Had Controlling Parents, which I stumbled upon. It has good reviews. Has anybody read it?

And that's what's going on in this place, at this time, in this spring. The trees outside are bright green with tiny leaves, the sky has been a beautiful clear blue for several days, and the air is breezy and cool. It feels like good changes are happening. 

breaking the cycle

Once I read that breaking the cycle of abuse takes three generations. I don't know how they arrived at that number, but the idea that changing family dynamics is a gradual task that more than one generation must shoulder makes sense to me. Each person can probably only improve upon her upbringing but so much. And if the goal of completely breaking the cycle is to produce an intact, healthy family, that suggests a healthy extended family, and clearly a first-generation cycle-breaker cannot offer his or her children healthy grandparent relationships. It will take time.

Sometimes I wonder - which generation am I? How effective can I be? My mother's father was a pathological narcissist, and I know that she wanted to be a better parent than he was. She succeeded, but not by much; while she avoided some of the specific harmful behaviors that he committed, she kept the same controlling mindset, the same scornful view of children and their needs. Without a change in philosophy, how could she truly break the cycle?

When I started my parenting journey, I was still fairly enmeshed in my family. I accepted my mother's childrearing beliefs and most of her practices. I thought that my beef with her was limited to my adolescence and the occasional irritation in the present. Philosophies like Unconditional Parenting and gentle discipline seemed ridiculous to me, irresponsible, "lax". My son and some chance meetings with more open-minded people taught me differently.  With time, exposure to people who parented differently from my parents, and lots of reading, I came to have a different understanding of who and what children are, and how adults can relate to them.

Is that enough? I can tell you, I struggle with being a compassionate parent. My first instinct is often to feel angry and to criticize.  Author Naomi Aldort would call those "old scripts" - the way you've been conditioned to react, even though it's not consistent with who you want to be. With time, that's changing. I'm a much kinder, more thoughtful person today than I was ten years ago. But young children don't wait for you to heal yourself. They're here, soaking things up as they happen. I was not as kind a parent to my first child as I have been to my third child - and even with the third, I have trouble staying engaged and not sending them the "mommy's too busy doing her own thing, don't bug me" message. Did I change too late? Have I changed enough?

Will my kids' first reaction to their children be less irritated than my own? Will they have imprinted different reactions and behaviors than I did in my childhood? Will they have better emotional tools at their disposal? Are their children going to be the third generation, the one that grows up with parents who can access empathy easily?