Staying/Getting/Doing Well – Moving goalposts or fixed target?

[Paw Prints]

Hi, this is my first post, though I have been reading the forums for some weeks. I’m probably expressing myself badly when I say that I have found reading about other people’s journeys reassuring. Finding a community of people who “get it” even when they have a wide variety of experiences and lives lived is not something I thought I would ever find.

Though people talk about getting well & there is a section Staying Well, I’m curious as to what this actually means to other people and how they manage their expectations. I noticed some people refer to being well as ‘being like themselves before they got ill’, whilst others don’t express an exact aim.

My idea of being well has changed over the years. I was first diagnosed as an 8 year old child back in the late sixties. The doctors told Mum that the voices in my head & the sudden crying bouts were because I suffered from ‘nerves’ & I was given meds to calm me. Of course such things were not discussed back then & I was told not to talk about it to anyone, not my school friends nor siblings, just Mum. For decades after my idea of being well simply meant being able to hide my illness from others.

A number of events in my life caused my illness to worsen, until some years ago I became so ill I needed to be hospitalised for my own safety. This lead to my current diagnosis of Major Depression, Anxiety & PTSD. I’m no longer in that dark place, but each day is still a battle (though I can now believe in a future). For now only my siblings & one friend know about my illness, though some things they still don’t know.
So, what does ‘being well’ mean to me, it is ever moving goalposts. If you had asked me 5 years ago would I be as well as I am now I would have thought it impossible as I couldn’t envision a future. If you had asked me last week (during one of my down periods) I would have said my progress was all an illusion & I was fooling myself that things can get better.
For now my idea of being well is being able to believe that things can change for the better, that I will one day be able to manage the everyday things like housework, caring for myself & caring for my dog & maybe, just maybe I will even be able to enjoy myself.

Paw Prints
**I took the tip to give myself time to write my post by writing on a word doc & then paste it.

[Eagle Ray]

Hello dear Paws and Hanna,

Thank you for your thoughtful replies. It sounds like we've all had our particular challenges and I'm so sorry you've both had such difficult things to navigate, especially in those formative years. I've stayed up late doing photo editing so I will reply properly tomorrow with a fresher brain. I'm planning at this stage to try and do some bird photography tomorrow morning. Right now I can hear the ocean crashing at the river mouth. It's a very therapeutic sound.

I hope you both sleep well 😴

Hugs,

ER

[Hanna3]

HI Paws and ER

Just a quick post before I go out - another cool windy day here!  Paws we grew up at a time when parenting was very strict and it was still the "kids are seen but not heard" attitude - you didn't argue or disagree with your parents and you did what you were told.  In retrospect that was a bad way to raise children and it didn't make for a happy family environment.  I was also kept very much under my mother's control, to the point where I had few friends at school.  When I went nursing at age 18 I remember sitting in my bedroom in the nurses' home and sewing name tags on my caps with another nurse, also brand new, and we sat sewing and chatting - and I had never had the experience of just sitting talking to a friend.  It sounds like things became very tough for you after your mother passed on and you had to be an adult and care for the house ad family way before you should have.

I think for me, being able now to look back on it and understand much more about what was going on has helped enormously.  I think as a child you think it's all your fault and now I am able to understand that my parents had their own issues that affected us kids very much.  Being able to reflect on my upbringing and work out what was going on has been a huge help - and I now really feel indifferent towards both parents.  I think they had problems, they passed these on to the kids and made us suffer as a result and I am honestly glad they are gone and we have all gone on with our lives.  Interesting that only one of my brothers married and my other brother and I have stayed single - relationships yes but married, no.  

ER I think you could find a lot of relief by reading a couple of books on narcissistic mothers if you have a library nearby?

Paws I don't know kitty's background - he was severely traumatized when I got him and he does get very anxious when I go out to the point where he will give me a bite on the leg when he sees I am putting shoes on!  It's difficult with a rescue because you don't know what happened to them - and he is stuck indoors, I think outdoors is easier for the animal.  

Off out now, will come by again later today.

[Eagle Ray]

Hi Hanna and Paws,

Hanna, your description of your mother as intellectually frustrated makes me think of my nanna (mother's mother) as she was very intelligent but like most women of her time had to give up her job when she got married. My mother was very bright and got a scholarship to go to university. The day she completed it and found out she had done well and passed her exams, she was feeling good about herself but when she told her mother her mother said, "You think you're so smart, don't you". She did not give one word of kind support or praise.

I think one thing you learn, as you say, is self reliance from an early age. It would have been really hard losing your mum when you were 17. The upside is perhaps that ability to find a capacity for independence. I became essentially my mother's carer, confidante and support person from the age of 5. So I learned to only understand about caring for others but not myself. I am extremely self-reliant but have not been very good at seeing my own needs, if that paradox makes any sense. My mother looked to me to get her unmet parenting needs met, so essentially I was parentified, while at the same time being used as a punching bag when she was angry or bitter. I learned there is no one out there for you, absolutely no one to rely on, so everything in life you will have to solve it yourself. But I have found I've also fallen into the trap of being an endless support for others who expect me to do things for them and always be responsive to their needs. I have trouble trusting others but others often trust me and expect me to meet their needs. I am trying to extricate myself from the messed up dynamic I learned as a child.

Paws, it would have been incredibly hard for you having your mum die when you were 12. My dad was 5 months old when his mum died and his eldest sister, who was 13 at the time, had to quit school and look after the other kids and do all the cooking, cleaning, washing etc. So I can only imagine it was similar for you in having a role forced upon you. It would have been hard to grieve and process losing your mum as you would have had to just get on with the role now assigned to you. it is really understandable about how the "being seen and not heard" has affected you too, along with your parents being older and having older values. There were some very constrictive values and ideas around the raising of children that I don't think are conducive to a child's spirit being allowed to be truly free. But I don't think it is ever too late to find that child spirit within and nurture her and give her the support and permission to be a free spirit. I recently bought some coloured pencils and paper to do some drawing which I know is my own inner child needing to express her inner world and needs.

Hanna, it would be interesting for me to look at books on narcissistic mothers. At the same time, even though my mother had narcissistic behaviours, I know she did not have narcissistic personality disorder. It was much more likely either borderline personality disorder, or just a particular kind of manifestation of Complex PTSD. Despite the awful things she did, my mother was, at her core, an incredibly gentle and kind person (when she wasn't splitting). Her brothers, who were spoilt by their mother, did turn out as narcissists. Her younger brother, I can say without hesitation, has full blown narcissistic personality disorder. My mother was bullied awfully by her brothers. She struggled all her life to believe anyone could love her. After my dad died she said, "I realised he loved me", but could never fully see/accept that before nor say to him she loved him while he was alive even though he could to her. Sorry, to be continued because of word count...

[Eagle Ray]

...In later years mum and I really connected. We would have long phone conversations. If I visited her we would often talk into the evening so I would be driving about 45 minutes home late at night and she'd ask me to call her so she knew I got home safely. So she did care about and love me. But she also continued to fracture within herself and still collapsed into states of rage and despair. She had so much trauma. She went through several experiences of severe medical negligence with horrendous consequences. She had always treated my brother as the golden child and had not bullied him as she did me. But when he had a big go at her in late 2019 that was the beginning of the end and she just unravelled completely. I was caring for her in that final year and I saw her just emotionally disintegrate. She essentially died from a broken heart and I was with her when her heart failed. A lot of stressful things happened following her death too and I have never had a chance to grieve properly and it still rips my own heart to shreds daily, knowing how hard she tried to heal herself within the confining stress of her trauma. Both my parents were the same as a dog in a rescue shelter who snarls and bites out of fear. That is exactly what their behaviours were about. Both so desperately needed to know they were loved. I tried to be that for them. I feel I lost mum just as things had been moving towards healing. My own heart still breaks everyday after her seeing her struggle to heal and then completely break. Dad had some idea he was loved in his later years, whereas mum really felt completely unloveable and self-destructed in the end.

Hugs,

ER

[Hanna3]

Hi ER and Paws

Just back from being out for what turned out to be a sunny morning!  I have just been looking for a quote from the Amy Witting, I for Isobel, book.  (Amy Witting was a renowned Australian writer, she lived in the suburb I grew up in and was an English teacher at my highs school but before I was there). I picked out this part where the family (mother, father and the two sisters) are having dinner.  Her mother has just asked Isobel what she is sulking about (Isobel is not sulking).

Isobel tells her mother "I'm not sulking"

"Her mother's voice, which had been rising to a scream, turned suddenly gracious and calm again...Isobel looked up and saw that her eyes were frantic bright. She doesn't want me to tell her, she wants me to scream. I do something for her when I scream".  Then she saw her mother's anger was a wild animal within her, that she Isobel was an outlet that gave some relief and she was torturing her by withholding it"

I'd say we kids were an outlet for our mother's rage that came from her childhood somwhere and I'd say you were in a similar situation ER - could your parents have been taking out whatever stress/marriage problems they had on you?  I think growing up we tend to internalize it all and think we are somehow at fault/responsible when it was always our parents, not us at all.

I'll come by later but I had the book out and wanted to quote from it because when I firsr read this book I couldn't believe how much I was reading about my own mother.  I didn't mean that your mother was narcissitic but that books about narcissistic parents often discuss the very issues we faced growing up.  

Back later on, sorry for the disjointed response today so far!

[Hanna3]

Hi Paws - I can well understand why you became quiet and self-reliant, having lost your mother so very young - 12 is an important age too, when you are just entering adolescence and adulthood, a difficult time for any young person much less one who has just lost her Mum.  I agree totally about the parenting styles back then and like it much better now parents have a much easier and more relaxed relationship with their children.  

Kids at school are horrible and I if you have anything at all different about you, you are a target - so old fashioned clothes would have done that for you for sure.  I was terribly quiet and shy as a result of the volatile atomosphere at home and I got bullied severely both at school and in the workplace.  I never grew up with a sense of self-worth and without that you become a target everywhere - I wish I had grown up with a healthy sense of self-respect but Paws our parents didn't make that possible for us and we have had to develop that self-respect on the wing as it were, later in life.

Paws many people could not cope with moving out of the city into a country town, on their own, buying a home and settling there on their own.  I don't think we give ourselves enough credit for our courage and our accomplishments.  Being able to do that on your own says a great deal about how resilient you actually are.  Full credit to you.

ER, your grief re your mother is very recent.  It has taken me years to sort out my family and its problems and the dynamics of what was going on.  I think with time you will probably be able to get a clearer picture of it all.  It's only very recently that I read that book and got talking to my old family friend who at 95 is incredibly wise and an experienced mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and is full of wisdom and insights about my family background.  It would be wonderful if you had someone like that to talk to because it's such a help.  One day when I was about 14 I brought home my paintings from an art lesson (I had a private lesson I shared with a friend after school).  My father admired my paintings and when he asked my mother to come and look at them she sat ridid, without speaking, staring ahead of her.  In the end he gave up - and I burnt all my painting in the incinerator outside and never painted again because I thought she hated me and my artwork.

It took my elderly friend to explain to me that my mother was directing her silence at my father, not at me.  She was so jealous of his attention to me that she would not do what he asked and look at what i had painted, so she sat and ignored him.  I of course thought she hated my art.  So it's only taken decades for me to sort out that one!

I wonder how much your parents were directing their marriage problems (and any other stress they had) at you as an outlet (hence the quote from Amy Witting, who wrote the novel based on her own mother).  It also sounds like you had a lot of caring responsibility that must have taken a huge toll on you.  Your grandmother's behaviour to your mother when you stayed there sounds abnormal too - I'm sure all this trouble is passed down from one generation to another.  It's interesing that both one of my brothers and myself have never married or had children and I think that speaks volumes - only my eldest brother married (to a bossy volatile woman like his mother) and he is a hen-pecked man who can't speak up for himself against her but bullied me, being the youngest sibling.  My mother's father was a violent alcoholic and hence the trauma...

I bet it would help you to have someone to talk through some of this with and counsellors are expensive.  You need a wise woman like I was fortunate to find.  I'm sorry you had such a difficult and traumatic time yourself and you probably need a lot of self-care.  The grief you feel must still be very raw.  The only advice I could give would be to be gentle with yourself and give yourself lots of time to heal from the recent trauma, much less the more distant stuff.  It's taken me decades - probably much of my adult life spent slowly coming to some kind of understanding of my childhood and youth.

[Eagle Ray]

Hi Hanna and Paws,

Yes, we were an outlet for their rage and, yes, my parent's marriage problems also fed into that. It's true we internalise the feeling of being bad as children and part of Complex PTSD recovery is learning we are not bad, shameful beings.

I don't think I could read the "I For Isobel" book. Just reading that short excerpt really triggered a trauma response in me. I am still experiencing acute symptoms and have only just recovered from several months of horrific nightmares. On the day my mum died my brother's partner was aggressive and awful towards me. She is a very volatile character and my brother has repeated a trauma pattern by being with her, but he can't see it. At my mother's funeral her older brother's son got up and rubbished my mother at her funeral in front of everyone in a eulogy he decided to give without being asked. My brother's partner was a hideous bully to me that day as well. A couple of weeks later my brother's partner launched a huge attack on me, yelling at me saying all the things she thought were wrong with my mother and I. She hardly knew my mother at all and only saw her as negative as my brother had turned hostile against her in the last two years of her life so he depicted her as entirely negative. It was that hostile turn in him that led to all the healing in her, and the healing between her and me, collapsing. That night my brother's partner attacked me I collapsed in the street and she just kept abusing me. I couldn't breath and thought I would suffocate. I felt my head split internally with a sharp pain. A long time later when I could finally walk she didn't stop even when I got back to the house. I planned and nearly took my own life that night. I ended up with severe PTSD from that, the trapped trauma only releasing a year and a half later when I did somatic work with a psychologist. I went through two violent assaults when I was 21 and 36, so I have a lot of PTSD reactions in my system. Everything to do with my mother's death was trauma and her soul was being abused even beyond her death. So for me focussing on reading about narcissism only brings horror. It will not be healing or helpful to me to go there. I already know and understand those things.

The only thing that heals me now are the gentle sides to both my parents, and underneath their fear-fuelled rage they were both actually beautiful people, as almost everyone is beneath the stuff that's messed them up (with the exception of psychopaths). So I find I have to work towards what allows my heart to be whole. I need to have nurturing energy towards my parents and myself and hold us together in that nurturance. My brother as well, even though I have almost become completely estranged from him in the last 3 years. I've had no one who truly understood my mother to talk to about everything. People saw her as all good or all bad depending which side they'd seen of her, and neither of those perspectives helps. I am still really broken and crying as I write this. I will have to go out into nature this afternoon to try to feel calmer and more ok. I just need to explain how triggering this topic is for me. It is very recent history for me and I do not have detachment from it. I am still right in it.

Hugs,

ER

[Hanna3]

ER I am writing in sections due to word length and interruptions here so I hope some of it makes sense to you!  Sorry it's disjointed.  Do get hold of the Witting book if you can it's only a short novel.  I think you have recent grief to deal with as well as your whole upbringing - but once you can get a way to deal with it all you will start to feel so much better honestly.  You must be barely starting to come to any terms with it all and it's all still very raw.  It's probably trauma and CPTSD in your parents and like my family, it goes down from one generation to the next unless someone somewhere puts a stop to it.  It sounds like you are that person to stop it in its tracks.

I did have a good counsellor who was enormously helpful.  I wonder if there is any way a GP could get you in with one?  Otherwise a wise counsellor like I was lucky enough to find.  I live with sadness that myself and my siblings grew up in a household as violent and abusive as we did but I know I have had to find a way of managing that background so it stopped harming me any more.  I at least have reached a place where I understand it better, I understand why I got bullied so much wherever I went, and I have slowly learned to stand up for myself better.  I was determined as a teenager not to become like my mother and that has stayed with me.  I actually sat down on a step one day at age 12 and made up my mind I would grow up to be the exact opposite of my mother and that was a decisive moment.  

I will have to go now but happy to come by tomorrow and chat some more.  You will get through this stronger and wiser ER and remember now it's still pretty raw and fresh - hindsight comes with distance I find.  Give yourself time.

[Paw Prints]

Dear ER,

I wish I could sit with you over a cuppa & give you a shoulder to cry on.  I think it is wise that you find a path that suits you to work through everything that has happened.  There is no wrong or right way.  I'm so very sorry you had the growing understanding between you & your mother shattered in such a way.  That just in itself would have been so difficult to process, adding everything that followed it is very understandable you are still hurting & struggling.  Lass  whatever followed can't take away that connection you had started to share with your mum, it mattered then for both of you, hold on to that.  I've no wish to trigger you further, but if at any time you might feel it helpful you are so very welcome to talk about any or all of what you have been trying to deal with & that includes happy memories as well.

Gentlest of hugs

Paws

[Hanna3]

Hi ER and hi Paws

You've been through a lot of stuff ER and when I went to a counsellor long ago he told me just a bit at a time, then change topics to something pleasant, and repeat, so it's not too overwhelming. Do you have anyone IRL that you can talk to currently?  

I'm wondering if you are the youngest of your family?  My two brothers, much older than me, are pretty abusive - I'm the youngest by many years and the only girl, so I was probably always going to be bottom of the pecking order!  I also suffered two violent attacks one when I was a child and one at age 12 and it took a long long time to get over those.  

I know my mother had a good side but she didn't show much of it to her kids unfortunately.  She tended to show it to other people.  I didn't get counselling about her until quite a long time after her death and when I did get help I guess I was ready for it and was fortunate to get a really good therapist.

I wonder if it's worth chatting with your GP about something calming/anti-anxiety for you for a while to make things a bit easier for you?  You might have already tried or done this sorry if you have.  ''Maybe try to stop yourself overthinking it all too much - try to realize when you are getting too upset and do something nice to give yourself a break.  I felt like I needed a bit of fun last night and watched Bohemian Rhapsody which was such a great movie with great music - I find that sort of thing is a real help.  

Is it worth talking to someone at Beyond Blue?   

I'm sorry I have someone coming over and can't stay here long but if you can try to do something soothing that will help calm your thoughts - I don't know if you have someone with you for support?  I'm sorry if it's all triggering but then I don't know what or how much to say to you.  

I hope you can find something soothing this evening and that things are a bit easier tomorrow.  Maybe a Rocky Kanaka video for some feel-good stuff is the way to go toight!  Sorry you are feeling so down and overwhelmed.  Hang in there.  Sending very warmest wishes.