Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[dollyvee]

Hey PC,

That's great that you've made that progress for yourself  Really, what an achievement.

My need to be emotionally "felt" by others, makes me quick to believe that's what others want also. I like being with people who want to feel cared about, and who want to care about others. So, I find myself wanting to share myself with people while they share themselves with me...emotionally. I assume that other people want to be heard and believed and cared about as much as I do.

For me, this is the tricky part. I had the experience where I was "loved" to the point of having no boundaries where FOO did things because they really "loved" me (well, they loved themselves). So, when people come too close like that it mimics the lack of space and self that I had with my gm. I also think, and I'm figuring out how all this scapegoating stuff applies to me, that I do one of the behaviours that scapegoated children do, which is called stuffing. That I don't express emotions etc because that was used against me. So, on the one hand I had to be extra open with my gm for example, but on the other with my m, I had to have this tough exterior (and the main thing is that no one did anything about it). When people are that open with me, I can't help to think what is their underlying motivation for doing so because with FOO it always came with strings attached, which I can understand would be triggering for those who wer cast out, or abandoned by their families. I think it's just a question of what our window of tolerance is.

Sending you support,
dolly

[Papa Coco]

Dolly,

I have a great deal of respect for what you're saying about love being used as a way to tromp boundaries. That's such an insidious behavior in people who do that to anyone, but especially to their own children and grandchildren. I've been learning, here on the forum, to be careful to not use the hug emoji too much, unless I feel sure that the recipients are not triggered by them. Some are. And it's easily understandable that some of us are triggered even by the word love.

Your posts have always been helpful to me, and I've always felt a sort of a connection with you through them, and through the many helpful things you've said to me over the years.

The word Love has something like 52 meanings. We love pizza. We love movies. We love our car or a favorite piece of furniture. I hate one job and love another job. I have a romantic love with my wife, a fatherly love for my children, and another love for my pets, and so on. My favorite use for the word love is what the religious people call Agape. To me, that is a synonym for soul-to-soul connection. I didn't realize that meaning until my father-in-law passed away in 2000. He was one of my favorite people on the earth. And when he died unexpectedly at work, my heart went into a feeling I'd never experienced before. It felt to me like a 2-inch diameter tube had been yanked out of my chest, and my heart was hemorrhaging some sort of hot pain. My connection to him had been severed in a way that surprised me. I was Gushing pain from my heart. That's when I realized that we really are connected to some people through our hearts. It took a few weeks for that pain to subside, and that's when I started substituting that version of the word "love" with the word "connection." Now, I know that when my wife is in pain, or if she's late coming home from work, that it's in my chest that I feel sad or afraid for her safety. When my son is in pain or danger it's my heart that tells me I'm worried. When a neighbor is in pain, I don't feel it so strongly in my heart, because my connection to a neighbor isn't as strong as my connection to my son, or wife, or grandson.

I learned a lot about myself when my own parents died a decade after my Father-in-law did. In the 15 years since their deaths, I still haven't felt that pain in my heart like I did for my wife's parents. That told me something about my connections that I didn't see coming. In hindsight, I now can see that my father-in-law loved me with a healthier love than my parents did. We happily added a wing to our house and moved my Mother-in-law in with us. She lived with us for 14 more years, and all the while I kept telling Coco, "I'm happy to have your mom here, but no way would I EVER let my mom move in with us." With the exception of my baby sister's suicide that nearly killed me from heart-gushing pain, the rest of my family's love was more selfish, like what you said about your own family. My wife's family loved me for who I am. My own family loved what I could do for them--as long as I didn't embarrass them with my humiliating "empathy" problem. My brain was easily tricked, but my heart appears to have known the difference between the different variations of love that people have with or for me.

Love was used against me also. My BPD/Narcissist sister always loved me just before she took something from me or started another family smear campaign against me. My mom abused me in a variety of ways, including sexually-based boundary tromping, and always said it was because she loved me. I was always told to be nice to my mean siblings because we were a family bonded by love. So, even to this day, when I feel like I love someone, I have to ask myself if I'm being tricked or if my feelings are genuine love.

I use this as a litmus test; Sometimes I have friends who I wonder if I really love them. So I try to imagine that person leaving me or dying or suddenly turning against me (like my FOO and friends and churches did many, many, many times). If I sense a feeling of relief in my chest, then I know I don't really love them, but am just caught in another "fawning" behavior and being nice to them because I'm afraid not to. But if my heart hurts at the thought of losing the person, then I know I have some sense of love (Agape/soul-to-soul Connection) for them.

A few weeks back I did some self-evaluation. I started to ask myself what it was that drove my 4 genuine suicide attempts, the first two at age 19 and the final one at age 50. I have a family of my own now that I love with all my heart, so why did I feel myself being drawn into suicide? I thought and thought and thought. Then I wrote out what was happening in my life during each of the attempts, and VOILA! It hit me like a ton of bricks! Each time I felt uncontrollably drawn toward suicide, like a moth to a flame, I was feeling aggressively abandoned by someone I truly loved. (Perhaps there's a clue in this as to why I struggle so hard to forgive my siblings for how they used love as a leash to keep me in their service. They abused the single most important aspect of who I am: My need for connection)

Now I believe that I better understand how to manage my suicidality, which is pretty strong. I now know that when I'm left or abandoned by someone with whom I have a soul-to-soul connection, that the pain of feeling abandoned is too much for me to bear, and I need to call out for help, so as to not slide down that slope again into suicide. I now have the proof that I needed to believe that my life really, truly is about connection with others. Obviously, that's why I get so sappy when I talk about how helpful the people here on this forum are. Nobody here wants anything from me except connection.

It was how people abused my need for connection with others that hurt me almost to death, and it's connection with others that raises me back up out of the pits of despair. I feel like I'm being literal when I say "I live for connection."

-----TRIGGER WARNING: I didn't have a good experience in churches or religions-----

It's not the same as human love, this is some sort of deeply spiritual need that I have to not be alone in the Universe.  I left religion about the same time my FIL died, because the religious people who were in my life were consistently more about faking love, and using it as a word they didn't truly understand. It's been my own personal experience that religious people have proven to be the most dangerous for me, in that they will withdraw their version of love the quickest if I don't behave how they want me to. My family was Catholic. My wife's family, who didn't go to church, gave me a love that was genuine and real. They didn't use it as a tool with which to control me.

[dollyvee]

Thank you for your response PC. It's given me some things to think about. I get what you're saying and am happy that you've found that sense of connection for yourself, but also that that sense of connection was a way to better understand your Self and a path to your Self, so that you could be there for you when you need it. What's interesting, and maybe where some of the difference lies in our approaches is that I was once on the other end of that suicide equation (if I want to call it that) with my father who wasn't "saved" (again, lacking the word to call it). Maybe in a way, it has taught me the opposite on some level-- that the people you need to be there for you aren't going to be there for you.

I don't want to take up too much of your journal, but through the scapegoat book I'm learning about disenfranchised grief, which is grief that is not "acceptable" to be felt at the time. I learned that one of the causes of disenfranchised grief is suicide. Perhaps once I process my own disenfranchised grief that sense of connection will be easier, perhaps not.

Yes, the hug emoji is a tricky one for me too. Sometimes I feel it, and sometimes it just sort of feels like a band aid when people don't have the capacity to be there for you (which I totally get!), and something in my body has to sort of protect itself for reasons stated above. I also do feel a connection to you through your posts and our communications over the years and there is a real sense of earnestness and genuineness that does come through.

[Chart]

I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment, but that discussion hit me on so many levels. Unable to really comment or reflect, absence of left-brain at the moment, right-brain overwhelm. But thanks for all that...
Sending a heartfelt hug which I hope with all my soul feels authentic. It very truly is...
 

[TheBigBlue]

PapaCoco, it's so much you are carrying. I'm really glad you let this space hold you while things are unsettled. You matter here, exactly as you are, and you don't have to make sense of everything right now. I know that place, too.

[Papa Coco]

Dolly, Chart, TheBigBLue, and everyone,

I feel a closeness with you and the other forum members that I can't feel with friends out in the cold, cruel world. I have friends who struggle as much as we do, but they still don't realize the value of opening up and talking about it, so they continue to suffer without any support.

I learned something beautiful from a book Dolly was reading. Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Help and Hope for Adults in the Family Scapegoat Role by Rebecca C Mandeville. I bought a copy and found myself crying while reading the first chapters, as it kind of triggered my sense of how serious their abuse really was to me. The book is a small, introductory book about how being scapegoated as a child affected me as an adult.  In the 8th chapter, the author wrote that families and social groups don't usually consciously choose to single out a child and blame them for all the problems, it happens organically to families or groups who don't realize their own traumatic damage, and they tend to usually, organically, subconsciously choose their strongest, most resilient, most empathetic and loving child to put all their grief onto.

Many times on this forum, I've said things about how I believe we are the strongest and most helpful people on earth. We're the "light of the world" and "the salt of the earth" and any other old saying that we've heard and dismissed. I see our suffering as a result of us knowing how unfair life is, and that's what makes us not feel okay with abuse. We can't even watch abuse done to others on the News or in movies. We're so aware of the unfairness, that we suffer. Not because we're bad, but because we're good.

This author makes sense when she explains why this is so: Subconsciously, people don't ask for help from people they know can't help them. People don't put burdens onto people who aren't strong enough to bear that burden. When I think about it logically, it makes sense: Broken people find stronger people to carry their burdens. We are chosen by broken people to carry their guilt and shame for them because we can. They can't give their weaknesses to other weak people. They have to give them to people who are strong enough to carry them. The author explains this much better than I do, but when I read that (over and over, almost in tears again), I started to see the truth in it. Our abusers are so fragile they can't handle their own burdens, so they find the best, and kindest, and strongest to put all their self-loathing onto. We are so strong that we take it. It's not fair, but it's how the dysfunctional family balances itself by putting its weaknesses onto the strongest, most durable and functional member.

In my own life, I can remember times when the evilest of my siblings was challenged by life and if she couldn't put the burden or blame onto someone else, she completely and totally melted down into crying and wailing and slamming doors and collapsing into herself. She believed she was stronger than me as long as she could deflect and blame her own evil onto me, but when she had to handle her own dysfunction, she completely imploded.

This really REALLY helps me in my newly formed ability to love myself even when I'm in a nasty EF that makes me feel weak and unsafe. I may be in a panic at times, but I don't hate myself anymore.

(Dolly, I have to give you another gracious thank you for mentioning that book).

[sanmagic7]

rate, PC.  i sent a reply and lost it.  the gist of it was that i echoed what TBB said, and that i, too, left organized religion quite a while ago.  i found spirituality finally at an AA meeting, and even tho i didn't ever feel it in church, i knew immediately what it was - like a bolt of lightning!  what a feeling!

i'm sending you love and a gentle hug (if you're ok w/ that) filled with calm, peace, and strength to keep going.  we're here with you, we are connected, and we've got you.