in the required ways, that is to say, doing the things on the “allow myself” list.

I need to get back to this. I did a freak-out when I found the bit about the camouflage being as much to protect me as it is to keep others out.

And, this really is one of those worm-eating-its-own-tail again things…. Which comes first? Honoring myself enough to allow myself and DH to live without the camouflage OR cleaning the place as a way of honoring myself? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it all leads, again, to my not feeling safe. I can clean up my office. I can even know that DH is not likely to steal from me, belittle my choices for stuff, etc. but I still don’t feel safe. And I suppose that’s part of the nature of having been raised by an alcoholic, the emotional abuse and the PTSD.

The alcoholic would (and did) change the rules whenever it suited her, and so what caused abuse day A did not on day B. The PTSD causes me to feel more likely to be victimized. The combination of the three means that I don’t really trust anyone completely, and isn’t that sad?

Except that I manage to go out and about and act as if the world is safe almost every day. I do this by ignoring the alarm bells and whistles that thinking about this causes….

Ah!

Okay. When I talk to others about HOW I can talk to others and try and tell them how to do the same, I’ve said, “If I think about what I’m doing, I’ll freeze. So, instead, I go on auto-pilot and assume that whatever I do will be not-bad.” or some such. If I follow my own advice about being in and around people and talking to them (and I do) then why is this so hard at home?

The only semi-rational answer that comes to me is that I expected people to attack me outside of my home, and so when they did I was ready. When I was attacked at home I kept believing that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, and the abuse tape runs that the reason for that was that I am subhuman. [Hello abuser!]

In all my thinking about abuse I’ve noticed that there are a few things that seem to be usually true. One of them is that frequently the abuser heaps shame on the victim’s head by this catch-22, “If you weren’t x, then I wouldn’t need to abuse you.”

In my case, this runs something like, “If you weren’t so horrible, then your (father, brother, sister,grandmother, aunt, etc.) would care about you, but they don’t. They want to ignore you rather than take care of you. They hired ME to take care of you, and you’re such a brat no one else will put up with you. Your dad will be mad because no one else could put up with you. He’ll put you in boarding school until you’re in college and then he can get rid of you just like he did your sister.”

And so, every time my family ignored my pain, didn’t cheer me on, wasn’t interested much in the details of my life, I took it as validation of the abuse, rather than simply I was born into a family of self-absorbed neurotics.

I was born into a family of people who are much too preoccupied with themselves to worry much about me, especially as my job as the marker that declared “We’ve moved on!” for my parents to their ex-spouses was over the moment I was born.
However, I had the bad manners (?) I guess to keep living long after all the people making that point and their ex-spouses.

So, my family was negligent because I wasn’t really wanted as a person, but tolerated, and the abuser made use of that fact to “prove” that I deserved the abuse. Like all such proofs, it’s faulty logic and based on nothing. Intellectually, I know that.

So how do I use all of this to help me find the “I just don’t think about it and do it” place that I use when I talk to people?

There has to be a way. I have to find it, and soon! If you’re tired of reading these diatribes, I understand. But your weariness doesn’t begin to approach the weariness of the rat caught in the rat wheel, believe me!

Maybe I can chew through the thing rather than run around it…?

jkd