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.   

[Chart]

PC, your post really got me reflecting. Two things specifically: one is that I wasn't scapegoated, rather it was the reverse. My job was to "save" the family. In that role I had "love privileges". I got all the love I needed from her as in line with my training. Probably, at minimum, I had a sense of relative value as a baby. Although, when I'd failed to produce the intended effect, my "role" took on a whole new dimension. It was subtle, insidious, but it was implicit and everyone knew it, I was the strong one, the adventurer, the popular one... special. But of course the half-truth held an ugly reality just below the surface. Understanding my own family dynamic, I have to say it was definitely easier for me to escape and although guilt-ridden, I've nonetheless managed to move on with my life with minimal residual guilt for abandoning my mother. As toxic systems go, I think mine was the lesser of two evils. (Dolly made reference to this recently and I'm still processing it...)

The other thought that came up was a situation with my ex-wife and eldest daughter years ago. It was a situation where my ex and I both "ganged-up" on our eldest daughter. Our D was maybe 12. Her mom got angry with her (or maybe it was me) and we both got on a wagon of anger and reproach and loud high voices just ripping into our poor daughter. I remember her scared and bewildered face. I also remember how "good" it felt to vent my anger finally. I was also "bonded" with my wife with whom I regularly was in conflict with. Big frickin' messy toxic situation. And so sad for my daughter. Unless I'm gravely mistaken, that was not a regular event. I don't believe we turned anyone into the family scapegoat. But what rings inside me is the recognition of that "feeling" of satisfaction I felt. I think I fully comprehend what your author is talking about and the "function" of the scapegoat in the family.

The more complex and finely tuned the instrument (eg. Brain) the more easily it can go all wonky.

[TheBigBlue]

Wow, thank you PapaCoco (and Dolly) for mentioning this book, and for explaining this so clearly (it can be overwhelming how much I still need to learn and understand). It was a real light-bulb moment for me. Reading what you shared helped me see my role in my family in a new way, as the one who was able to carry, absorb, and contain what others couldn't. That reframe matters a lot, and it helps loosen some very old self-blame. I really appreciate you putting words to this.
 

[dollyvee]

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.

PC, I'm glad you found something in this book and I'm sorry that your family did that to you. I also thought it was interesting that she wrote about how the family picks the strongest, most empathetic etc etc member, which is different from Scapegoating in Families: Intergenerational Patterns of Emotional and Physical Abuse (which I was also going to recommend tho it's more about the constructs so far in the family) where she and has a polarizing view of taking the "weakest" member of the family, which I don't agree with necessarily. I guess the story is who the family sees as the weakest, which is not necessarily true.

To me, I find the word "helpful" really loaded because that's the story that they wanted me to believe, that I had to be "helpful" and take this on to help the family survive, which of course, needing the family in any capacity, I did. But being helpful is also something that is keeping me stuck in many ways, and keeping me from my authentic self and a connection to healthy anger. Everything I did had to be for someone else because that's how I had to survive in the family.

My job was to "save" the family. In that role I had "love privileges". I got all the love I needed from her as in line with my training. Probably, at minimum, I had a sense of relative value as a baby. Although, when I'd failed to produce the intended effect, my "role" took on a whole new dimension. It was subtle, insidious, but it was implicit and everyone knew it, I was the strong one, the adventurer, the popular one... special. But of course the half-truth held an ugly reality just below the surface

Chart, I would encourage you to look at the definition of scapegoat more, or the examples given in the Scapegoating Families book where the scapegoat is the precise one used to save the family. I also put a blurb in my journal this morning about the relationship between parents and children of the opposite sex where the parent heaps praise on the child until they no longer follow the "rules," and then the scapegoating begins. Not that I want to project my own experience onto you, I just perhaps noticed the similarities.

And now who is being "helpful!" I am writing about this I guess in hopes of getting out of this place that I have found myself in since being a child, and the path to connecting to my own more authentic self, anger included.

Sending you all support,
dolly

[Chart]

And now who is being "helpful!" I am writing about this I guess in hopes of getting out of this place that I have found myself in since being a child, and the path to connecting to my own more authentic self, anger included.

This hits a button for me. I have analyzed things my whole life, trying to decide if what I am doing is for me, or comes from my conditioning. Now, by trying to help people, am I just fulfilling a manifest destiny imposed by toxic caregiver dynamics?

Ultimately, no. I now understand that dynamic and although I'm not totally immune to it's influence, I still feel strongly that I make decisions and act on situations based on what I believe is "good". (And I'm not implying that anyone is suggesting the reverse, just that I find the dynamic fascinating, but complex enough that it's tricky to explain, especially without implications.) Did that make sense?

I'd like to add, I think, PC and DV, you are doing EXACTLY the same. Taking those parts that come from toxicity and then making them your own BECAUSE you've examined them minutely and determined that "being that way" is ok now, despite it's horrible origins. It's the idea of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My mother trained me to emotionally take care of her. So for better or for worse, I got an intensive crash-course early on and quite frankly became darn good at it. Too many times in my life it totally backfired. I still have to continue being careful after all these years. Understanding limits and what's healthy is still not second-nature for me. I sometimes goof up. But overall, I sense that I can be very good at something that very often is very positive, a lot of which came from my narcissistic mother. So for that, I have to rejoice in the universal "process". The origin of all is one. Evil is only born out of a total misunderstanding of Love (imo :-)
 

[dollyvee]

Did that make sense?

Yes, I get what you're saying and until I read Fawning, I would have said that being helpful is "good," and ultimately helping people is good, but there's a line where we are helpful, and then helpful because fawning is an ingrained trauma response that we're not aware of. Specifically, because of how we have been raised (ie the one to take it all on, not incite conflict etc). The Fawning book has really helped open my eyes to this (and there is specifically a chapter on Fawning in Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed) and think it is perhaps more prevalent in scapegoats.

Sorry to hijack your journal PC. I just thought this was an important distinction to make and am happy to move the conversation somewhere else.

[NarcKiddo]

PC, I am so happy that you are now able to love yourself even when you are in a nasty EF. That's so important and worthwhile.

The discussion about whether the scapegoat is weak or strong is interesting. I'm not even sure if a FOO would view it in those terms, were they to analyse it. After all, most of the time it is in their interests for the scapegoat to continue to be the scapegoat. If they are too weak to take it they may break. The FOO might not care about losing the individual, as such, but it is a lot of work and hassle to revamp the dynamics if someone drops out. I think that is why we feel such resistance when we start healing and behave differently towards them. They DO NOT like it, and I think a big part of that is because they have to adjust themselves in response.

And (also sorry to barge in on your journal, PC) the word "good" has been cropping up here too. The word "good" is generally used as an insult in my FOO, when used to describe a person. I am frequently called "good" and although they pretend that it is not an insult when applied to me, I am pretty sure it is.

[Papa Coco]

Dolly and Narckiddo, no need to think of this as hijacking my journal. I invite my journal to be used for this deep a discussion on this subject. It's theee subject of the day for me. I've invited you all to enter into my journal because I require feedback any time I'm trying to figure things out. My personal journal in my computer's hard drive helps me formulate thoughts, but it doesn't give much feedback. This is a living journal that I can write my thoughts into and incite a healthy gathering with good, positive, helpful feedback.

This morning as I was trying to not get out of bed so early (again--my brain is still in fix-it mode because of the EF I've just endured, so it won't stop thinking, and I can't fall back asleep at 3 am anymore) I was thinking about the concept of Trauma Therapists as partners in our healing, rather than just smart-doctor/broken-patient relationships. It's well documented in the books I read about trauma therapy that any therapist who partners with their clients provides the best healing. I thought about how true that is with spiritual beliefs also. Rather than me laying around praying to a God or a Universal consciousness of some kind to please help me, I'm wondering now if taking a partnership relationship with our higher powers (God, The Universe, whatever we each think of as our higher power), could bring us closer to the peace that we seek. The way I see the world is an "As above, so below" or "Our inner worlds mirror our outer worlds" kind of resonance.

Just now, as I'm writing this to you all, I'm thinking about how partnership is working here too. I'm writing my deepest thoughts in a journal, and several people whom I trust are partnering with me to ponder those thoughts and flesh them out into helpful realization. We're all learning while we're all teaching. Partnering for healing from trauma is the least lonely way to slowly heal my deep, lifelong sense of inner loneliness.

I see Chart's comments about how being the family fixer was just as difficult as being a family dumping ground, and all the comments made by Dolly and Narckiddo around his response, really shines spotlight on the overall dysfunctional dynamic of the entire family unit. Any dynamic goes into imbalanced chaos when one of its balancing components either changes or falls away. It's always been so easy for me to think of the family as villains versus victims, but what if it's more of a partnership of imbalanced behaviors driven by a family of imbalanced emotions? What if they need me to heal from their "abuse" as much as I need me to heal from it? What if it's more like if I heal, they heal too?

It's been said that fawns often try to help everyone, but when we help someone who isn't learning their own lesson, we're sort of doing their homework for them. Nobody learns when someone does their homework for them. As I was running out of patience with my CBT therapist 25 years ago, he was teaching me that when you help someone, you're stealing their learning from them. (Helpful ideal, but a not-so-nice way of heaping more shame onto me for feeling ashamed of who I was already).

Whenever I witness a narcissist or a BPD sufferer having their meltdowns, I see a person who hasn't learned a darn thing about themselves. They've blamed me their whole life and as long as I carried that blame, their own personal growth stalled. That "smartypants" CBT doctor, (who loved to make sure I knew that he was smart and I was broken), would try to shame me into stopping being a fawn. Little did he know, heaping shame onto a person drowning in shame makes less sense to me than it did to him.

My current therapist is a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist (DBT) with a strong belief in partnering with his clients. He teaches that if I focus on healing myself, then the world around me will heal itself also. When I combine that sentiment with Chart's, Dolly's and NarcKiddo's thoughts on how the whole family falls into the trap of putting their blame onto someone willing to hold it for them, I see how the less willing I am to take their blame, the more chances we all have at learning how to be accountable for our own dysfunctional feelings.

Many true natural-born narcissists (like Ted Bundy and other profound serial killers) may never learn anything by losing their fawns, but people who fell into the cyclone of blame because that's how the family was evolving, DO have a chance at learning.

I can say that I was a Catholic for 20 years, then a Christian for 20 more, and now I'm a spiritually tuned believer that God is the force of creative consciousness that we are all a part of. But as a Catholic, I learned from Catholics how to be Catholic. We were judgy. We talked about people behind their backs. We believed in physical rituals rather than "be still and know". We prayed to a "father figure" who would only help us if we behaved how our priests told us to. As I left that world, I had a lot of learning and growth to do. I did all those things because I was taught to. Marrying Coco when I was 22 years old was one of the best things I've ever done, because she is a loving, caring, gentle soul who also has a strong sense of her Self. When I tried to be the person I was raised to be, (blaming her for my moods) she simply didn't take it. By not being my fawn, she didn't give me a place to put that dysfunction, so I had no choice but to learn to take accountability for my own moods. I owe her a HUGE lifelong gratitude for showing me the way out of the lifestyle I was taught by a dysfunctional family.

For me, I've become a much better person because I've had to take responsibility for my own behaviors. Rather than feeling like I'm going to be punished if I don't behave, I now see that I don't want to keep perpetuating a hurtful world, I now want to be the peace that I seek. It's not about eternal rewards and punishments for behaviors, it's about wanting to resonate with the energy of love and peace so I can "partner with God" to become the person I want to be, rather than behave like a good boy so I can go to Heaven someday. This feels so much more real to me. So any time I allow someone to put their own shame onto me, Both of us, me and them, stop learning how each of us can be accountable for our own emotions and fears and shame and peace and love, etc.

It's not about behaving peacefully, it's about becoming peace.

I use that word a lot, "peace."  It's the one thing I want more than anything in life. It's the one thing I've not yet been able to really resonate with. I drink coffee all day long so I can feel anxiety, because if I don't feel anxiety, then I feel depression. I haven't yet been able to accomplish feeling relaxed. Ever. At least not while unmedicated. I fear depression far more than I fear anxiety. I've been a Nervous Ned since the day I was born. Anxiety has saved me many times by keeping my guard up. Hypervigilance keeps me aware of danger. Any time I relaxed around my Catholic family or friends, I was vulnerable to their exploitations. So I'm terrified of being relaxed.

Again: I want what I'm afraid of. Peace. Relaxation. Letting my guard down. I intentionally stay anxious because, like those starships in the movies, I "have my shields up" 24x7.  It's safer than dancing freely in the meadows or swimming freely with the dolphins. Seeking the peace of safety is still my obsession. Anxiety keeps me safe. So I drink coffee and keep watch on my surveillance cameras always.

Whew. Wow. What an eye-opening morning this is proving to be for me.

Please, keep using my journal for this. I'm learning a ton right now.