Old Inner Programming Being Wiped Out With Harsh Reality

          We cannot deal with other people's problems until we deal with our own. That's why i can't stand when people who obviously don't care about my problems ask me how i am. Pretending they care. They obviously don't but it seems like I'm the only one who picks that up. 

  

         And it triggers the old feeling crazy feelings in me. And I wanna shout, "I know what you are doing!!! I see it don't think you can trick me!!! You don't REALLY care, you just want my validation that you DO. Sorry honey, NOT today!!" 

         But then i KNOW that they won't want to hear that. They will deny and get angry. And then it will make me feel CRAZY. The gas lighting. I am still not yet strong enough to do it on my own.

         So i carefully step away, slipping from their fake sympathies. From being their clutch of bravado, which I am NOT a match to give them. Maybe i used to be, but the memory of the falseness still cuts me like metal clanging together on my insides. As Alan Robarge, a relationships therapist and YouTube video maker says in his video about emotional dissonance, when you KNOW someone is being fake to you it rubs your insides like chalk screeching on a board. It feels awful.

         The more I'm away from this garbage, the stronger I hear my own thoughts. And when this happened to me today, it struck me how awful it was to have to fall to my feet every time someone wanted an answer from me, and I had to honor them. But it dishonored me, and made me feel less self-respect.

          Now that I'm done with pleasing others, I find that when I encounter someone who wants me to react a certain way, rage boils up in me and i feel the need to PUSH back with all my might. It may be over reacting on the outside, but inside it makes perfect sense. It's like i have to make up for all the disrespect i allowed in the past. Like i have to PROVE to my exterior that I'm HERE inside. 

        Eventually, it'll balance out. But for now, I let the rage be. It needs seeing, and healing.

         I lost it on my mother today, when she interrupted my peaceful life by bursting into my house and expecting royal treatment. At least to me it seems that way. But if i look deeper I see she is really fragile and needs her daughter's validation of her reality. Because of the minute I said something that didn't resonate with her, when I slipped that "my daughter needs her mother because she is still traumatized from her beginning." To which she answered, "babies aren't so sensitive, and she had love from the beginning." to which i reminded her that she stayed in HER house for her first months, and she is willing to admit that that wasn't so loving due to the well known shouting matches. But then she said something that TIPPED my senses.

          After i thought i had finally got her to believe in the validity of the effects of adoption trauma, and she ADMITTED THAT NOBODY SAID ADOPTION WASN'T TERRIBLY DIFFICULT TO GET OVER, she said: 

"Well you are imagining that babies are affected.... The only reason you feel bad about adoption is from the BOOKS you read." !!!

         And, my soul dripped into my gut. -

          Funny this was AFTER I had told her that she only thinks babies don't have valid feelings because she raised all her kids to lose their own sense of self/will. And her other daughter is doing the same with HER kids.

          She replied with a tone on sensibility that, "they are perfectly happy and always smiling." 

          To which I muttered in reply, "yeah but you wouldn't know their REAL feelings. They're repressed." 

        The woman was befuddled, and then said the above statement.

        So there you have it, folks. A look at people who CRAZY MAKE you into feeling mad, and then walk away with an air of dignity when you just KNOW they are wrong but cannot make them change.

         They're not gonna change as long as you expect them to. You gotta walk away, my former codependent, and face the fact that it doesn't make YOU wrong.

         We gotta be strong for our selves, that's the only way we will be happy in the end. It may hurt, but that's the only way to go on the path to HEALING and greater things.

        If you want to wrestle with pigs, you stay in the mud.

         Sorry mother. "I'm not the same way I used to be. I put my pieces back together differently." Either you hop on my train, or I will have to leave you behind.

         When she left, I recognized my old feelings of guilt and shame from the inability to please her. But then I realized: This was sadness, and it MAKES SENSE to feel. Because my mother basically rejected my reality. And I am oversensitive to rejection because of my past triggers of encounters with it. You know, the deep shame in my subconscious because of Relinquishment. And I let my emotions be, and the grief stay. And soon enough, I felt better. It was different then the old confusion and overwhelming pain she used to make me feel when I could never get validated by her.

         Because now I KNEW. That it was not my fault. And not my self-respect to give away. 

         Oh, and by the way, I noticed I was better at staying present with my daughter's feelings when she was obviously frazzled from the Drama that happened. Because instead of giving her food to quiet her outer attention seeking, I thought, "Let's let her feel the feelings for a change." And I didn't muzzle her with food, and it felt so good. Like I was making a SPACE for her FEELINGS. I think she will appreciate that allowance of her truth to be in the future. 

         Love, 

         A Sad, but clear now, Adoptee Heart