You cannot communicate with batshit

[Pingpang]

Following on from a recent thread regarding those who are NC/LC with family members.

Welcome to the good ship Narcymcnarcface! The bar is stocked and there's a seat for everyone. Shuffleboard starts in 20 mins.

Yy. What Thumb and Garlic said. I'm sort of guessing you've been cut off from someone Nina?

You really do need to at least speed-read the full thread, but that's just Internet and conversational etiquette anywhere; that's how you work out what somethings about and if it's appropriate for you. No summary will necessarily help you otherwise.

I've found "the banter" on here to be weirdly therapeutic the past few days (though that might just be me). I had a moment of crying my eyes out the other night when I remembered something quite dark from the teenage years, and then I pictured myself out at sea in a little cabin with people who fucking believed me and didn't think I was mad. That's an astounding feeling after 30+ years of thinking I was insane or only DH would ever know.

Will be back later to reply to others and going to google disassociation later too, because I think I understand more than I "know" Misc...

So glad you were able to take comfort from the Good Ship Batshit, Merd!

Bacon my sister feels hugely guilty for living where she does, but loves it there. She has married into a big family and they are the polar opposite to our family, which is interesting. My BIL is a great guy so I know she will be very happy. She is also very angry about what has happened. But she has pushed that to the back to still communicate with my mother. I can't/won't do that as I wear my hear on my sleeve so find it very hard to pretend everything is okay when it isn't.

If my mother tries again, well, I guess there is nothing I can do about it. She is on low dose morphine patches which have really helped and my sister tells me that my mum is much more positive. Which is good. But I am a cynic and know how seemingly duplicitous my mother can be, so suspect she is telling my sister what she wants to hear. Mr mother has been under the crisis team after the attempt but doesn't see the point. She lives like a hermit (a very comfortable hermit) and shuns any outsiders. I have tried and tried to help her, even considered buying a house for her nearer to me (she rents and is rapidly running out of money) but nothing is ever good enough and she wanted something higher in value than our own house! I can't do it anymore. But I have a feeling that I will give in and call her, when I really want her to come to me, to show she gives a shit.

Bacon my sister feels hugely guilty for living where she does, but loves it there. She has married into a big family and they are the polar opposite to our family, which is interesting. My BIL is a great guy so I know she will be very happy. She is also very angry about what has happened. But she has pushed that to the back to still communicate with my mother. I can't/won't do that as I wear my hear on my sleeve so find it very hard to pretend everything is okay when it isn't.

If my mother tries again, well, I guess there is nothing I can do about it. She is on low dose morphine patches which have really helped and my sister tells me that my mum is much more positive. Which is good. But I am a cynic and know how seemingly duplicitous my mother can be, so suspect she is telling my sister what she wants to hear. Mr mother has been under the crisis team after the attempt but doesn't see the point. She lives like a hermit (a very comfortable hermit) and shuns any outsiders. I have tried and tried to help her, even considered buying a house for her nearer to me (she rents and is rapidly running out of money) but nothing is ever good enough and she wanted something higher in value than our own house! I can't do it anymore. But I have a feeling that I will give in and call her, when I really want her to come to me, to show she gives a shit.

YY to what Merd said.

For me, knowing there is a small group of people who just get it, who don't think I am wierd because of my family situation, and who aren't trying to silence me so I won't make them feel uncomfortable by mentioning the batshittery.. That's massively helpful. My feelings haven't been minimised here and I haven't been told to try harder with my DM or 'just be more forgiving' which is what has happened if I mention it IRL. I feel like some of the weight has been lifted since posting.

Picturing us all in the same boat is the perfect metaphor for so many reasons.

BTW I've put out fresh on the tables, breakfast pastries, ham, cheese and are on their way for any shipmates who fancy a continental start to the day.

Toria.

I so know the blanks/dissociation thing. For me it's not so much about the past (though it's true there are whole swathes of my childhood I can't remember, I'm not sure how much of this is normal forgetting), it's about any time I feel unbearable stress now, my head just goes utterly blank. I keep doing it in therapy, and my therapist pointed out that it usually happens when he's being empathetic or kind or trying to show he cares about me. I can't stand being cared about, or rather I simply don't have the brain circuitry to process it.

The therapist thinks this is because I didn't attach securely to my mother, so those bits of the brain have never grown. Perhaps I'll always struggle with allowing others to take care of me or love me. Ironically I work in a caring profession where I show love and acceptance to many people every day, and I'm told I'm a deeply compassionate person. My own traumas seem to have made me able to empathise with others, to give love, but not to receive it. Which is a lonely place to be.

That is to say, I'm quite proud of the fact that I'm able to give love and acceptance to others in need, I worked hard at this on no parental modelling. And it does help me too, a bit. It's just not quite enough.

Just to interject, I was whiling away time last night so looked up Ninas posts when I saw her post on here.

Sorry Nina that sounds slightly stalkerish please forgive me!

Anyway, I found a good few posts from some years ago that were very thoughtful and nice. So assuming it's the same poster, I think we should hold fire on lumping her in with the other rather upsetting intrusions we've had on the other thread.

Nina if you've come fresh to this thread you may not know its history. It's a kind supportive thread for people who are trying to heal, recover and generally manage the damage done by very difficult and damaging people in our lives. Not just people who we disagree with or have had a little argument with that needs resolving. These are people who have caused lasting damage from very unpleasant behavior, not a petty contre temps that we need to just 'get over'. Usually adults in a position of power and control when we were children.

Getting over the severe psychological damage done is ruddy hard as the types of neglect and abuse we are talking about leaves deep scars and also, the significant gaps in self esteem, identity, self care, and resilience, that people with normal childhoods are modelled and taught.

Unfortunately the last threads here and on gransnet got rather difficult for everyone, and I hope this thread won't go the same as this is quite a different type of thread.

Anyway, better to go read up on the other threads but feel free to join us here supporting each other and identifying with the difficult experiences we've all had.

Hi Merd, I sort of stumbled on the label 'disassociation' by accident to describe the memory stuff and the way I find myself switching off from my physical and emotional self.

A good link is here:
www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pathological-relationships/201211/dissociation-isnt-life-skill

Disassociation when really severe is something that can end up being multiple personalities, and other personality disorders. I'm not talking about that side of things, though I can see how it happens.

I think what people are talking about on here (including me) are down the lower end of the scale although feel quite hard enough to deal with in itself.

The link is someone writing about disassociation in abusive relationships, but I think describes it well and does refer to other situations when people have to do it as a defense mechanism, like in childhood.

"Let's talk about dissociation a minute: It's technically a defense mechanism—we separate out of our memory things that we don't want to or can't deal with. In trauma (like abuse or rape), that's helpful at the time. Dissociation is when we separate from our awareness 'details' of an event.
...
Dissociation can become a primary defense mechanism if you grew up in a dysfunctional, abusive, addictive, or violent home. That's because children can easily get overwhelmed and check out—or dissociate—because they can't handle whats going on. If you never learned adult coping skills then it's likely you use the ones you do know: which are from childhood. And if your primary ones were dissociation, then you're probably using that now, and it probably has gotten you into a lot of trouble in your patterns of relationship selection:

And yes yes Olives to your description of going blank. It's interesting that the blankness can happen for lots of reasons, from not being wired to have that automatic response to something (love, concern etc), to throwing up a defense mechanism which now gets in the way.

It's so desperately sad that by depriving someone of love and attachment a child grows up not knowing how to love or care for themselves. I'm so glad you're beating the legacy you've been left in some ways.. By caring for others at least. Maybe that means you can work towards the other half of love, receiving it yourself? I hope so.

I'm starting with the whole self love thing, which I have a lot of trouble with, so hard to do! But am persevering as I've been told that loving and nurturing yourself is step one on the way to step two... Love from someone else. Which is my deepest hope and desire.

But yes, very lonely . Hopefully a stage to move through rather than live in? Bloody hope so anyway!

Thanks garlic
That would definitely instigate a blowout! I guess I'm just scared to me on the receiving end of the unavoidable rage and drama, don't know why as I'm a grown woman!

Thanks Baconyum
Stiff drink definitely needed! I will check the other threads out, cheers.

Still haven't had time to google thoroughly but from what you've written I think that's how I processed something big that happened as teen, Misc., as well as maybe daily stuff. Odd odd feeling.

But I have a feeling that I will give in and call her, when I really want her to come to me, to show she gives a shit. God yes, I'm extremely familiar with this feeling Toria. Silent treatment is awful.

I'm sorry if this comes across overly blunt but you can't stop your mum from ending her life if she wants to ... And if she does, it's not your fault. Really and truly it's not. You can't make her move if she doesn't want to. You can't make her change. All you can ever do is work on the way you process her behaviour, which means detaching and is hard because we're all usually over enmeshed.

I suspect we're very good at being guilted into things as a bunch because we were trained from birth to do that...

Cat and Thumb and all and hurrah for the good old ship Batshit.

Merd no, not blunt at all. Its the truth and I know it. I have always been a fixer, I want to make things right, happy, I guess. I feel like I have failed I suppose. Its hard to let go.

Both my parents were shit at it. Both of them used to say 'don't have children, they ruin your life'. I often wonder why they bothered as they both seemed to begrudge it so much.

I have huge gaps in my memory, things my sister remembers and I don't. I remember always feeling anxious, walking on eggshells. I don't want that for my daughter.

for you guys too.

That's really interesting Misc

I spent a while with a good therapist in my 20s because I often found myself dissociated from my body, to the point where I'd see my hand or foot move in front of me and think 'what's that?'. It took me a while to realise it didn't just 'happen' to me, I had subconsciously learned how to do it by looking in a particular way at my hands. My therapist told me young children dissociate from situations they're not equipped to deal with, it's a protective mechanism, but because the brain recognises patterns, particularly the part of the brain that handles stress and trauma, under consistent long term stress it starts getting hypersensitive and reactive to anything it perceives as part of that pattern and starts triggering you to dissociate or blank out not just the traumatic stuff but anything even like the traumatic stuff, and then anything even vaguely in the vicinity of anything that reminds you of the traumatic stuff in the name of protection. She said it was like experiencing an earthquake while drinking a cup of coffee and reading a Jane Austen, and your brain then not only blanks out earthquakes (obviously bad) but also coffee and Jane Austen (associated with the bad) and then to be on the safe side it may decide that tea and any romantic novels need to be coded as 'bad, blank it', and may finally decide all drinks and all books are potentially problematic and put those out of reach too. So you end up blanking out huge chunks.

I had barely any memories at all prior to the age of twelve when I first started working with her, and a lot of them came back as I worked with her with an odd sense of 'yes I'd always known that happened' but had just been misfiled somewhere I couldn't pull it to mind, and the majority of it was innocuous. Just miscoded and dumped in the 'do not look at this it's too upsetting' file.

When I was going through my counselling and subsequently the NLP training, I used to look on these forgotten/suppressed memories as being put in a big black box, locked away. Like Pandora's box, if you like, although mine were in a box, on a ship (ironically!), locked under a trap door in the hold.
But, sometimes these memories would find a way to rattle the box, rattle the trapdoor, remind me that they were there. And I learnt in the NLP training that actually that's the best time to consider opening the extremely scary box, because there's less to unlock.

Thing is though, that opening that box is very like opening Pandora's box - an awful lot of shit comes flying out, but there might be a tiny gleam of something pure afterwards. It is, however, possible to open the lid a tiny bit, let only a bit of the shit out, and then slam it shut - but that doesn't allow you to get rid of the box.

Another analogy (I like this one as well) - consider it's like a spot on your face. Not a blackhead, one of those godawful blind whitehead jobs. It's mountainous, painful, ugly, you keep poking at it - but if you try and squeeze it before it's ready, then you don't get all the shit out, AND you can cause collateral damage - more spots, scarring, bloody scabs etc. (Can you tell I'm a picker? ). Thing is, for that spot, or in fact any wound to heal properly, you have to get all the shit out. Otherwise, you leave a bit behind, it scabs over ok, but it's still there lurking underneath - never quite right. And then it erupts again later, when it's built up enough. And you go through it all again. But catch it at the right time, and all that disgusting stuff comes out - and you have a nice clean hole that will heal up properly. You might still have a scar - but the wound itself has gone.

Some people have more than one black box; or like in Harry Potter (Goblet of Fire), a box with many layers - so that you open one lid and get rid of some shit, but then you realise there's more shit behind another lid.

It takes a lot of courage to face whatever is in your black box, and good counsellors will help see you through opening them. But when those thoughts are knocking, that is still, IME, the best time to take a deep breath and have a wee peek.

I do like your therapist's disassociation explanation, Rumbling - that's really good.

My sister has no childhood memories, and I'm not entirely sure why, despite the whole thing I had with my mum - because she got on much better with mum than I did. But her whole childhood is a blank to her, except the very occasional thing, prompted by a photo or a film clip.

The dissociation stuff is really interesting. I have huge memory gaps from my childhood too (mainly around the few years of witnessed DV between parents and the time of my DF's affair, and my parents telling my DB and I they were divorcing). I remembered some of the instances much later on. But I have other gaps too that I'm sensing are there but can't recall.

I do remember being generally unhappy and anxious as a child, having difficulty managing my few friendships. I struggled with some pretty dysfunctional relationship patterns even back then, I'm starting to realise.

I might point my DM towards dissociation. She and DF are finally, finally in the process of a lengthy, highly dysfunctional divorce (almost 2 years and they've only just started living separately together). My mother had a highly abusive childhood with her narc mother - with whom we have all been NC for 15 years - and met my abusive narc DF aged 15. She lost her dad at the same age, and my grandmothers abuse of her stepped up, effectively pushing her into leaving home and living with my DF and his family very young. They've been married 40 years and my mother has major signs of this dissociative behaviour.

It makes my relationship with her very challenging as she has lived refusing to acknowledge or face anything difficult for almost her whole life. She is also, while making progress in small steps, still not really seeing how dysfunctional her relationship with DF is, and her version and recall of events is constantly being overwritten as she revises it. She really struggles to identify what she wants, really feels and to actively say it. It's as though she cannot tell the difference between thinking something and outwardly communicating it.

I've pointed her in the direction of a whole load of reading material, information etc but she tells me she just can't face it and she's doing what she can. I do understand how frightening it is for her to face these traumas but I am frustrated and worried that in not really moving her thought patterns towards a more healthy state, she will allow my father to do her yet more damage. I've been advocating counselling to her but I don't think she will go.

I should add that I want to support her in addressing some of this as most of all, I'd love a more healthy relationship with her. She enabled and supported a lot of unhealthy and abusive behaviour directed at DB and I by DF, but she was and is still a pretty good mother to me (when we aren't parenting her!). She is supportive, kind and generous and now my dad is finally moving out of her (and our) life I'd like to salvage something. And I want her to be happy, at last - she deserves to be. All she's done is try to cope with some horrendous behaviour.

By the way, apologies for not adding much to anyone else's stories on this thread. I don't feel I have anything useful or worthwhile to add, seeing as I'm incapable of healing / dealing with my own situations. But you all have my support, and gratitude for being on this thread and sharing.

I feel terribly guilty at taking so much from you all and not giving anything back - says it all about my childhood training really, doesn't it?

Oh, the dissociation is interesting. Dp's dsis has said that she suffers from this, and she certainly seems not "with us" iyswim. She is really unaware of social stuff around her, eg asking mil why she is very quiet when she was completely ignoring dp over something trivial. I wonder if it was just a way of blanking out lots of difficult childhood situations. Mil certainly has attachment issues, and this has been handed down to Dp's dsis and to her dd. Each one blames their mother for being emotionally cold, unaffectionate etc. but can't see that they share similar traits.

and and for all of you who had such difficult childhoods. It is hard enough to deal with this as an adult. I have nothing but admiration for those who turn their lives around and decide not to repeat the dysfunctional patterns.

ComeOnKenneth you are very welcome. It sounds a very difficult situation for both you and your dm.

Again just darting in and out ATM but I think (hope?) that sharing stories in itself is weirdly helpful Kenneth. None of us are able to offer much in the way of help online, but hopefully what we can do is listen to each other and feel less alone in it all

Thanks, Merd and Quirky. Yes, all I can think of to do is add some of mine to the pile, I don't have any advice to offer anyone really. I'm finding other people's stories so, so helpful. I'm so glad I found the previous thread.

I think, Kenneth that it shows how things have progressed , that many of us, our generation, are more able to confront and challenge what happened to us, seeking help and counselling, whereas your mother is probably still in the generation where any sort of "head shrinkery" is seen as shameful, a dirty secret. It's also very interesting to see it from your POV, as next generation, where your mother has been seriously abused and you and your DB are having to deal with her coping mechanisms (as well as your own father's abuse :( )
I hope that when she gets away from your father, that she has enough life left in her to turn it around and find some peace and "normality". It's a big step she's taking!