Sister Stuff Take 2

introvert Avatar
Sept 26, 2023 23:21:26 GMT -4 introvert said:
You know, it was just so healing when I realized that my feelings matter, they really do. I can take care of them, as in...be gentle, caring, and empathetic with myself without having to numb, avoid, justify, defend, rationalize, or correct myself. If it hurts it hurts and I don't have to shush myself or talk over myself, I can just respect and care for myself in those moments.

I don't have to oppress myself and invalidate myself like my mom did, constantly overriding me. Yeah. I'm sensitive, that's ok. There's a lot of good that comes from it. I think honestly my avoidance shielded a very tender heart when I was a little one. I like my heart.

I like my voice, I think I have valid things to say. My opinion matters as much as anyone's, and we don't have to agree but I don't have lay down so someone can blaze their path right over me. There's just so many ways to say it, the point is, my feelings matter TO ME. That's the critical piece. Because they matter to me, I can represent myself better, and protect myself better. My empathy for others has grown as a result of finding empathy for myself.

People who run over others haven't got to the point of being tender and present with themselves and we can actually be a good example. They may or may not get it, but at the very least we can remind ourselves that harsh people aren't healed yet, their pain is running the show. They can deny it but that's just denial. We don't have to let their pain become our pain. I think harsh people try to displace their own discomfort onto others and we can say internally, "No, no, I can't let you do that, I'm healing now."

Things really start to shift when you can support yourself like that.


This made me cry.

This is the work.

It's what my therapist has encouraging. I resist it. But also until I'm sitting down and focusing on it like I do here and writing about it and sort of tracking what happens, it's so reflexive and habitual, I don't even notice it most of the time.

This morning, I just happened to be looking all the way back through photos to when my daughter was a baby and my ex and I were together. I was trying to find an old photo to show someone something and it was alllll these photos of me as a mom of an infant and little one and I just remember who I was then - so filled with shame, so willing to be wrong, so raw and in pain. And so absolutely overjoyed at being a mom and family and in love with my ex and wanting him to love me. But I didn't have a foundation for being okay with who I was. And that is the other trigger that is coming up right now for me - my sister and my own daughter and my parenting of her. She was ultimately the motivation for me to change. I remember going off to a coach training when she was 3 or so and someone at a table next to me (all coaches) asked if I loved myself. It was so inappropriate, but it was truly a catalyst -- I realized I didn't feel worthy of being her mom of her loving me. I felt horrible about myself all the time. And when I look at those photos, I was truly stunning. And so, yeah, it makes me so sad and heartbroken to think - why couldn't I just let myself be myself? I was a beauty with a gorgeous soul, so genuine and a good person. Yet I believed I was in some way a jerk? I don't even know. But I felt that way esp so in those days with my ex and my sister and parents around me. And even the people in my life who told me I was kind and sensitive and beautiful and caring, etc. I probably didn't believe them. So it's not like anyone could have come in then and "saved me" from myself. Or come in and said, "I deeply see you and I see how good-hearted you are and thoughtful and I love how sensitive you are." I would have probably slugged them.

So, yes, I see where this is my work. And yet, it seems like it would be easy? Or to be able to turn around and go "Hey!" But I have parts of me that are mad at myself for "having to be so _________" sensitive or deep or complex, etc. Because its seems that's always caused me so much trouble -- it just feels like a giant job to heal that relationship with myself. But yeah, what else is there, lol.

I'm even echoing back to geez 10 years ago now? Or around there when I was in a mastermind group and doing yoga with a coach and she said to me, "What would it be like to not make yourself wrong?" It was baffling. And here I am all these years later.

Oh, I get the looking like they have it easier but hard in there own way. I know a lot of really tense marriages right now and I do not envy that.

There's a very specific thing that happens with me. And I'm not sure if there's really anything I can "do" about it -

It's like I'm in a tunnel and as long as I stay in that tunnel I can do okay. I'm grateful for simple little things - but then we go out of the tunnel or I hear someone else talk about their lives and I go into a kind of shock. This has happened for years - when my daughter was little, we used to go over the river to a friend's house - she had cats, a backyard with fun things, friend had a sibling, there was a dad, and my daughter used to come home from that and cry. And hate our house - she was still young, but it was natural. It wasn't any specific, material thing. She just *felt* the difference.

It was probably a year later when I got our dog, which helped. My daughter and I were just living in chronic PTSD. And then she got severe mold illness and couldn't walk. 

There are actually, come to think of it, still a lot of injuries around my sister from those times - like my niece was really attached to my daughter and my daughter had something called PANS/PANDAS and used to threaten to jump out of a moving car if she was in a flare. One day, we were supposed to go up to the nieces birthday party and I had to call to say we couldn't go. My daughter was in no shape for it. She just had cornered me in a grocery store and was screaming and it was all I had to get her home and safe. 

My sister hung up on me. She didn't talk to me for months. It was the most bewildering thing at the time. I remember because not a lot of people knew about or understood PANS/PANDAS and I think it was something about that time of year because it happened again the next year until my sister stopped inviting us to her daughter's birthdays, which of course was heartbreaking for my daughter. 

That time in our lives was such a blur and so traumatic on so many levels - ending up in the hospital, her dad getting another woman pregnant. We couldn't catch our breath. Until we finally left everything we owned and moved to where we are now by some grace of God - during covid, still in court with my ex, in therapy with domestic violence. This is the first time things are relatively stable, but I still have mountains of debt, no physical support, rarely get time to myself. And I manage and tolerate all that.

But what happens it that I hear clients or friends or my sister or someone complain about something - like their husband. Or that their kid was sick, and I honestly can't manage a ton of compassion. But it shocks me. I think - what if they lived through what I did? How would they do it? How did I do it? Why did it happen? 

Last night, my sister was complaining that she doesn't used one of her million energy healers anymore. Where do I go with that? Or that her husband is "so stupid." Or that she "doesn't have a minute," When her kids are in school all day and her husband takes care of them.

Or my friend is stressed because she has to work out her two kids sports schedules. Doesn't work. Has a husband. 

Or someone says they couldn't get their babysitter that night. 

I don't mean to be a jerk, but it feels insanely isolating. I sit there, invisible, and think, what would they do if they were living my life? What would it be like to have stress over figuring out your kids sports schedules?

Or when they're single for like a month. (It's been many years here).

And I'm stuck because I don't want to complain. I don't want to be a victim. I don't even really want to talk about any of it. But I disappear. I go dark. I can't connect or relate. And its made for a pretty lonely existence with the exception of regularly paying for a therapist to dig myself out of the PTSD.

And even now, I have a voice that's like "Whine whine whine." But it's real. It's a thing.

We happen to live in one of the wealthiest areas of the country. I didn't choose that. I grew up here, met my kids dad here, am currently a bit stuck here for the time being. But what does a kid like mine do when her friends have indoor movie theatres, everything they could want, multiple homes, goat farms, and you're just trying to survive. We've had a million talks about that and she's pretty mature about it now, fortunately. But after a while it's the isolation and pretending to be okay that completely wears you down.

There is very little in your posts describing trauma and hardship and isolation that I cannot relate to. Deeply. I get it, and I don't know why some suffer so much, and some hardly at all.

Here's what I know: it's all relative. Somewhere there is a mother holding the body of her starving child, certain of death, who would not be able to generate much compassion for you. This is the reality, there are haves and have nots and people don't come into their circumstances by choice much of the time.

So where does it leave us? For me, its come down to acceptance and actively retraining Mt thought patterns. The series of questions you have when confronted by the relatively small suffering of others, while understandable, is meaningless.

I can truly empathize! But those are the wrong questions and they don't solve anything for you because they are irrelevant in terms of your own suffering, they do nothing but increase it in fact because of the comparison involved.

Stop asking these questions. (Out of mercy for yourself, not shame). Catch yourself, and redirect yourself. That's my advice anyway. Why? Because your perspective as a Have Not hurts you, and only you, and you have a choice in your perspective. It may not seem so, but I believe it to be true.

I have made it a practice to acquaint myself with the suffering of others which surpasses my own, intentionally. It is a game changer for me. Because I just couldn't live as a Have Not anymore, even though my suffering was intense and prolonged and real, I just couldn't continue comparing myself to others in that way.

I did all the things, too. Trauma therapy, this that you name it. But targeting my thought processes was an important part of getting to a place of acceptance and gratitude.

I still slip. But overall I've come a long way.

I've found a daily gratitude practice really beneficial to help me start to shift some of my negative thought patterns.

Introvert, not harsh. It's real.

But I haven't had much luck with just changing my thoughts.

For instance, I work with a sort of psychoanalytic approach that's a very specific method of therapy once in a blue moon when I can maybe afford it. Things are pretty intense right now with my sister and family, so much so that I didn't sleep one whole night on Sunday and I can't afford that with all that I'm doing. It happened again yesterday - my sister sent me a bunch of texts and everything started to activate. I had clients and I was distracted and I can't afford to be.

So during my session, the craziest stuff was coming out. Like some incident (granted a pretty big one that was a major trauma for me that impacted me for years) from 25 years ago! came up - and I started shaking. I couldn't believe how that had still been "lodged" in there.

I have clients who've had a lot of success with neural retraining and brain retraining and I do it too. I redirect A LOT. But in the end, the "body keeps the score" and I'm only slowly pulling my way out of PTSD with a lot of hard work - homeopathy, balancing hormones, diet exercise, etc.

I don't think I consciously ask those unhelpful questions - I think it is more to put words to it here what the feeling is like - it's alienating and isolating and I haven't been able to get around that for a long time, which only exasperated the PTSD. But I have been more lately....

Gonna post some updates/wins...

I don't think I ever came back here to share my breakthrough around my sister. For most, it would be pretty normal, not a breakthrough - but for me, it feels like it's opened up a whole new world and helps me see how much healing I've done.

So it's been a month since my last post - life gets crazy busy. But I did want to share that about a month ago, I had a phone conversation with my sister about some things and instead of reacting to her, I got curious. I stepped WAY back and just observed - which was the breakthrough . . . none of this was about me. None of it was about her being unavailable TO ME or her not caring ABOUT ME or her thinking anything about me. It was all about her (and pretty much always is) and her spinning and dysregulation and anxiety (of which she'll actually admit to none). I almost had just sheer compassion for her in those moments.

Later that day, something else happened in my family and I saw the way she reacted to it. She told me she had no space to deal with it. She said it would "drain her." Everything that came out of her mouth was just so .... I don't know, her version of reality that I don't share. And, again, it had nothing to do with me.

This had such an impact. Of course, I still have parts that are hurt and want to connect with her and wish things were different and judge -- like recently she told me she is still mad at her husband from 10 years ago for "leaving her" with their kids when he went to work and that that's an obstacle she can't overcome in their marriage and he won't work on it b/c he thinks he did nothing wrong? I don't know what to say to that. In the past, though, it would enrage me because I'd feel unseen and offended - like does she HAVE ANY IDEA what I got through and have been through and feel completely alienated. And instead, I'm just curious and like Huh, that's interesting (and admittedly a little judgey as in that's on her - but whatever). She also recently told me that she constantly thinks about our mom and her cognitive decline, and I gently suggested that she either do something or seeks some help for her anxiety around it. And she snapped back, "I don't have anxiety. I am allowed to be upset that my mother has early dementia."

So that's the other thing. I really don't know how to talk to my sister? And so I've just stepped back and thought - it adds up. It agrees with reality. The childhood we had and how dysregulated and traumatic everything was -- and of course she's like this, esp because she hasn't done any work (she claims she has - I think she went to maybe 3 or 5 therapy sessions years and years ago).

So I've been more able to grieve. More able to not take it so personally. I know people here suggested this but it took me to live through it and experience it to get it finally. I've now been able to do this with every one of my family members, which I'm proud of - to reach a place of seeing them as individuals and, yes, sometimes harmful in their behaviors but on their own paths with their own struggles and unable to really be fully present. And that's largely been my goal - to reach a place in myself and in my own healing to not have to be victims of them, blame them, accuse them, have no contact - but to be able to see them and have compassion for them. And it feels freeing and good.

Of course, there's still so many other areas - stuff with my ex, stuff with men, etc. But this has been a big one.