Fraught
That's the best word, I guess to describe my past relationship with my mother.
Since my mother found my exact address sometime in 2012, there have been several incursions on my privacy. At first it was just the occasional card that quickly disappeared under Cyn's expert filter ( Read more... )
Since my mother found my exact address sometime in 2012, there have been several incursions on my privacy. At first it was just the occasional card that quickly disappeared under Cyn's expert filter ( Read more... )
I know what you mean about therapists. I combine a fairly sharp insight into my own problems with a total lack of confidence in my conclusions - thanks to all the gaslighting over the years it's like my own voice is just thin and unconvincing to me a lot of the time and I don't trust my memory about anything. I hope it might improve as it's only this last year I've been no contact and been really clear about what the abuse was. But I suspect that with that sort of early primary carer abuse you never really fully recover. Main thing now for me is to not fuck up the kids too much. I love them to bits, but I really wonder whether I would have taken the risk of perpetuating the cycle of abuse if I'd been clearer in my head about my own childhood.
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One specific thing I recall from all of my therapists was they called out my recollection of events because I would say, "... and I know this is true because... XXX and XXX said so" Or "I remember X event but my mom says it never happened, but I asked X and s/he said..." "The day my moved out, she stood there at the washer chanting, 'I never cheated on him, I never cheated on him.'" But she says that never happened even though I was there. I heard it.
Each and every one of them said, "Do you not see how dysfunctional this is? You're gathering evidence like you're a detective, just to prove your own memories."
When I was in my 20s and being pressured to have kids, my stock response was "nope, don't want them" and when pressed, "I don't want to imprint my kids with the shit I went through" and the stock answer was always, "OH, but it's different when they're kids of your own." No it's fucking not.
I think, as long as we're aware of the shit that fucked us up, we're far less likely to foist it on our own children. Especially so if one has gone through so much physiological shit just to have a sprog. I think, you're gonna be okay and the girls are gonna be okay. And if they're not okay you've already equipped them with the tools to communicate when they are Not Okay.
And I have found, to my chagrin, the reddit thread raised by narcissists to be so very cathartic, just by lurking and reading. It wasn't just my mother's clinical depression and bi-polar bullshit, she really is a textbook NP.
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Yeah it's not different when you have kids of your own. In fact the problem is precisely that they are your own - I didn't know I remembered all the things my mother used to say till they started popping into my head when I was angry with the girls. So there is this daily fight not to use the responses that are automatic to me.
And then there's the difficulty of having patience with an actual 3 year old when you've been emotionally servicing an adult with the emotional age of 3 your whole life. I'm so glad we're past that stage, it was really tough.
I do that with my memories too, exacrly that. It's like my actual memory comes to me with no more force than a suggestion of what might have happened - happens with childhood memories and anyhting where I'm dealing with simeone aggressive. I had 18 months at the Bank working for someone with NPD before I knew what it was, thought I was going to go nuts with all the double checking. Of course she knew how to wind me right up - I didn't know what she was but she knew what I was.
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I got chills when I read this line. I know exactly what you mean.
When you're so used specific patterns, it's so easy to fall back into them, no matter how hard you've worked to rid yourself of them.
That's why back when I kicked out the Trash, I was so deep into my illness I couldn't see it until both Cyn and Kaari had come to visit, noticed his erratic behavior and controlling attitude toward me--until they BOTH asked me very pointed questions and made soft, casual statements in the moments he was being irrational, I had no idea that I was back in the soup again. We're so susceptible to being like the adage of frogs in boiling water.
And I hear you on old scripts rising to the surface and suddenly coming out your mouth. I even remember a specific incident whilst working on the yearbook in junior high. I was having a conversation (I don't recall what it was about now) with our advisor, a teacher, and there was a thing that was wrong or late or something, and she said something along the lines of "We didn't think..." and I replied, "No, you just didn't think." and the students around me went "whooooa." another student said, "Sam, that's a little harsh." I mean, I was a student and I thought it was okay to criticize a teacher, OUT LOUD, in that way. Ugh.
It was just a script that rolled out my mouth before I could stop it.
I can't even imagine how difficult it is to be raising kids and trying to work against years of conditioning. And I agree, one the hardest things I had to learn about myself was how to discipline myself when interacting with kids whilst teaching. I once go so frustrated with one kid in that awful outside kindergarten class that as I was charging him back to his seat, I actually hurt him when I dug my fingers into his arm. I still cringe just thinking about it. He was a terrible, acting up three year old, but he never ever deserved to have his teacher get SO angry. And as you know, having read my entries from my years in Saigon, I loved my kids. I am still so very ashamed about that once incident.
I am super judgmental and often put people off with my opinions. As a perfectionist, I really do judge people harshly when I see that something's fucked up. Like, "HOW HARD IS IT TO CREATE A TEMPLATE/MASTER PAGE IN INDESIGN THAT MAKES THIS SHIT STANDARD? I should NOT be marking up para/line spacing!"
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I remember when you broke up with Trash but didn't know how bad things had got.
On the kid stuff... there's this moment, when you're at the end of your tether and you feel like the most rubbish person in the world because this tiny little kid is pushing your buttons and it's really easy to be harsh and awful. And the worst thing (for me) is that OK, you walk out the room and go punch the wall or whatever - but then you have to go back in again and plant a smile on your face and be positive and make it work. It's still just you and them. Honestly people said to me before I had kids "you'd make such a great mum" and it's not at all true - trying really, really hard makes me an OK mum, at best.
It is getting better for us now though and I do wonder if that's because my kids are now past the age where (they say) NPD people stop developing emotionally - at about 2 or 3. All that stuff where they blame you for every single thing that is wrong and then act out in ways that have nothing to do with what's actually wrong - that's starting to tail off, and they're tons better at actually asking for what they want. That's a really adult emotional skill - most of the adults I know still struggle with that TBH.
It's funny, I'm the opposite of a perfectionist! I am only comfortable working with people when we've both seen each other make stupid mistakes. I would drive you round the bend. (I actually make an effort to pull up my grammar around you because I know there are some things I do in informal writing that probably make you itch. I'm trying to write some proper fiction right now and if you could see the state of the files, I think you'd respect me less as a person).
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1) I've been luckier in friendships than in love. I mean, I have had some supremely fucked up friendships, most of which I have ended (see Big Black Line cutting through my life when Jerome was killed), and since Big Black Line, I have been wary of friendships in general and quick to cut.
2) You remember but didn't know how bad things got? Were you not in on the Hemlock filter at that time? You may not have been. I painfully detailed all of his/my shit. I can send you a linky in friendface pm or add you to that filter, because there was a lot of shit on it, but I am almost sure you were in on the Hemlock filter. It was bad.
3) Oh yeah, I have heard and fended off the "but you'd be such a great mom, look at how the/my kid(s) love you!" I decided not to have kids solely based on my absolute, basic terror and knowledge of my own self. I just wasn't willing to risk it and to be honest, until I started teaching kids in VN, I really didn't like them or relate to them at all. I learned a lot being a teacher.
4) PLEASE don't pull up your grammar around me!! There's a huge difference, to me, between conversation and my work. There are a few online items that make me twitch:
--definitely: something definite is FINITE, there is no "a" involved.
--wretch vs retch: I dare you to wretch at something that makes you want to retch.
--whenever vs when: "whenever I was a kid" no no no no no no. One is continuous, one is finite. "When I was a kid, we..."
--using ellipses instead of... any... other... punctuation... makes... me... hear... every... sentence... as... a... question... or... a... trailing... thought... OMG COMMIT to a thought and finish it!
--then vs than: "I went to the store, then I came home." "I'd rather chew glass than talk with my mom again."
But other than those, I really just elide all grammar and spelling transgressions when in casual, online conversation with friends. I'm actually a bit horrified at you saying you feel the need to clean up around me. I'm so bad at being proper in online chat/conversations (in PMs, I rarely use caps in any form).
I'm more a perfectionist with myownself (and my rant on production, since I know what it takes to make templates and master pages), like, if I'm not a great at something right away, or if I fuck up, I either abandon the project (see: playing guitar) or I am super hard on myself. Like, just the other day, I let something slide at work, which I really, really shouldn't have. And my entire scalp broke out in a sweat as I stood there next to the PM as she asked me why the writing templates she asked me to update on Wednesday weren't done on Friday morning, and I had no excuse other than I had just let them slide whilst I worked on two other projects and after I'd spent weeks sayig to her and other PMs that I'm super good at cat juggling. The writing templates are important, but I just half-assed them because I had X other project and IT was replacing my computer, and I was hot-desking at two other stations and couldn't connect to the servers and so it goes and so it goes, but basically, I just de-prioritized the one thing she'd asked me to do.
And I still feel shitty about it. I've been beating myself up all weekend every time I think of it. "Why did you do that? You're not stupid, you know what you're doing, you want to get hired full-time here and PM can make or break you. You disappointed her, you're awful, you're a fuck up, remember how many other stupid errors of yours she's caught which made you sure that you were going to get fired in the first two weeks? You don't even know what you're doing, you've been faking being a proofer/copy editor for years. Maybe this is the final fuck up that will kill your chances. Why can't you just do your job?" Ugly ugly script that starts up as soon as I fuck up and I fucked up, it would have been easy to finish off those templates, but I didn't and I really damaged my relationship with my PM.
So there's no way I'd respect you less as a person. In fact, if I sent you my editor's notes on my own fiction enterprise, you'd probably respect ME less.
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I am a bit of a fan of ellipses. I can see how annoying it might be. The others, not so much. I've started doing comma splice sometimes, just because it's so common, and I feel slightly dirty every time.
Regarding the work fuckup: oh boy, do I know that shame spiral of doom. One thing I really enjoyed about being a process development chemist at the EvilGeniuses is that I got to work a little bit on stuff to do with the psychology of making mistakes - designing processes that account for the fact that people are sometimes absentminded, afraid to look stupid, or get overwhelmed by information. Cos if you're making things that go bang with very little encouragement, you can't depend on people acting the way they do on their best days - you have to make processes that are operable when people are doing it for the 10,000th time, when they're about to change shifts, when two things go wrong at once etc etc. It was so liberating to think we are allowed to use our clever, adaptable monkey brains to design processes that our lazy, easily distracted monkey brains are capable of operating.
Gringott's was the opposite: lots of manual checking processes to be done at the end of pressured days, very little data visualisation, and massive public humiliation for anything you ever got wrong. It is a sick organisation. It makes people sick too - I remember when I was on mat leave seeing that some of the official published series I'd once been responsible for had been retracted with apologies (basically a hanging offence at Gringott's) and I was pleased that it would show to the bosses that I'd actually been pretty good at my job - rather than just being outraged for my colleague who'd been put in the job with no decent handover (I handed over to someone else, who left the month after me) and with a boss who didn't know what he was doing and was also faking and trying to push blame away from himself and survive till retirement. It was such a mess.
Anyway, blethering now, but I think that doom spiral is an ACoN thing - we get what self love we have from what we do, not what we are. Other people do stuff like that and they see it as a temporary aberration. We see it as proof they were right all along. It gets worse the more you beat yourself up too, as you know.
I try and tell myself that I'm not obliged to keep feeling unhappy about something I've done wrong unless I think it's going to make me do it better the next time... but that's just another level of guilt, isn't it? It would be nice if we could just fuck up and then go "poor me, I might not get the thing I wanted now" without feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.
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https://youtu.be/UJkxFhFRFDA
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this is not about love
and
okay, so twice then
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So... imposter syndrome every day, all day in every job since I returned from VN even with all of that writing/teaching experience.
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