I M Perfect lady

Tag: caring

  • And Me

    Today my husband and I leave for a few days, just him and I and the 1983 Chevy truck. 

     

    While it may not seem like a big thing, what kind of car you drive, we do however have a few vehicles that bring out the date in you, and the Big Blue Truck is one.

     

    It doesn’t see the open road much, it rarely has plates on it and surely not insurance.  It is used mainly for plowing snow and is kept in the barn on hay…well actually beach sand, but I kid him.

     

    He bought it brand new in 1982, the fall he and I began dating.  He has had it painted, a new engine, running boards and running lights, chrome wheels, loud mufflers etc.  It is a well-loved truck…a truck of young boys dream.

     

    Before taking it out on the open road, he had a few things to fix, rear breaks, led to new break lines, led to wheel bearings, and to things called spider gears (well we may let that go and pray for the best), but he won’t back out of our driveway until he is assured it is good running shape….  I have no idea what these things look like, but his concern for the truck equals his care for the things he loves.

     

    Overall, it is his care that has kept the truck going, our love going, our family going.  He is a man who pays attention to the details.  He catches things before they are way far-gone, he hears little sounds the truck makes telling him which part needs his attention, just as he notices when any of us are just a hair off. 

     

    If he had his way, we would all be kept on hay in a barn, safe, sound and out of harms way…only to be taken out for joy rides.

     

    I am so thrilled to be going on a joy ride with a man who loves, who cares and who shows it.

     

    He has taught me how to care, how to love…we have traveled far and are very lucky that we can dip back into our earlier years and enjoy dating. 

     

    Today is his birthday…and he will be like a young kid again driving along in his big blue truck…28 years since he bought it he still loving it, and me! 

     

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    My husband just came back from the parts store, the part we were waiting on did not come in.  He was able to get a part for my Mail Jeep…a wheel bearing that too has been making noises.  So, we will continue on…leaving the Chevy for dates near home. 

    This is our first time taking the Jeep on vacation…it will be a good cool ride. Air.

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  • Where we lead…

    In the past two and a half months, my yoga practice has been very spotty, it has boiled down to two times a week, and I am now understanding the sentiment of caring for your self or more importantly what it feels like again, to not care.

    Without care or interest, to be indifferent to the bodies needs. To feel myself almost going to sleep or in a daze and be too tired to begin.

    What we fail to notice is that when we are too tired to do something, we are actually playing to indifference; we are feeding the lack of care.

    It finally came to me what I have been doing, I have been leaving myself alone.

    Leaving the care of my body, walking away from what it needs and just sitting down.

    I could feel the waves of indifference, what I used to call being lazy, with no umph is actually the expression of indifference.

    You become indifferent to what it needs for its optimum health.

    What I find so intriguing is that when my daughter’s abuse came in and I experienced posttraumatic symptoms, I left my self-care.

    It is strange that when our body needs us the most we are the farthest away.
    It wasn’t that I was disconnected from the stress and wasn’t dealing with life, but what I failed to do was treat my body, to care for its needs.

    As I did yoga yesterday I was surprised that my body still remembered the poses, that it did it’s best with stiff and sore muscles, and that it tried to keep up to what I was asking of it, and I felt its struggle for it wasn’t used to this routine.

    The body’s forgiveness is pure nature; it simply follows where we lead.

    (What I know for sure today, is that by not doing yoga I am feeding indifference. So when I sit and feel unable to get up and do my yoga, I know to whom I am dancing with, what music I am hearing, I am hearing the beating of the drum being led away from me.)

  • I see me

    “Tolerance is another word for indifference.” William Somerset Maugham

    I am not sure you can have tolerance unless you are indifferent.

    Indifferent – without care or interest: showing no care or concern for or interest in somebody or something.

    I am looking at abuse and addictions from the point of the person who is on the receiving end.

    Usually abuse is looked at from the point of the abuser or addictions from the point of the substance.

    We forget to look closely at the person who is getting abused and why they have the tolerance or seem indifferent to the blows and words that are hitting them; it is because they are without care or interest for their self.

    They are indifferent to their own life.

    They show no care or concern for or interest in their own life.

    My question is when did they become so careless?
    When did they let them selves go?
    What happened that they no longer care?

    What I can know in my life is that I don’t even recall a self; I was too little to know I had a self to hang on to, to care about and to care for, and it was gone.

    My self was gone before I even had a chance to know it and know that there was something to protect.

    When a child is raised in an environment where the adults are indifferent to the child’s needs, we then become indifferent to them ourselves.

    Imagine, parents who are indifferent, without care or interest: showing no care or concern for or interest in somebody or something…and that somebody is you.

    We learn indifference.

    How they treat us is how we treat ourselves.

    We learn how to not care or show interest in our selves.

    In fact in order to survive, it is best to not have a self.

    For a self would feel their indifference and we don’t want to feel their indifference.

    It is easier to be without a self, to live in a pretend space, making believe that they care and the only way you can believe that story is to be separated from your self.

    To deny your body, deny your feelings, to not be connected to the self.

    A self who is not there will not feel their indifference…but lke the old saying goes, “If a tree falls and no one is in the forest to hear it, does it still make a noise?”

    In the same manner, if a child isn’t there to feel the indifference, does the indifference still happen?

    If a self is unaware does the indifference still affect them?

    When you are indifferent how can you know indifference?

    I don’t know what was more shocking their indifferences or me not caring for me, for me to see the lack of interest in my own life and wellbeing.

    I was indifferent to my whole life…and had to bring me back to my world, to undo the indifferences and learn how to care.

    In caring I found me.

    I am no longer indifferent… I see me.

  • What I Mirrored.

    Continuing on from “Codependent No More” by Melody Beatte, she writes.

     

    “Gradually, I began to climb out of my black abyss.  Along the way, I developed a passionate interest in the subject of codependency.  As a counselor (although I no longer worked full-time in that field, I still considered myself one) and as a writer, my curiosity was provoked. As a “flaming, careening codependent” (a phrase borrowed from an Al-Anon member) who needed help, I also had a personal stake in the subject. What happens to people like me?  How does this happen?  Why?  Most important, what do codependents need to do to feel better?  And stay that way?

     

    I talked to counselors, therapists, and codependents.  I read the few available books on the subject and related topics. I reread the basic – the therapy books that have stood the test of time- looking for ideas that applied.  I went to Al-Anon meetings, a self-help group based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous but geared toward the person who has been affected by another person’s drinking.

     

    Eventually, I found what I was seeking.  I began to see, understand and change.  My life started working again. Soon, I was conducting another group for codependents at another Minneapolis treatment center. But this time, I had a vague notion of what I was doing.

     

    I still found codependents hostile, controlling, manipulative, indirect, and all the things that I had found them before.  I still saw all the peculiar twists of personality I previously saw.  But, I saw deeper.

     

    I saw people who were hostile; that had felt so much hurt that hostility was their only defense against being crushed again.  They were that angry because anyone who had tolerated what they had would be that angry.

     

    They were controlling because everything around and inside them was out of control. Always, the dam of their lives and the lives threatened to burst and spew harmful consequence on everyone. And nobody but them seemed to notice or care.

     

    I saw people who manipulated because manipulation appeared to be the only way to get anything done.  I worked with people who were indirect because the systems they lived in seemed incapable of tolerating honesty.

     

    I worked with people who thought they were going crazy because they had believed so many lies they didn’t know what reality was.

    I saw people who had gotten so absorbed in other people’s problems they didn’t have time to identify or solve their own.  These were people who had cared so deeply, and often destructively about other people that they had forgotten how to care about themselves. The codependents felt responsible for so much because the people around them felt responsible for so little; they were just picking up the slack.

     

    I saw hurting, confused people who needed comfort, understanding, and information.  I saw victims of alcoholism who didn’t drink but were nonetheless victimized by alcohol.  I saw victims struggling desperately to gain some kind of power over their perpetrators.  They learned from me, and I learned from them.

     

    Soon, I began to subscribe to some new beliefs about codependents. Codependents aren’t crazier or sicker than alcoholics.  But they hurt as much or more. They haven’t cornered the market on agony, but have gone through their pain without the anesthetizing effects of alcohol or other drugs, or the other high states achieved by people with compulsive disorders. And the pain that comes from loving someone who’s in trouble can be profound.

     

    “The chemically dependent partner numbs the feelings and the non-abuser is doubled over in pain – relieved only by anger and occasional fantasies,” wrote Janet Geringer Woititz in an article from the book Co-Dependency, An Emerging Issue.

     

    Codependents are that way sober because they went through what they did sober.

     

    No wonder codependents are so crazy. Who wouldn’t be, after living with the people they’ve lived with?

     

    It’s been difficult for codependents to get the information and practical help they need and deserve. It’s tough enough to convince alcoholics (or other disturbed people) to seek help.  It’s more difficult to convince codependents – those who by comparison look, but don’t feel, normal – that they have problems.

     

    Codependents suffered in the backdrop of the sick person.  If they recovered, they did that in the background too.  Until recently, many counselors (like me) didn’t know what to do to help them.  Some times the codependents were blamed; sometimes they were ignored; sometimes they were expected to magically shape up ( an archaic attitude that has not worked with alcoholics and doesn’t help codependents either.)  Rarely were codependents treated as individuals who needed help to get better. Rarely were they given a personalized recovery program for their problems and their pain.  Yet, by its nature, alcoholism and other compulsive disorders turn everyone affected by the illness into victims- people who need help even if they are not drinking, using other drugs, gambling, overeating, or overdoing a compulsion.”

                    Melody Beatte

     

    What I love is that she sees how the codependents were formed…and in my experience it matches to what I know to be true for me.

     

    I love how she says we suffered sober…for indeed we did…My perpetrator wasn’t an alcoholic, but a sexual predator, yet the outcome is still the same.

     

    My mother’s codependency of my father is what I mirrored.

     

  • Beauty

    The Island of Misfit Toys was the place in Rudy the Red Nosed Reindeer story. The place toys went that had been created wrong.  I can’t recall each misfit, but their action didn’t do as the fit ones did.

    Yet on the Island, if you had a problem you fit right in, perfect.

    Hey, you could have called it the Island of Imperfection.

    The natives on the island expected, loved, understood, you, and your quirky nature.

    It is unclear in my mind why this Island appears in the story…but I know we are taken there and shown around.

    Maybe it was to show we all belong somewhere.  I felt sad for those left on the island of misfit toys, like no way could then fit in on the Island of Normal. 

    How this appeared to me today, was that I was thinking of how my husband has the knack for fixing things that are broken, missing a part, in long neglect disrepair, a car or lawnmower that most would put in the junk yard, my husband takes home.

    He has the patience of a saint, can see the potential and works little by little to bring it back into its original state.  We have seen many transformations that his hands have made.  And we have seen him milk along vehicles that truly are tired, worn down and ready to rest.

    Just when you think, he can’t possible make it run again, he does.

    We are forever sentenced to a life with a car for he won’t let it go, until he is certain it has lived its full life.

    I know this may sound beautiful, but try riding around in a car that has more overused parts than new.  We have cars where, you have to remember to not put down the window…..that is right.  Don’t push the power button, or when you do, the window will fall quickly down into the door and disappear and it will take him many hours to get it back up.  So you have a window that goes down, but not up.  You don’t know how instinctual it is to just hit the button, mindlessly.

    We once had one of these kinds of cars stolen, yes stolen.  The most expensive part on the car, was the full tank of Gas, oh and my stamps on the visor.  We cheered and laughed and were so gleeful, it is gone, but lo and behold by the end of the day, it was back in our yard.  It was found just a few miles away, undamaged, or so we think.  We couldn’t really tell what damage was new, for who remembered all it’s bumps and bruises.

    You almost feel sad that one so damaged has so much damage that you can’t even see the new bruise.  And does the car get used to being so precariously balanced, or does it too feel….I will move today if I can and if not I will just stop.  It is not up to me.

    Does the car remember being young, shining, new all things working, where it could breeze along the road happily!  Does it remember no dents and dings no overused parts?  Does it wish to go backwards, does it dream of a fixer-upper man?  Does it wait to die in the junkyard? Is there a heaven for cars?  Just so you know my husband shops in the junkyards, seeking that one part that still is good.

    Now as I look back at my life, I can see why I married this man.

    I was the perfect wife for him.

     

    One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

    They say we marry the person who can heal your childhood wounds I for one know that is true.  He brought out in me the things that needed correcting.  You may recognize the ‘buttons’ that we seem to be able to push in each other, those are buttons of dysfunction.

    A place where we have lost our power, a place where we have a wrong connection, a button that doesn’t do what it is supposed to do.

    For some of us, we have been broken for sooo long we don’t even know what the normal function looks like, feels like or would recognize it.  Our normal is dysfunction.  We have lived so long on the Island of Misfits, that that is normal.

    It isn’t until you leave the island that you look down and see. See the damage, the brokenness, uselessness abounds.  And is it possible for one misfit to fix another misfit, or do we need a fixer man.

    But always remember, “One Man’s Junk, Is Another Man’s Treasure”

    I should know. 

    I have been both.

    Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

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