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it was larger than life – and that is how i am happiest (although i am reevaluating the stress on my system created by ‘larger than life’) I do not know about your husband, but perhaps over time i will.

there is a very seductive quality to the writing of, and about this story – I have my avatar’s writing and journal entries, also. And right now I can write little pieces of this story at a time; I do not want to be seduced by the quality of it.

it is most important that i keep grounding myself in the REALITY behind what was for me, a love story.

All I have wanted for the last few years was a partner in creativity. I am so sad to lose him.

It is so weird – he is she and she is spath….

but he was laughter and creativity and playing with words and laughing and playing and laughing…and wanting.

sob.

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You have written a beautiful story here, about shared creativity and the grief of losing a partner in that creativity. It reminds me a lot of the larger-than-life quality of my marriage to my second husband, the alcoholic poet who died. I feel for you.

At the same time, I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing when we use the word avatar. We might be, but I’m thinking not. This part of you is not buried in your subconscious, but more unused for lack of opportunity. You are willing to bring this out of yourself for the right partner or the right circumstances. My avatar was someone else because I really did not know I had these characteristics in mself, or was even allowed to have them.

All that said, we might well be talking about the same thing, and I’m just too sleepy to understand.

What I do know, however, that this is a wonderful story and you’re a fabulous writer. You should write it.

Kathy

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this next bit is the ‘story’, without editorial about what i know to be true now:
‘M’ (the beauty boy aspect of the spath) was revealed overtime as having multiple personalities. the first, the early 20′s wild submissive, the second, a even younger girl. With words and life to support each. complex, nuanced words and stories; a mind so fascinating as to hold no anger for anyone. and much abuse in the past and much reason for anger and yet no anger – seeing it as useless. and when i first mentioned ire at some situation, he said, “i like how conflict brings out the fantasy violence in you.” and right there a superhero name was born. and we talked about her – and i realized that she IS part of me. and the longer the boy and i were togehter, the more she started to have space in my life.
I started to write a secret blog – her life. her mythic life as i related to him and his bf. and she knew the bf was bad news long before one step giving all more than reasonable doubt, knew.
She wove around through my history – and i saw that she wouldn’t have existed if i hadn’t lived as a dyke, and yet she seemed to not have a sense of orientation, beyond liking and wanting this boy – and being a loner. She was tattooed and knife wielding; knew what she wanted simlpistically, loved the boy WILDLY, had no things and saw the landscpae as shore and dunes and would pack a horse at the wiff of stupid – she was a avatar.

She is MY avatar. Brought to life by my being with him. And I MISS HER, AND I MISS HIM.

The day he died, she got very very drunk. He spoke in an irish patois – her speech was infiltrated by those round rolling ‘a’s (they still come at times) as she spoke to him more than anyone else during her day.

My friend came to get me very early – she brought me rum and tequilla, and we toasted his death in the woods, and i fell against her sobbing, weak at the knees. I gathered my sleeping bag, my money, my knife and my hat – and my friend drove me to the land i rew up on. And i drank – bare chested in the sun, drank till i puked in the dry riverbed. I walked up the slope to the burying tree and sat on my knees, looking out over the field, mind numbing, i feel over into the pine needles and lay until the sun went down.

i crawled back to my sleeping bag- unfurled on the stones and watched for the first shy star of the night – him. in the sky. stellar boy. gone.

……………….there is much more. but all i can do for now.
The avatar – she has been at times numb, drunken (although I am not drinking), fearful, knife raised and whilring, protecting herself….
most days when i ask after her – she is not well.
yet.

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As you said, in coming to trust ourselves we are in a better position to make better decisions. We are blessed, and become a blessing to ourselves.

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You’re both saying very much the same thing. Where you are right now is very okay. It is raw for both of you. And you don’t have to worry about all this right. Think of it, maybe, as a voice from your own future.

Right now, the biggest and most important thing you have to deal with is staying NC. It’s like you’re detoxing from an addiction, and the more distance you can put between you and the source of your pain, the better and stronger you’ll feel.

I’ve mentioned before that I almost wish we had little emoticons to say where we were, or maybe just how long we’ve been at this. I’m nearly seven since the day I threw my ex out of my life. I’m not sure how far into it 7steps or pollyannanomore, but I know they’re pretty far down the road.

Take care of yourself, both of you. I mean, be kind. Find things that make you feel better. Friends are good. So are bubble baths and music. Above all, you are learning to be your own best friend right now.

Big hugs and thumbs up to both of you. You’re doing great.

Kathy

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I like this in your post to 7step: ““No, but I can run my life like I deserved to be loved. I can choose people who are capable of loving me or anyone else, rather than wasting my time on people who aren’t. I can run my life as though I love me.”

I still feel dependent that I still want to settle for a little bit of love rather than risk having no one in my life who cares about me. I wake up with a feeling of dread when I imagine my future w/out my husband. It sounds nice to nurture myself, love myself, or enliven myself, but I long for a man’s love.

And thus my stuckness in a relationship that broke due to lack of respect and giving and compassion.

DW

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well …today he just got to me with a long message of he misses me etc …i thought it was too quite…and i am just trying to stay away from responding …luckily my gf was available and i have to get ready to meet friends in awhile for dinner…i have to stay on trac…cuz this is all so new and raw…

oh god!

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You wrote: “And Kathleen YES I read your post about coming to trust ourselves and make better decisions etc. I would love to be in that place. I truly don’t kow if it is at all possible. When I have reached out with the olive branch I just get more reasons why I will be abused and taken advantage of. If people are toxic to me why would I even want to keep putting myself out in the line of fire? I did trust my middle sister, until suddenly I couldn’t. They act like they are catually ENJOYING the pleasure of hurting me. It doesn’t matter to me anymore how much they change – because they are obviously capable of deliberarely causing another person pain.”

I never suggested holding out the olive branch to people who clearly don’t know how to treat each other respectfully. I said to withhold your trust and love until people earn it. Or alternately, give it conditionally — just as much as you feel that they deserve, in the sense of being trustworthy or able to return your love.

I do understand that there’s some larger ideal at work here. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything in the family supported each other and go along? But that ideal turns into one of the “rules” that has more to do with self-sacrifice than taking care of yourself, unless you know for sure that you’re dealing with people who respect, appreciate, understand and feel compassion towards you. From a totally practical perspective, why would you invest in people who have a history of making you feel bad?

I do understand the deep desire for a home to come home to. My history of giving up what I wanted, giving up telling the truth, and feeling responsible for everyone else’s feelings began in my family. Not just when I was younger. When I was in my 20s and came back from living for five years in Europe, nearly a decade after tried to protect my little sister by confronting my father about the incest in front of my mother and a minister who’d agreed to sit in on the meeting, I tried to bring it up with her. She told me that my father had told her it was my fault, and she believed him, and if I wanted a relationship with her, I’d have to never discuss it again. And you know, I decided to “forgive” them and acquiesced for almost two more decades, just to have a family, until I finally called them and told them I wasn’t taking the rap for this any more, and if they wanted a relationship with me, they were going to have to face the reality that a 13 year old girl would not seduce her father, and even if she did, he was the responsible adult and he was the predator.

So believe me, I know about what we do to be able to maintain the illusion of having a family that cares about us. And especially, especially if we never had that kind of family in the first place, how powerful the dream of family can be. And because we were not trained by our families to care about ourselves, to stand up for ourselves, to expect other people to treat us with respect and compassion, we go on to try to take all the responsibility for making everything okay with everyone else in our lives. And get our hearts broken over and over when they don’t seem to understand the sacrifices we are making for them.

But 7steps, eventually we have to come to understand that what we learned at home was not for our benefit, but for other people’s. And that we deserved better. Just because we are alive, if for no other reason, we have a right to take care of ourselves for ourselves, to speak what is true for us, to judge carefully what we will and will not accept in our lives, and to enforce whatever is important for our self-esteem, our sanity, and our ability to not just survive, but to be creative and active producers of whatever our lives are about.

If they don’t love or support or respect you, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t loveable or entitled to support and respect. It means that you’re not getting it from them. And the reasons have nothing to do with you.

One of the turning points in my healing — and I had some serious work to do on even believing that anyone would really love me or I was even welcome in the world — was when I had the astonishing idea that I deserved to be loved. When it came up in my mind, I wondered if I’d finally gone crazy. I brought it to my wonderful Buddhist friend, who knew the history with my ex, and he said gravely, “But Kathy, you can’t force people to love you.” Which was exactly the right thing, because it made me realize what I really meant. And I said to him, “No, but I can run my life like I deserved to be loved. I can choose people who are capable of loving me or anyone else, rather than wasting my time on people who aren’t. I can run my life as though I love me.”

That was a moment when a lot of fireworks went off in my mind. It didn’t matter whether anyone in particular welcomed me, understood me, respected me, loved me or whatever. It mattered that I treated myself that way. It was my job to live as though I expected to be treated well. And if I wasn’t treated well, to not waste time or energy there, but go find better places and people who were able to recognize me and appreciate me for who I was. I wasn’t garbage. I wasn’t nothing. I was a good, smart, hard-working, generous, dependable person, and I wanted to be around people who not only respected that, but were like that themselves.

As far as the family went, there was a lot of initial anger and rejection. Who did I think I was? It didn’t last long. My truth shook the whole family to their foundations, and they started getting more honest and, as they stopped holding up the whole edifice of lies, more compassionate with each other. (Except my father, who was a full-blown sociopath.) It was too late to change a lot of things that were in motion. My brother died early from complications of his addiction, but he became a better father in the meantime. My mother died feeling like she’d failed as a mother, no matter how much we tried to relieve her. If she’d just lived a few more years, she would have been witness to the recovery of several of her children and hopefully have shared in it herself.

But 7step, these changes began with me drawing a line. Telling them all that if they wanted a relationship with me, I had conditions. That I was no longer participating in their lies. That I was not going to be a victim or a scapegoat. And if they wanted me in their lives, they were going to have to respect my reality. They didn’t have to agree with it, but don’t expect me to hide what I think and feel if I’m around them.

Would you call that an olive branch? I wouldn’t. The olive branch — me forgiving my father for incesting me and my mother for believing I was at fault — was just an invitation to lie about me some more and make me a scapegoat for what they couldn’t deal with. What made a difference was when I said, “You want me? You earn it.” And if they didn’t want me, that was up to them. Because it wasn’t worth it to me to keep trying to be a good daughter and sister, if this is what I got back.

I hope this makes sense. I know you’re working on some hard stuff right now. I’m not telling you this to make it harder. But to help you get to a position that will begin to create the life you want. As I said before, it’s not going to make you popular right away. But it will create real relationships, if it’s possible to create them.

Kathy

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“You’ll notice them starting to divulge things with a kind of guilty pleasure long before they actually get a grip on the fact that you’ve changed the game in a good way.”

Kathleen – the “surprises” that have been coming from my mother’s mouth really are leaving me slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. Apparantly once the lightbulbs start going on you can never turn them off again.

As I said earlier, my mom recently remembered a story that provided me with some validation, when she told me that baby sister P had told her doctors that my mom was a cocaine abuser. This wasn’t true. Baby sister repeated this behavior years later, saying that I was an alcohol abuser and should be shunned by the family.

During this same conversation she said, “I remembered something my mother (my grandmother) said to me before I married STEPDEMON” (my stepfather).
At the time, I was nine, middle sister seven, and baby sister about 2 1/2. My grandmother was a sweet, blue-haired Southern lady of around 70. When she would take my sisters and I out she always wore a hat and little white gloves. She was always very sweet to us – much nicer than my mother was. My mother always perceived her as very naive, but I am wondering about that now. Now before I recollect this I must remind you that the stepfather sexually abused my youngest sister BEGINNING AT THE AGE OF THREE.

My mother said this to me, just 2 weeks ago – “You know, my mother told me before I married stepdemon, “You keep an eye on him around the little girls!”"

When I heard this part of my brain went into shock, I am not even kidding!

I said: “I didn’t think my grandmother would know about anything like that!”

My mom replied, “Well I knew what she meant but I didn’t believe it. I just scoffed at her when she told me that!”

This conversation took place in 1965 or ’66.

HOLY FREAKING COW! I have just been awarded my Phd. at the college of knowledge!

pollyanna: “You also made a point about our abilities being different with different people – very true. Some people trigger unconscious reactions in us – I guess the knack now is trying to remain mindful and acknowledging what comes up in these situations – if we watch we can learn from it. I read a quote and I think it was from Freud – perhaps a better read member can correct if wrong!

“Individuation is the ability to remain yourself when around family.” It refers to the unconscious family scripts and roles we enact – you talked about being made the family scapegoat and the topic of gossip – all families have one somewhere to relieve the unspoken tensions that nobody else will name.”
———

Boy, is it ever apparent that you have been giving this some serious thought! This is like holding two completely opposite ideas within your brain without it exploding!

I think there are so many triggers and abuses where my mother is concerned that dealing with her will always be painful for me. And it is actually dangerous for me to trust anyone in my family, for they have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to act detrimentally to my own best interests.

pollyanna: “Before, I would sit with the unsolvable puzzle of the relationship wondering why I couldn’t work the damned thing out when I was capable of achieving in every other area of life. It was like one of those russian puzzle rings – seven rings all intertwined and he threw them on the floor and left me to try and get them back together so they fitted as they needed to. Or like a rubiks cube – the relationships were all unsolvable because that is one of the things that kept us all hooked in. If I had realised long ago it was hopeless naturally I would have left – he dangled hope like a carrot in front of me and stupidly I kept reaching out for it.”

———-

The rubics cube – I swear that same thought went across my brain.
I was always confused because elsewhere in my life I would just tackle a problem with either brains or brawn and and it would eventually yield. I was stubborn, obstinate, persistent, and it usually worked. Everything you’ve been taught to do you throw at this problem until you have nothing more to throw. And then you give up, and feel like a failure.

Kathleen: “I was the queen of obsessive thinking, turning it over and over, looking at all the facts. Trying to understand him, me, the circumstances.”

If you are the queen of this I am the supreme universal overlord!!
So yes I could very well remain myself with family – the angry hurting betrayed self!! And a big part of this is the 10 years I spent with my stepfather not knowing that the relationship was a lie. Age 10 to 19.
The whole foundation of a relationship with my surrogate father was based on lies and complete ignorance as to who he actually was. I wasn’t a grownup when this happened, I had barely left home. It’s difficult to face the facts as an adult who went into an exploitative relationship, but I had not even made that choice. I thought my stepfather loved me! He treated me better than my mother did most of the time.

pollyanna: “I had a friend who did that – he wasn’t handsome but had a pic of a model up as his own. As we conversed over time, it became clear to me that he was lying about himself and hiding elements of his life – told me several fake names and made out he had a bad experience with another woman online who tried to ruin his career – high profile and supposedly he was protecting himself. In the end up I had to delete him and end contact – I just can’t be associating with liars anymore.”
——–

Back to the themes of true identity, false identity, personal photos and the internet. I have not really felt safe in putting photos up. I have been telling myself that it’s just because I don’t have any good ones, but that is not really it. I just feel too exposed, I cannot put my pics up because I KNOW the predators are out there. On my facebook page I put up the photo of a beloved pet. People ask me “Well why on earth wouldn’t you put a nice photo up?” It is difficult to answer that without sounding like a paranoid nut.

It HAS allowed me to reconnect with some great people I had lost touch with. But my brother’s ex broke into his account 2 weeks ago and sent a nasty letter to his GF – who did not know he was still married. Last week I went on to the fb account – which I wasn’t really comfortable having up at all, took out almost EVERY scrap of info in my profile, made everything else private, even my email address. People can send me messages. They are only going to get more info if I know who they are, and even that is at my discretion, not in my profile. I will NEVER EVER share pictures with the world.

Same thing with my dating site account. Just uploaded a crappy pic I took with my cell phone. People put up pics with their friends and relatives. I would NEVER do that. Many many people have instantly closed me out because they don’t take a second look at the picture. I think, goodbye and good riddance, a$$holes! It is very hard to know what you know and still react in any kind of normal way in the world. People talk about how it’s not trusting to do background checks on someone you are dating. NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT!! Too bad if you think that’s a terrible thing to do – you must have something to hide!!

pollyanna – “The guy had english as a second language and had rather unique phrases he used so I was able to recognise them quite quickly and there were definite anomalies in the way he used english. I called him on it and confronted him demanding he put up his cam so I could see who he was in moving action. COnveniently he responded his cam was broken – I told him I didn’t believe him and outlined my theory that he was the deleted friend, which he strenuously denied. It made no odds to me – I cussed him and deleted him.”
——

You are one smart cookie with a rubics cube!!! Way to take ‘em DOWN!

I pretty much assume that ANYTHING ANYONE says to me AT ANY TIME could be a lie. It’s a hard and disturbing way to live but it’s the only way I can go. How do you go on protecting yourself while at the same time not approach everything in your life fearfully??

And Kathleen YES I read your post about coming to trust ourselves and make better decisions etc. I would love to be in that place. I truly don’t kow if it is at all possible. When I have reached out with the olive branch I just get more reasons why I will be abused and taken advantage of. If people are toxic to me why would I even want to keep putting myself out in the line of fire? I did trust my middle sister, until suddenly I couldn’t. They act like they are catually ENJOYING the pleasure of hurting me. It doesn’t matter to me anymore how much they change – because they are obviously capable of deliberarely causing another person pain.

It may be about me and the healing I need to do – but it doesn’t change the fact that I would be stupid to EVER trust them again. I am finally getting a clue. My needs would be better met elsewhere.

There are so MANY MANY things in your post which are relevant to my experience. To think of them all at once will make my head explode.
But earlier you were talking about recognizing the “bad” people. I am now realizing that they are the ones who are bad. They are the ones that did the hurtful things. I thought maybe I had done something to deserve it. Now I know that’s not true. I have to make this step to get back some semblance of the boundaries I never had.

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