BPDFamily.com

Here's the thing:  most of my life, almost 45 years of it, I seem to have been emotionally repressed and numb.  In childhood, there was always something to stop us from expressing emotion.  My mother was very loving to us in infancy, she had a need to have babies, we were her emotional fulfillment.  She married my father, a very emotionally repressed and cynical man, and they emigrated from Germany to South Africa. My mother could hardly speak English and new nobody at first, found it hard to make friends, and she needed something to fill her otherwise lonely days. My father worked at his business all day, and my mother tended the home.  So she fell pregnant by "accident", first with my sister, then with me (I think I was the only planned child) and then some years later, almost at the end of their angry and bitter marriage, with my brother.

I recall her being a wonderfully spontaneous and warm mother, doing fun stuff with us during the day.  But at suppertime, when our father came home from work, the atmosphere changed completely.  We were on inspection duty, our rooms had to be tidy, toys had to be packed away, we had to be neat, presentable and quiet.  The house had to be clean and the food had to be on the table.  My mother would also change when my father was at home:  she became a quiet, timid little woman and the fun and warmth would disappear until he went to work again the next day.

After my parents divorced, when I was 7 years of age, my maternal gran came over from Germany to live with my mother and us three children for a few years. She was the "caretaker" mother, very strict with us.  Typical German mentality, post-war years.  Strict, disciplinarian, children must be seen and not heard.  My mother was suddenly emotionally absent from us.  My father as good as disappeared from the scene, theirs had been a terribly angry and acrimonious divorce, with my mother getting custody over us, but my father having visitation rights to see us now and then.

My mother started dating again, with some of her divorce settlement money, she funded a so-called "religious pilgrimage" holiday for her and a religious man she was dating (a pastor of a church) to Israel.  My gran looked after us, while our mother disappeared for a few weeks.  We did not really understand where she had gone to and why.  Basically, she was probably having a wonderful fling with this man, under the guise of a religious experience.

Not a year after my parents divorced in 1976, my mother met and married a German contractual working at a multinational company near where we lived.  This man I know now was a full-blown Narcissist.  We lived as a "blended" family with him as a reluctant stepfather (he claimed never to want to be our father, and he always referred to us when talking to my mother as "your children".  He pretended to like us at first, but all he was interested in was outward appearances of being this "perfect" family.  And my mother was his little wife concubine sex object. They would behave very innapropriately in front of my sister, brother and I.  Walking around naked, he with an erection. They would have loud sex at night with their bedroom door wide open.  My stepfather would fondle himself under the breakfast table in our presence.  They would get all flirtatious and suggestive in our presence and within our earshot.

We the children were just expected to get on with our things, go to school, come home, do our homework and sit in our rooms all day being good.  My mom became a collapsed mother.  She was so preoccupied with her appearance, her body and her slim figure and being sexy enough for this man, that she lost all interest in her children.  She became vain and superficial.

And this never changed. 

My stepfather used to mock me for being so shy and  not coming out of my "shell".  He used to suggest that something was wrong with me, why am I so selfish and why do I not want to socialise with the family.  He used to mock my brother for being a "mommy's boy", and he used to mock my sister for being so "outgoing and flirty" and at 13 years of age, he suggested that she was sleeping around and needed to go on the pill! My sister was doing nothing of the sort! 

My mother used to go along with all of this cr@p and honestly seemed to believe our stepfather and go along with his disordered thinking/behaviour.  My stepfather was also the instigator of hateful things that were said against my father.  He instigated parental alienation between us children and our father.  When you hear certain claims over and over again as a child/teenager, you begin to believe them. He convinced us somehow that our father was a loser, a miserly man with lots of money but not wanting to give us some, a stupid low IQ person,etc. Once again, my gullible mother treated our stepfather as this powerful superhero and hung on his every word.

To cut a long and convoluted story short, our stepfather eventually announced one day in 1985 that he was not going to renew his contract in South Africa any more, and we were to be uprooted from our homeland and go and live in a foreign country. He took a contract in South America, and he and my mother basically kidnapped us (they did not get my father's consent) and secretly we left South Africa and went to live overseas for 4 years. 

We children had to complete our schooling in a foreign language in a foreign schooling system, and get accustomed to a whole new culture. Just like that.  Meanwhile, the stepfather had already checked out of his marriage to my mother a long time ago, having extramarital affairs all along.  My mother collapsed even more into herself and started eating uncontrollably and getting more and more overweight.  After my stepfather's contract in South America ended, he uprooted us once again, and we landed up in Germany. On setting foot on German soil, he announced to my mother that he wanted a divorce.

We had no plan, none of us.  My siblings and I did not know what the hell to do. My mother collapsed even more under the strain.

One by one, my brother, sister and then after a time, I, returned to South Africa to live with our biological father, who had since invited us all to come back to live with him.

Unfortunately, my father remained a cold, angry and bitter man, and all his resentment towards my mother and stepfather was now turned onto us.

We lived with him for some years, my sister eventually married and moved out. My brother and I were still living as young adults in my father's house in 1995, when he died suddenly in his sleep one night.

My mother had since been in and out of other relationships in Germany and got her life on some sort of track by getting employement there. But she was supposedly pining to be back in "Africa with her children" (not that she ever really checked in with us over the years to find out how we were doing).  So she came back to live in the same town as we were in, shortly before my father's untimely passing.

So, my whole life, I have just been expected to get on with things.  Whatever feelings I have had, they were not acknowledged by my parents or gran or stepfather.  It was all about other people, and never about me. I just had to get with the programme.  Just stuff it all down. Never mind the upheavel, the shock, the drastic changes, the painful displacement, leaving my homeland, etc etc. I was just expected to shut up and fit in.

And so, I continued in the same vein for most of my adult life until now.  I had some longer term relationships with men, but I never wanted to marry or have children of my own.  I took up endurance sport, long distance running and Ironman triathlon.  I exercised my pain and loneliness and childhood grief away every day.  I was a numb, compulsive person.  I continued to stuff down my emotions, as I had learned to do as a young child.

Until I met my exBPDh.  His intensity ignited all my repressed emotions.  The rollercoaster year I spent being married to him, called up in me the most intense emotions, the most pain I have felt in a loong time.  I almost felt like the pain would kill me at times.  The intensity of it took my breath away.  The loneliness, the hurt.  It was that hurt little child in me, the one who wondered where her daddy went to, where her mother went to, why she was being mocked, why they had to euthanase their beautiful big St Bernard pet dog of so many years, sell up the house in South Africa and move to a faraway land under a great veil of secrecy.  Why they were not allowed to tell anyone.  Etc.

And now that I am divorced, I suddenly find myself in an emotional lull again.  Once more, I am leading my solitary existance, by myself in my house.  Shopping and cooking for one.  Going on my solitary jogs.  Alone with my pets in the dark house at night.  I do not want to go back to my emotionless "bubble" life!  No, not this time!  This time, I am determined to feel those emotions, get in touch with who I really am.  Acknowledge and validate my own reality. 

I AM GOING TO FEEL!

You go, Ihope2 ! 

Thank you for sharing this moving post.  I resonate with your feelings of solitary numbness.  That coping mechanism was valuable for you as a child, it worked to keep you from succumbing to the upheaval and insecurity around you.  As you express in your post, now it's outdated and doesn't serve the person you are today.  This is the moment of real change, when we can choose to learn a different way, and you have conveyed that so well in your post, it's inspiring.

What strategies do you have to help yourself feel again?   

Thank you Heartandwhole!

It is all so new, at the moment it is still more of a resolve, than anything that I feel I am putting into concrete action.

I have a lot of inner work to do still vis a vis my mother.  I feel so much anger towards her. I want to avoid her, but I know sooner or later I need to face her again.

She is avoiding me at present.  But time is precious and it slips away so soon, my mother is 70 and I need to speak my truth to her soon. 

I want to work through my anger at her.  Why am I not as angry at my late father, he stuffed our childhood up just as much? He failed my brother, sister and me just as much as a parent.  And my NPD "stepfather" where-ever he may be, I need to acknowledge my anger towards him too. I have not had anything at all to do with him since I left Germany in 1990. 

And my sadness and loneliness and feeling separate to others.  I don't want to spend the rest of my years feeling sad and lonely. I want to find joy and serenity.

I know I won't find this all on my own.  I would like to find some way of connecting with safe and joyful people, perhaps join a hiking club and get out with others into nature.

I think keeping my own dialogue alive, doing regular self inventory, how do I feel about things, is what will also help.  Not just ignoring my own feelings and telling myself to "suck it up" as I have usually done.

Ihope2, I am inspired by your story and your determination to move past it and find happiness! I love your idea of reaching out and joining a hiking group. How about a running club?  I joined a women's only run club and have met some very nice women. Also a cooking class if you're interested in that. I joined a wine club and that's fun too. Getting out is a good thing!

That sounds lovely, LoveNotWar.  I want to do stuff that brings me joy, I really love music, but never learned to play any instrument. I love listening to music that has cello in it, like anything by Loreena McKennit.  If only I could learn to play cello!  And I love to sing in the car to my music.  But I seem to be a bit tone-deaf   So cello or singing lessons would just be the absolute thing for me to do to! 

My sister, who is also in a phase of her life where she is looking at her Adult Child Recovery issues, has recently taken up ballroom dancing classes, which I also find inspiring.  Especially since we were never really encouraged to be feminine, growing up.  The thought of her in a beautiful sparkly dress, twirling around the dancefloor is very inspiring.

:)

I have the same desire to feel things again. The BPD r/s brought out emotions that hadn't seen daylight in decades... .both good and bad.

When you try to avoid bad feelings... you can, often by disassociating... it is a way to cope... but it comes with a great price. When you quit feeling the bad, you also quit feeling the good. Most the time you add in censoring yourself... to keep from offending or triggering the people around you. In time you can become dull, emotionless, or as you described it numb.

Seeing a T is probably best advice... mindfulness helps to learn to be in the present not hiding in your head. To be intimate with people... you have to have your stress level down pretty far, otherwise the connection isn't ever very deep. Best book for explaining stress and what to do about it, that I have found (once you already do mindfulness well)... is "Wired for Joy"... it explains how brain works, is attachment oriented and has tools for getting to a better place from the tense numb place I was in. However it seemed to be missing lots of details ... .turned out the real details of what to do are in the author's earlier book "The Pathway". From those and seeing a T, I learned to notice when I was below the line... acting in reaction to things instead of comfortable and functioning well... .and then work back to being normal ... still working toward Joy... but not as numb as I was.

I concluded that from my BPD mom and NPD mom... I picked up issues of my own, Anxiety/avoidant and schizoid behavior... very likely SPD even... as I was pretty numb to things for a long time.

Physical activity helps... the more you are in the moment and feeling... the better.

It helps to just feel whatever comes up ... and not run from it, just let it last... it will drop off after a while and the more you do it the more you notice that its not just bad stuff that comes up... its good too. Your feelings/emotions are supposed to be feedback and tied to your bodily experience... when you run from them, you run from feeling alive. I think a lot of the current Zombie fad... is that zombies are still moving around, going through the motions, but pretty much devoid of life... numb even to being shot or stabbed, you have to shoot them in the head to get them to be consistent with normal people... .bit familiar?

Bravo Ihope2! What an insightful and interesting post. i resonate so much with your early confusion and I am so impressed with your growth and healing. Well done you!  What  a lovely thing to imagine your sister in the sparkly dress - not just because you are girls but because inside you are still KIDS! the playful part is the best part of kids, I think. I'm glad you are re experiencing yourself in a way. You are adventuring out a little bit maybe with the readiness to explore you might not have had before. Maybe more able to provide yourself with that security and love and self-hug you so deserve. You are not just  asurvivor - you are a thriver. At the risk of sounding patronising, I'm proud of you!

Zed

Hi, Ihope2.

I haven't been on these boards in a few months, but wanted to pop in and see what's going on, and read your post here. Going through something very similar myself.

My mom was more of a sadist--I had a pretty rough childhood. What I clung to growing up was that as soon as I could grow up and move away from her, everything would be fine. It was devastating to discover that I was NOT "fine" when I finally grew up and escaped.

Even though my "thinking self" understood my mom was a deeply disturbed person, my emotional self (which I had to be pretty detached from in order to cope in her concentration camp style "home" internalized her daily rants at me about what a useless slimeball I was (waaaaayyyy paraphrased down!)

I went on to marry and divorce a diagnosed antisocial PD, then had a whirlwind "romance" with a narcissist, and just divorced last year from an 18 year relationship with a bipolar/narcissist/antisocial PD.

Hmmmm... .apparently everything was NOT "fine"... .

I never had trouble accessing my anger at my sadist mother, and a bit more trouble accessing my anger at my alcoholic narcissist child molesting father. What I had a REALLY difficult time accessing was my own feelings about the things that happened. The anger, while certainly justified, was still about something outside of me. Directed at the wretched parents. It took years and years to access the fear, hopelessness, powerlessness, depressiveness, and "weight of the world" crushing pain.

It was and is easy to bring up the outrage towards the gawd-awful horrible things the parents did. But I had a heckuva time drawing up any sympathy for the pain and anguish the little girl (me) went through. I couldn't access that pain, so how could I sympathize with it?

I also wanted it to "not matter. That's in the past now and no longer affects me". Except it did/does. In a big way. I spent ages rationalizing with my emotions, trying to think them away, instead of just feeling them. I didn't know how--I had practiced for so long a coping method that didn't allow that, that it was completely automatic. So automatic I didn't even notice anymore. I said--in my rational world--that now I won't ever fall into that trap again (whichever "trap" I was falling into at the time), yet I would--over and over and over. Which only proved even more to my emotional self that I really was the useless idiot I was taught I was. Which only dug the trap deeper.

Perhaps for the rest of my life I will have an automatic reaction based in my childhood. But I have begun to develop new automatic patterns that are more whole and healthy. So far, in my particular level of practice at this, I have to stop myself after the automatic pattern reactions and remind myself that it is OK to feel that way, and I don't have to do anything at all to escape the feelings. Just let it happen (if it's a big deal, I actually allot a certain amount of time--maybe 10 minutes--to sit alone and feel feelings without doing anything at all about them).

So many of my actions and reactions have been about trying to avoid uncomfortable emotions! Emotions which don't actually go away, but just go to the basement of my psyche and become mutant drooling monsters that control my actions against my will  . Make me an idiot in situations where genuine and sincere emotional interactions are required--like intimate relationships--because I had no practice with that. Gee, no wonder I was attracted to people with PD's and they were attracted to me!

My counselor turned me onto a really cool video that I want to share with all of you www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+story+of+o+and+the+missing+piece&FORM=VIRE3#view=detail&mid=B81FC86E4289B2AD9E14B81FC86E4289B2AD9E14

it's called "the missing piece meets the big O" and it's very moving and thought provoking.

thanks for sharing and for listening.  :)

Thank you DoubleAries,

Yes, this childhood stuff follows us around and sticks like glue. To use the title of a well known mindfulness and meditation book "Where ever you go, there you are".

I am tired of hiding from myself and pretending to myself.  I have carried a big baggage of pain and confused emotions around with me for the longest time.  I'm unpacking as much of it as I can now, and I will not shy away from feeling whatever I need to feel any more.

And one thing I realised about myself:  where there is anger, there is  fear about something.  Anger is a whole lot of smoke and fury, disguising a whole lot more.

Blessings on us all on this difficult journey of discovery and healing.

Ihope2 - thank you so much for that painfully honest and digging down deep post.  Bravo to you!  I am awestruck at how strong you are and how far you have come on this journey thus far.   And yes, blessings to all of us -- thank you for that, and I share this sentiment with all of us who are going down this road.

DoubleAries -- Thank you also for posting the link to the video -- what an astronomical truth told in a simple story.  Wow, just wow.  I have read many of Shel Silverstein's stories to my children... .How did I miss this one?  Thank you so much.

A wise person once told me "anger is a mask for fear". I have found this to be true over and over and over again.

That video was a recommendation to me by my counselor. It had a pretty big impact on me. I kept waiting for missing piece to find the right one... .yowza! surprise ending, of profound importance!

I just want to reiterate what StJarna said. This story took a lot of courage to share, and was very touching and inspiring. And that video was amazing, too. Thanks!