Little Gerda Goes Forward with Courage and Safety

[Gerda]

Job, Sage, Own, DnJ and Eagle -- Thank you so much. These words meant so much to me, I did visit my page a few times yesterday to get some fortification and it's so mysterious to have these people out in the world somewhere care about me and take the time to tell me! Thank you so much!

Eagle, I am a woman of words but agree with you that F2F is much better and wish I could hear your words that way instead! It means so much to me that you found those words to tell me that, I will have to hang that on my wall!

Job, I hear you! You always keep our feet on the ground.

Own, I agree but it's kind of like standing. I don't regret trying and would try again if he was willing. I think the effort is part of my journey and I also think it is great to go to trial with this giant file of evidence of all the times I tried to settle, to no avail, esp as H is still trying to get me to pay for his legal fees by claiming I delayed a settlement!

Sage and DnJ, longer words are amazing too, and much food for thought which I have been munching and crunching. I do think I am shifting to something different but most of it is based on acceptance -- I don't know if I changed but just remembered who I was before and stopped holding out for something -- not restoration but the thought that H would stop doing this and I could have a peaceful life now. Realizing that H may always have been ill on some level but covering it up, and realizing that I can't stop him from wanting to destroy me and just seeing him truly for who he is. I am very good at loving what is best in people and this has been a hard thing to shift. I guess at this point, H makes it "easy"!

Thanks for the gentle revelations. I don't think it's even a whisper for me about D11. It's overt. But it's not because I don't want to face that I should have known. That is my focus these days but I think the reason is different. It's not because of H. It's because of my own mom and somewhat, my dad. It's because I have realized that H is not the first person I didn't see clearly. Looking back at my life and realizing that I never thought anyone would love me, that every guy I dated before H was another version of that dynamic. The scales have been coming off about H for the last seven years but recently I am astonished to realize that I thought I was marrying someone so different from the people who hurt me as a child but that in fact that kind of NPD was extremely familiar to me, so much that I didn't realize how natural it was for me to become a wife to the same dynamic that dominated my childhood/teen years and which I thought I had escaped.

These people are very dangerous to a child. Not knowing what was happening, not being able to see clearly -- well, it's like that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams says, "It's not your fault, it's not your fault," over and over until the kid is crying his head off. It's like I just woke up and looked back at it all and see with astonishing clarity how dangerous my mother and brother (who was literally diagnosed with NPD as a teen and spent time in psych ward) and even my dad were to me, the gaslighting and confusion and self-hatred I carried under this veneer of being the strongest and the smartest girl around. I still can't imagine that anyone would ever love me with an honest and uncomplicated love.

That's what I am afraid of for D11. S15 is greatly burdened by not having a dad and really having no extended family to stand in the gap. He carries a weight of grief, covered over by defiance and silence that is hard to take at times. But he makes his own money and takes care of himself in many ways already, and he sees his father clearly enough to refuse to see his father. D11 doesn't. She has a lot of learning disabilities and it's hard for her to understand a lot of things. So yes, I am very scared for her, and I think if she "chose" me, it's not that it would make me feel better or more justified though I guess that's true too. It's that I am afraid she will travel through her life with the same feeling I had, that she has to fix broken people and that she won't know how to look for an honest love or think it is possible or think she deserves it. I even see this pattern in her choice of best friend, and they are only 11! (I am not projecting, her best friend really is a drama queen with very little empathy and they have a lot of disagreements that end with D11 apologizing when she didn't do anything wrong.) I am afraid for her now, watching her confusion and how she gets the same gaslighting and confusion and anxiety I did with H -- now, but then later, that she will walk with a wound for forty years too, and carry this devastation on for another generation. I had such a different idea of what my family life would be, of what kind of mom I would be -- and I at least had a huge extended family to fill my broken life when I was her age. She doesn't have that, and I think if she saw her father for what he is, she could start learning how to set boundaries -- not to never see him again (though I think a break for a while could be good) but to strengthen herself to not get confused and to never find so familiar a man who is like that later that she mistakes it for love.

I know that this is a fear against which I must apply the DnJ method but I am laying out there what it is, I need to see it very clearly for now.