I feel a bit 'nuts' at the moment when I thought I had it all so sorted for a while!
Reading my ex-neighbour's letter was like listening to another witness' description of seeing signs of what was wrong in mine and my brother's relationship when we were children. It made it seem so real, not just in my head because someone else saw it, and I relived some of the feelings. It reminded me with a shock that it was real and it did happen but I think my brain tries to think of it as something that happened to someone else and by someone else, not my brother who I know now. This would be fine, my brain protects my feelings in this way, except for the fact that I still have the anxiety from childhood which holds me back in what I want to do and makes me feel ill at times, and my irrational fears of being transported back into the past and going through it all again, or my children being deluged by feelings as bad as mine if I even let a tiny bit of badness into their lives without preventing every tiny bad thing from happening to them. My brain's protective strategy blocks me from processing what happened by stopping me from feeling it or thinking about it too much and if I don't process it I will still have the anxiety and irrational fears. I suppose then my neighbour's letter was useful even though it felt painful to read.
My brain separates the person I was as a child from the person I am now and separates the person my brother was as a child from the person he is now. It is how I cope with everyday life without feeling the old feelings too much. My brain tries to dismiss that whole chunk of my life (my childhood) as something that never happened and isn't part of my life and myself. Normally if a memory of childhood comes to me I immediately banish it because it feels too uncomfortable to think about. I think this is the bit which causes me confusion and conflicting feelings. When I see my parents or my brother now, I can see their good points and I can like them and enjoy being with them as the people they are now, from the point of view of the person I am now, who doesn't need very much from them. I can do this because I learnt to block out the past completely when necessary. When I see them I like them and feel for them and feel the urge to try to make them happy. Then I remember things that happened and feel like I am betraying myself for liking people and wanting to make people happy who did things that made me extremely unhappy for a very long time. I feel like it is twisted. I remember how I made myself act like I was enjoying it when my brother was hurting me because I hated the humiliation of him knowing I hated it but didn't have any power to make him stop. It seems almost as twisted as this.
I think I do this denial of the past because I want to have family and if I think about all that happened I am likely to reject them and lose them. I particularly want to have family on my birthday and my children's birthdays and at Christmas and at these times I feel an extra urge to try to get closer to them. When I think about the fact that I am being nice to people who have caused me so much pain I feel angry that this means they are 'getting away with it'. I feel like a mug who will let anyone do what they want to me and I will still come back for more because I am desperate. Then I think about the fact that they haven't totally got away with it because I have told them all exactly what I think of them in my long letters last year and have reduced contact. My parents gave me a 'reduced service' as parents when I was a child and I give them a 'reduced service' as a daughter now. My brother is taking the consequences of his crimes against people by being in prison. This makes me feel better but I still seem to waver in my feeling that I'm doing the right thing with the reduced contact when I feel guilt about their feelings at the times when I like them when I see them as separate people from who they were in the past. I suppose I just need to keep reminding myself why I don't need to feel guilty and practicing this because it still isn't coming naturally yet. I'm finding that to cope with seeing them I have to do this denial of the past thing. I found it difficult on the prison visit just gone though. I've never found it difficult before, but I did this time. And I worry that he can see this as he seems to be able to see right into me and always did seem to be able to do this. I'm finding it really difficult to get my thoughts in order since and feel like my brain is overworking, trying to process too much stuff at once and is feeling the strain. Sometimes I am consciously thinking about it, making myself think about it, but the rest of the time I can't stop my brain doing it 'on its own' anyway, making me feel tired, confused, unable to concentrate, pent up and anxious.
I didn't think I cared about having family any more but I think things lately have proved that I don't stay in contact just because of guilt about their feelings if I don't but also because it would hurt me too much to cut contact altogether and feel I had no family.
I've been accepting the past more through therapy and the feelings my brother made me have are closer to the surface so it would have been harder to separate his past self from his present self on the visit anyway. But reading my ex-neighbour's letter as well which really made me feel the past made it even harder. My brain was having to work so hard to block out the past on the visit, I found it very tiring. My feeling of wanting to block it out was very strong as well though because of my birthday being recent and the strong feeling of wanting to have family. The more I block something out, the more another part of my brain tries to 'intrude' it into my life, giving me 'flashback' feelings (I don't normally have visual flashbacks apart from in occasional dreams at night), or making my past feelings be triggered by small things that happen in my everyday life now. It feels like my brain is fighting with itself. I feel nuts!
I am giving my brother a chance to change and on one hand it feels right. On the other hand I feel like I might be being stupid and weak. I kept giving my birthmother a chance to change after I kept thinking "this time she has finally been truthful with me and will have an honest and healthy relationship with me now". I wanted to believe that, because I really wanted to have a relationship with her. After one too many times of feeling like she had been untrustworthy though I gave up. I think it takes a lot to give up on these things, it is very hard to let go when you want something so much. (Some of us have transferred this feeling to our relationships with men at different times in our adult lives!). I stubbornly think "I can fix it and it is so worth fixing that I will keep trying until I know for sure it is impossible. I also find it hard to give up on my brother because I know how alone and abandoned he feels in the world because we were both adopted (from separate places) and both had the same cold parents, and I feel the sense of unfairness and that he so deserves for someone not to abandon him. And everything looks like he is changing and is making a huge effort to change and is remorseful for what he has done. When I see him it is hard not to 'believe' him but there are people (probably most people) who would say things like "People don't change, sex offenders don't change, if he was 'mad' all those years why would he change now, you shouldn't trust him".
AAAAaaaarggggh, I am so conflicted! Can I come to terms with having strong feelings that contradict each other? How do I make sense of it? I'm sure none of you can give me an answer to that and maybe have no idea what the hell I am talking about. I'm hoping Therapist can say some things that make me feel clearer when I get to see him, which is difficult now with him away and then school holidays and only a couple of child free days. I feel I really need him right now and he is not here. Then by the time I see him I bet I will have somehow worked it all out!