You just do not get this at all. I'll try to elaborate.
I find it helps some to see with adult eyes that a behavior or a feeling was a response to a situation that you either misjudged or you are no longer facing, as a way to convince yourself to start letting go of it.
First off, you are not me and you did not experience my childhood. Second, you are not a licensed therapist. Third, this is not, for me, a theoretical discussion. We are talking about my life, so that makes it personal.
Inappropriate comments from my father about my developing body and inappropriate comments from my mother about her shameful unwed pregnancy and date rape--told to me when I was a pre-adolescent--were misjudgements on THEIR parts, NOT mine. And because they are my parents and I have chosen to continue a relationship, I still face these issues. There are triggers like the Betrayal Bond book mentions that bring up these feelings in me again and again. Sure, I could have cut myself off from them, but I didn't want to do that. Maybe I'll determine that I need to. I don't know. And that is the point. I don't know. What I do know is that I am working my butt off to heal myself. And that's good enough for me.
Not that it gets you anywhere near all the way there, but at least you can begin to detach from it and stop identifying the behavior as an "inescapable part of you" or defending it or blaming it on unwitting third parties.
This sounds like avoidance to me. I believe the only way I can truly let go of this is to face it head on, feel everything associated with it and then let it go, as Corri said. I don't believe it is an inescapable part of me, but I don't just expect it to disappear into thin air either.
And little kids do have the ability to reason. They don't do it as well as we do, but they do reason and they do make choices.
They most certainly do not in a situation such as mine.
I said this in my old thread:
Quote:
I don't know that it's possible for the mother to explain away inappropriate fatherly behavior to a 10 year old. The child simply would not have the maturity to understand human behavior enough to be able to view the behavior in this context.
Edited to add: And she shouldn't have to. Why is it the child's responsibility to understand the parent?.
And then fearless wrote this:
Quote:
Sorry I gave James Hollis' book the wrong name - It is Middle Passages: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife
Mrs CAC 4 - I looked the book up on Amazon this morning and looked inside the book. This quote jumped out at me right away.
Your opinion is the same as this Jungian psychologist (I added the bold): "The conclusions about the world drawn by the child are thus derived from a narrow spectrum and are inevitably partial and prejudicial. The child cannot say, "My parent has a problem, which has an effect upon me." The child can only conclude that life is anxious and the world unsafe."
Sometimes those choices need to be revisited and altered in later life, but that happens with choices we make later in life as well.
Well, duh! What the heck do you think I'm trying to do?
I guess I'm not really getting that. Directing anger at parents feels to much to me like a "Devil made me do it" defense. Maybe you're right, that it is a step along the way, but it feels so much like misplaced blame and a distorted view of what actually happened.
This comment makes me wonder if you are having difficulty facing something from your past.
But from my own POV--I was born a healthy whole child. A blank slate. My parents' behavior caused me to develop unhealthy views of sex, pregnancy, men, and my female body. There is nothing distorted about that. I am not mistaken about that. I am not making sh!t up and I am not dreaming. These things happened. I did not ask for it. I did not deserve it. They happened. Now I see that I have adopted defense mechanisms to deal with my fears. I am starting to understand exactly what those DMs are. Once they are all out into the open and I can see that although they helped me survive as a child, I no longer need them, I will be able to let them go. This is already starting to happen, and my improved attitude about my sexuality is proof of that. It is happening.
But speculation backed up by experience and research.
This is just nonsense. Each person reacts differently to events based on many different factors, including personality, attachment style to parents, gender, and so on. I have spent nearly 40 years feeling like I was a freak and at fault for what happened and I WILL NOT feel that way about myself anymore. This is me saying that I'm not a victim now. I can see things with my adult's eye and put the responsibility where is rightly sits. I completely stand behind my child-self and her reactions to her life and I don't give a whit what you or anyone else thinks about that.
We had choices, even back then. Our parents did not have all the power. We could have done something different.
You must have been living in an alternate universe. My mother held ALL the cards back then, and she made sure I knew it.
And we still can, although long habit makes it difficult.
And on this, I do agree with you.
Yes, it was a deliberate understatement. Hey look, another defense mechanism! Cut the monster down to size, laugh at it, and maybe I'll have what it takes to attack it.
Or maybe, as one that's tempermentally prone to distraction, calling this thing a "distraction" is a way to excuse myself for not having gotten the better of it after all these years. And I'm back to "the devil made me do it". See how tempting it is?
The choices we made as children are what they are. We had no choice. We had no power. We were at the mercy of our parents, and if they were merciful, we were very lucky. If they weren't we paid the price. Now as adults, our job is to untangle that web of dysfunction and try to put our lives back together. AND, try not to pass it on to our kids. We do that with the maturity and capacity we now have as grown-ups. But first we have to honor and respect the children inside us and the choices we had to make to survive.
