Birth family dynamics
Taking time in lockdown to browse through on-line videos on self-help, I listen, learn and recalibrate a lot of what I thought I understood. My understanding of many of my birth family dynamics changes, firming up, and offering new perspectives that bring me up short, as I ask myself a host of questions which will probably remain unanswered.
Some answers I do have, however. And this process of reflection is very welcome, as finally I can feel myself standing up straighter and coming out from under a lot of pointless habits, such as needless introspection – Wow! It was never about me after all, there never was anything I could have done to change that – worrying, and overthinking around painful subjects – What might I have done differently? Turns out, not much.
This process of setting to rights and starting again is often painful: I’m having to review most of what I previously thought I had understood about “what happened” and reconsider events in a very different light, as having much less to do with my conduct or perceived failings than I had assumed. Coming to terms with a lot of wasted time and wasted regrets – there was no shape I could have twisted myself into that would have made any difference, after all – has been stark. A process of uplifting liberation from the old narratives also leaves me feeling quietly appalled.
Children accept what is reflected back at them and assume it is inevitable. So, my childish realisation that my parents both had difficulty accepting my particular suite of impairments was part of the juvenile understandings I collected about life in general and me in particular: “I’m obviously impaired, therefore I’m unhappy, obviously…” As youngsters, we take on board a great many mixed messages, then spend years trying to contort ourselves to make sense of them. So I took for granted an assumption about my world, that I now recon is the Great Falsehood.
To be continued.
Thanks for listening.
Please share:
July 26, 2020 @ 10:23 pm
Wonderful! Excellent! I love the painting of the little girl. Perfect. And yes, we spend tons of energy and time trying to figure out what really had little or nothing to do with us in the first place–except that we were there, so of course it had ‘something’ to do with us. I can’t help thinking of Trapped — and how just being born ‘traps’ us in family dynamics already in play. The air we breathed without even knowing it.
Things over here seem to be going from bad to worse. I grieve for our nation.
Hugs across the ocean…. 🙂
Elouise
July 29, 2020 @ 2:45 pm
Dear Elouise, Thanks so much for your wonderfully kind comments and reflections. It’s lovely – though it also feels strange – to see everything differently, a bit like waking up from an uncomfortable dream to the realisation that everything has changed.
I’ve always said that the advantage hard-line disfunction in politics, is that is galvanises the “liberal” others, the mainstream, tolerant majority -including many republicans – who have probably been taking their freedoms rather too much for granted of late. We have seen an upsurge of concerted action to protect and promote the good, generous values that we all need to cherish. And, if POTUS cannot see that by excusing himself from responsibility for “messy” decisions, he simply impoverishes himself, that is his problem. Worry not! 🙂