I M Perfect lady

Tag: legacy

  • Fly

    I listened to Byron Katie today, speak about the mind is always the cause and then we act out the affect of what we think.

    We think and then we move…it isn’t an action first.

    All our actions are supported by a thought. And here is the second part, the thought doesn’t have to be true and we will follow it.

    We will follow thoughts, marry for thoughts, die for thoughts, kill for thoughts, and suffer greatly all due to our thoughts, whether they are true or not, we never stop to challenge our thinking mind with our thinking mind.

    Many of us will die with the same thoughts our parents had, and will see ourselves as they originally saw us, we will not advance beyond the original thoughts.

    The family legacy of same thinking is handed down generation to generation.

    What most fail to consider is the original thinker and what his life experiences were and what he passed on.

    What I want most for my children is for them to have a clear mind, a free mind, a mind that seeks and lives with reality.

    I have come from a long line of brainwashed conformists.

    I see them locked into a diseased mind.

    Dysfunctional families can only continue with minds that are not free.

    Cults depend upon malleable minds.

    There are woman who fall victim to ‘love’ and all it is a mind game, a control, a man owing your body and life.

    The old saying, “if you love something set it free, if it comes back to you its yours if it doesn’t it never was.”

    Most will not ‘try’ or test the waters of their love, challenging to see the depth and breath of it, to see how free you are inside of a relationship.

    Some think the tighter you are bound the more you are loved, when in fact the opposite is true. The loser the ties, the more love grows.

    A free mind is a loving mind.

    A bound mind lives in fear.

    Hold a flower clutched in your fist and see how much it grows…

    The impulse of a parent is to squish their children tight to keep them safe, and yet the most loving thing we can do is release them and let them go.

    We can only hope that we taught them to fly.

    “What is bound on earth is bound in Heaven…”

    “Thy will be done…”

  • Help you be you.

    A letter of apology to my daughters, for I have taught you wrong, all my selfish pleadings to do well for me, as created within you a program, that is better to give than receive.

    To give up your attention on self and in return receive accolades of a job well done.

    To wear proudly the tag of people pleaser, to lower your boundaries bit by bit to take on more and more, until you are swimming in a life that is minus of you.

    I taught you to please me.
    I taught you to do for me.
    I taught you to think like me, dance for me, talk for me, and become a victim JUST like me.

    To let go of your own needs, to be the need pleaser of many, to be in a vacuum of Other inside of you.

    Where your first and only concern is Other.

    Helping other, feeling other, healing other, dealing other, pleasing other, loving other, seeing other, with only a teeny tiny smidgen of space, a speck that is truly just for you.

    By the time adult friendship and relationships are due to arrive, you have your role all mapped out, you will be drawn and have feelings for the deepest hurt, the most messiest, and jump in and begin to save, rescue and recreate a better life for them.

    I taught you to love the messiest, I taught you to love me. So, love for you is to find the lowest among us, the most selfish and the most wounded, and you will allow them to abuse you as I did.

    I didn’t let you be you, I needed you to help hold up me. For inside of me was nothing of self. You had to be my self.

    I never let your self be born, to let it flourish, prosper, life in its full light, instead I used you to also.

    I used you making you a victim to me.

    Unknowingly I needed you to fix me.

    The past six years I have spent fixing me, what I failed to notice is that the fixing I am doing, may not be enough to overflow on to you.

    You may have to fix yourself.

    To rescue a speck of self and slowly nurture it to bloom as you.

    I covered up that little bright self, each time I hollered in fear, when I needed you to look a certain way, act a certain way for you had to make me a better me.

    It was your job. I assigned it to you as a baby.

    All your accomplishments were to make me better.
    To shield the fact that within me lay nothing but a wounded victim, not a whole mom.

    I wasn’t a mom, I didn’t know how to be.
    I was victim posing as a mom.

    I used your little lives and little bodies to cover-up my deficiencies.

    And now, I fear that this is the only role you know.

    That you are destined to a life of serving Other and neglecting you.

    You all have served me well, and I am sickened by this and feel to the depth of my being, that the legacy that I was born in has its tentacles in you.

    And there is nothing now that I can do to make you shine bright inside of you. No amount of praise, love and attention will melt away the program set as a child.

    It will be up to each of you to reset your inside, to find the Spirit of self, to set up boundaries, to find a value of self, and I am setting you to this task with very little self.

    It can be done, and it has been done.

    I found a me inside of me buried deep waiting.

    She is who you now have as a mother, a reformed victimizer, and sadly she now has to sit and watch the affects of years spent being abused by me, play it self out.

    The legacy is hard to get out from beneath, and harder still to watch in real life continuing on slurping up another life.

    My greatest plea as I lay in tears on my yoga mat, was if this is my lesson, I got it. I got it, and please let my children get it too.

    The saddest day of my life is to see too much, to feel to much, to know the intricacies of the legacy, of living a soulless life, to see what I created.

    It is like I wanted puppets to please me, but the puppets are only set to please messy people, selfish people, mentally unbalanced people, and I can’t reset them to be puppets to self.

    To turn all those wonderful attributes and let them serve you.

    Love you.

    Feel you.

    Please you.

    All the love and attention I needed from you, I now need you to turn that back to you.

    Be the most wonderful caring loving trusting self to your self.

    I am sorry.

    I love you.

    Words mean nothing, actions speak loudly.
    You have witnessed myself in the past six years taking care of my self.

    I am here to help you be you.

    I pray it is not too late…can I be stronger than the legacy I planted?

  • I belong on this Tree.

    The story line art project allows you to reflect backwards to get know those who came before you, to see whose shoulders you stand upon, who blazed the trail before you.
    Immediately we all go into our memory banks to withdraw someone who was a hero, who against all odds, seemed to flourish and persevere.
    As I flipped through files in my mind, I knew who I would write about.
    I know her intimately for her shoes I wear; yet I have no pictures of her, nothing.
    Well, I do have a family picture with a sticky note saying she is missing.
    Her and I are the sticky notes, the holes in the family or the ones that got away.
    Like a pair of mittens knitted decades apart, we match.
    When I seen the mitten tree with all the different mittens who lost their pair, I felt a sense of connectedness.
    I loved how they looked displayed so artfully on the branches, the snow, the green tree and the lights.
    I wondered what drew me to that tree and its simplicity, homemade and nature.
    As I drove home from the quilt meeting with my own mitten tree quilt, it took on new meaning. How the mittens were all misfits, mismatched, part of a broken set, yet when hung together make a beautiful tree.
    And this morning as I sit here with the quilt in front of me, I see the lady approaching the tree…I see the tree, and I wonder how this will complete itself.
    What story line will this quilt unfold for me?
    Before it is even complete I feel a great sense of peace settle over me. I belong on this tree.
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  • Stand Up!

    Yesterday Oprah had the second part with the 200 men who stood up against abuse, I have only seen small segments on her website, but the few I seen offered this, “Standing UP against abuse”.

    Standing up and speaking up with courage, releases the shame, the blame and the rage that live in silence.

    Standing up is not a victim stance.

    Standing up takes courage.

    Standing in the truth of your life and your life experiences, standing and speaking of the deeds of evil you survived as a child, the mixed messages, the bad definitions, the path it set you upon, all stop when you stand up.

    You then pick your own path.

    A path free of abuse.

    I believe to the depth of my soul, you either are sitting down with abusers and letting the legacy continue, OR you are standing up and speaking out and walking away from the abuse.

    It takes courage to stand up, but standing up is the only thing that will stop abuse.

    Sitting and remaining in relationships where the abuse lives is sitting down in abuse.

    I Stand UP!

    I applaud these strong men and the courage it takes to stand up and I am standing with you!

    It will change your whole life, from being a victim to becoming a survivor.

    Standing up and speaking is the only way to end this.

    It is never too late to stand up!

  • United together without abuse.

    “One can be a brother only in something.  Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.” 

    ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

     

    What is the something that binds a family together, what binds sisters to sisters, and brothers to brothers, and sisters to brothers and brothers to sisters?

     

    What ingredient is needed to weld a family together?

     

    Something held us together and something tore us apart, and I want to know what that something is and who was responsible for stealing the something.

     

    We can all get together and be a family lined up as I see it, or as others see it, a united family.

     

    If I were to join the lineup today, I would just be lining up I would not be reunited.

     

    The ‘something’ is missing for me now.

     

    Did I give it away or was it taken from me, or was it even there in the first place, perhaps it was just a total illusion all along.

     

    Maybe all we ever were was a family line up.

    A line up of abused kids.

    We were bound by abuse.

     

    When I stopped standing there in the abuse, when I left and walked away, I broke the bond that held me in place, I left the abuse, I walked out of the lineup.

     

    I was bound there by abuse, by a shared secret, my insides matched their insides, and we were united.

     

    United in a lineup of abuse.

     

    I want to lineup again, but not in abuse.

     

    I want to line up in a real family.

     

    And that is the legacy I am trying to build for my children, so that they have a family that is united together without abuse.

     

  • Steering Our Own Canoes!

    One definition of codependency; Adult children of alcoholics; people in relationships with emotionally or mentally disturbed; people in relationships with chronically ill peoples; parents of children with behavior problems; people in relationships with irresponsible people; professionals – nurses, social workers and others in ‘helping’ occupations.  Even recovering alcoholics noticed they were codependent and perhaps had been long before becoming chemically dependent.

     

    Melody Beatte goes on to write.

     

    “One fairly common denominator was having a relationship personally or professionally, with troubled, needy, or dependent people.  But a second more common denominator seemed to be the unwritten, silent rules that usually develop in the immediate family and set the pace for relationships. These rules prohibit discussion about problems; open expression of feelings; direct, honest communication; realistic expectations, such as being human, vulnerable or imperfect; selfishness; trust in other people and one’s self; playing and having fun; and rocking the delicately balanced family canoe through growth or change – however healthy and beneficial that movement might be.  These rules are common to alcoholic family systems but can emerge in other families too.

     

    Melody’s personal definition is; A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior.

                    Melody Beatte

     

    As I sit here 5 ½ years later, I realize that I rocked the family canoe by getting out, I tipped the balance and was seen as crazier than the folks who began steering that canoe long before I was born.

     

    I heard on the radio today, that a family boat is heading down a certain river before a child is born, and our legacy is to pick up an oar and row.

     

    We are taught how to row and in what direction by our parents.  And we don’t start rowing at 18, but at about 1 year old or younger. 

     

    We are taught how to row and where.

     

    It is my opinion that two mentally and emotionally disturbed people were rowing my family’s canoe, and that the only way to save my self was to get out of the boat, and not to just stop rowing.

     

    I was no longer trusting in the elders who steered our family canoe, nor was I going to ride along with the rest, just because we were born in the same boat.

     

    While I couldn’t change the course of the family boat, I could change mine, but in order to do so, I had to jump out.

     

    It is seen as rejection of all who stayed in the boat.

     

    It isn’t seen as healthy or wise, but rather that I have set boundaries to keep them out.

     

    And I guess I have.

     

    I don’t want people in my canoe trying to steer me in a direction I don’t want to go in. 

     

    It has been a long and arduous journey to find the strength and confidence to row myself, to strike out on my own, learning how to row in a direction that is much more healthy than what I was taught.

     

    While the rest may see me as rejecting them, I am only embracing me. 

     

    Embracing my independence, my freedom of choice, my boundaries, and learning what is healthy for me and what causes me pain, what I need to live in peace, love and joy.  Learning how to stay in my canoe and in my business, allowing and honoring each person to ride the river of life as they chose.

    I heartily and cheerfully encourage the rest to jump ship, letting the family’s legacy canoe to finally become empty of dysfunctional codependent folks.  It can happen when one by one each of us begin steering our own canoes!

     

     

     

  • 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.

     

  • Both and And…

    ‎"To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path."

    Pema Chodron

     

    The path to enlightenment isn’t a slide of joy, love and bliss, perhaps once you have untangled all the crossed wires and unhooked all the addictive tendencies, connected love of self, but until then…when you feel that it is hopeless, when it seems so upside down and backwards, head in.

     

    Head directly in what is giving you stress and angst, and look about inside and outside, see it all as an experiment in humankind.

     

    I used to look at others and see all the places they were backwards, where they made actions blindly and sat befuddled in the outcome, now I look at how I affect the world around me.

     

    I am not excited or feeling blissful as I delve deeply into how my all or none actions are affecting me, my mothering skills, and how this all affects my children’s sense self, but in the moments when I feel so out of control, I usually am.

     

    I usually have taken a learned behavior and never questioned its application.  Not only on me, but those around me.

     

    It leaves you breathless to see how your words and actions can literally change the way another feels about themselves.

     

    One of the biggest challenges in all of this is to be the changeling mom, to be the one to undo and correct generations of useless tools.

     

    I am never certain what will work, but I am always certain that if I don’t change, the legacy will continue on, a legacy of all or none living.

     

    The perspective alone from all or none, to both-and leaves everyone with multiple options and the gates open wide in allowing different opinions to enter, for new ideas to be born, a change of the landscape as well as the people who live upon it.

     

    It leaves me hopeful, always.

    Hopeful that the damage I have inflicted can be turned around, that when I finally learn a new way, they will instantly feel the affects.

     

    The affects of being accepted, of allowing their true selves to shine forth, their voices to be heard, a life to be noticed, hopeful they will be in a reality of Both and And.

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Silent Aunt who disappeared….

    “He couldn’t not know what he knew; he couldn’t not see once he saw.”   Patti Digh

     

    It hit me today in yoga, that what I am witnessing in my great niece is Me.

     

    Me as a newborn baby girl arriving and going with the flow of the family I was born into.

     

    She appears on a stage of an already in motion drama, a play in progress, roles clearly defined, the scenes are set, the dialogue is memorized, and from there her role is carved.

     

    She begins with a supporting role, and will learn that in order to maintain favor, her lines will reflect those of the Main Characters, her parents and grandparents.

     

    It is the expectation of her elders to follow their roles, and someday take over top billing.

     

    I may be her future self and she is my beginning – we are linked with the thread of legacy.

     

    My mother’s sister who was estranged from her family has come into my thoughts yet again.  How nice it would have been to have her view of my mother’s family. 

     

    What made her leave the stage she was born upon?

     

    I feel that I am my Aunt, but a generation behind her.

    I have access to the Internet and have ways to communicate that she wasn’t able to.

     

    My mother is close to her brothers and has always been, while my Aunt chose to stay away, two totally different perspectives of one family.

     

    The last words my mother said to me was, “we have two different perspectives!”  Remarkably wise, she knew we didn’t match.

     

    My mother never spoke of the sister that ran away, never.  She had another one who also was estranged from the family but lived near the family; she, I was told was cold and bitter. My mother had very limited exchanges with this sister. 

     

    She also had a brother who committed suicide.

     

    My Uncle (my mother’s brother) molested my brother and sister, and another Uncle molested my mother when she was a young girl, yet she remains close to her family and holds them in high regard, visiting them regularly.

     

    There are two distinctly different reactions on the stage of abuse; we either keep the normal dialogue going or we get off the stage!

     

    If you stay on the stage, you continue with the same play and drama and accept new characters as they are born upon this stage.

     

    When you get off, you get off alone and you are segregated and an outcast, but the abuse stops.

     

    It stops only along your family branch, but the rest of the tree continues to flourish as long as the other branches go along with the original dialogue of abuse. 

     

    Roles continue unchecked, words flow the same, abuse lays in the wings waiting, forever near, cycles spiral again and again, repeating itself like a broken record.

     

    On my new stage I have to learn or maybe unlearn the first 40 years.

     

    I am no longer a newborn without a voice or a choice.

     

    I now am able to discern what I feel and what I know, what is healthy and what isn’t healthy and I have the right to act freely and use dialogue that goes against the original family play.

     

    It is with the greatest compassion that I look back upon my old stage and see my family still stuck in the roles they were born into.

     

    If I can be a voice that hollers from off the stage, a disgruntled watcher of their play, if my jeers can put a seed of doubt, a drop of fear, a whisper of truth, if I can lure but one player away, I feel my life’s journey will not be for naught.

     

    I will not be the silent Aunt who disappeared….

     

     

  • She is watching you always!

    As I have been pondering, tossing and turning around in my head, how it is possible that the 4th generation is just beginning a relationship with the same pedophile, it occurred to me it was love and compassion that has kept this legacy going.

     

    I know it sounds nuts that such a kind sentiment can be the cause of this legacy continuing on, but it is.

     

    The third generation is just following the path of the second and the second of the first, the first being my mother.

     

    As my nephew goes to visit his grandpa, he is only doing what he has witnessed his mother do and his grandmother do since he was born.

     

    There is nothing unusual in his steps.

     

    His daughter will also watch and see how her father engages with this man and will follow his lead.  Her steps will echo his.

     

    There doesn’t need to be any words spoken, written or shouted to the moon, nope, just seeing how the adults in the room treat her great-grandfather is all she needs, she will mimic them all.

     

    Does it matter if her great-grandfather is on the sexual predator list, that he needs to be supervised around her, or that he has a long history of damaged little girls behind him?

     

    Nope, none of that information will stack up against the fact that her father is okay with this man, that her grandmother is fine having a relationship with him, and that is all that matters. 

     

    She will use them as her gauge, her monitor and her guide in what is acceptable in life and what is not.  She is being groomed to be comfortable with a pedophile, she is being taught not to fear him and she won’t.

     

    This one fact alone is what has allowed him to continue on, no one fears him they all love him.

     

    The ones that love him allow him access now, then and always, for they love without conditions.

     

    While most are looking at my father and his actions and watching diligently for him to make his move, no one is looking at the ones he is with.

     

    My mother was the first adult to know of his actions within our family tree, and her reaction were what we all followed to a tee.

    She never left him, had a consequence for his behavior within their relationship, she didn’t warn us of his disease, there were no outward signs in her behavior that would have sent us a signal, not one.

     

    Not once as far as my limited memory serves me did she ever act in fear of this man, not one time, never.

     

    What she instead always showed, was love, respect and normal petty complaints that two married people have, she never once suggested to me that his disease was ruining our lives, that it had ruined many, that the potential was there, that she feared for the safety of her girls, their girls and their girls, and their friends….

     

    Not once.

     

    Her actions have always been to love and support him, to show him compassion and caring, always.

     

    We only see actions, actions, actions.

    Words are meaningless unless and until an action follows.

     

    So as you tell me my fears are unfounded, that I have no reason to worry, I will tell you this.

     

    You are your mother’s daughter, you are doing exactly as she did and you will receive the same exact outcome.

     

    The legacy continues through you, your children and now your grandchildren.

     

    You are the one teaching them NOT to fear a pedophile, know it and own it.

     

    The little baby is without words but she is learning much already, she is watching you always!

     

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