LOL! Your parenthetical statement says it all: (while I put you down with a zinger that boasts of the things I wish were true).
This week I've been dealing with the residue of a fable-filled family. I have an uncle that loves to give gifts with a long self-aggrandizing, bullshit story attached to the ordinary item he happens to be giving. He presses his gift earnestly into your hand and begins his lying: “These earmuffs belonged to the Dalai Lama; he gave them to me the night he told me we were soul-twins. I know he would want you to have them…” Of course, it’s impossible to be properly grateful for a gift of such imaginary magnitude, so you get to feel like a schmuck for going along, or like a spiritually stunted ingrate for not being properly enthusiastic for the sacred earmuffs. Fun!
My mother is a ‘very evolved’ intellectual with a vicious streak about a mile wide, that she covers up with hippy hopes that people will ‘evolve’ to her level and will no longer have the horrible flaws upon which she has no choice but to comment. If there isn’t anything horrible to say about someone, she makes up a story about them that can’t be disproved. She’ll say that they have ‘bad energy’ or that there is something vague about them that she finds untrustworthy. She loves to gossip about me.
The way that this residually manifests in my life today is that I don’t believe a word that anyone says, even if the source is trustworthy; I fact-check my husband who, I trust implicitly. I’m just in the habit of double-checking everything. I don’t know how to behave in a trusting way, even when I feel trust.
The nice thing is that I’m discovering that my skeptical nature (nurture?) makes me a natural student. What’s ironic about that is that my family has always steered me away from school. See? Even a self-absorbed, lying family has its positive points. Ha!
Thanks for commenting on my post, it’s easy for those of us with families that fall beyond normal dysfunction to blame ourselves for not being able to *handle it*. When the fact is, that without the proper emotional armor, contact really is damaging, and the needed degree of protection isn’t always available to us. It is nearly incomprehensible for people to understand if they come from a family that supports them.
This week I've been dealing with the residue of a fable-filled family. I have an uncle that loves to give gifts with a long self-aggrandizing, bullshit story attached to the ordinary item he happens to be giving. He presses his gift earnestly into your hand and begins his lying:
“These earmuffs belonged to the Dalai Lama; he gave them to me the night he told me we were soul-twins. I know he would want you to have them…”
Of course, it’s impossible to be properly grateful for a gift of such imaginary magnitude, so you get to feel like a schmuck for going along, or like a spiritually stunted ingrate for not being properly enthusiastic for the sacred earmuffs. Fun!
My mother is a ‘very evolved’ intellectual with a vicious streak about a mile wide, that she covers up with hippy hopes that people will ‘evolve’ to her level and will no longer have the horrible flaws upon which she has no choice but to comment. If there isn’t anything horrible to say about someone, she makes up a story about them that can’t be disproved. She’ll say that they have ‘bad energy’ or that there is something vague about them that she finds untrustworthy. She loves to gossip about me.
The way that this residually manifests in my life today is that I don’t believe a word that anyone says, even if the source is trustworthy; I fact-check my husband who, I trust implicitly. I’m just in the habit of double-checking everything. I don’t know how to behave in a trusting way, even when I feel trust.
The nice thing is that I’m discovering that my skeptical nature (nurture?) makes me a natural student. What’s ironic about that is that my family has always steered me away from school. See? Even a self-absorbed, lying family has its positive points. Ha!
Thanks for commenting on my post, it’s easy for those of us with families that fall beyond normal dysfunction to blame ourselves for not being able to *handle it*. When the fact is, that without the proper emotional armor, contact really is damaging, and the needed degree of protection isn’t always available to us. It is nearly incomprehensible for people to understand if they come from a family that supports them.
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