Breaking Free - Giving and Receiving Love From Healthy People

[Calsun]

One of the things that has brought me great sadness in my life was that I was always so bound to my uBPD mother and to the family system. There was a message that you weren't supposed to tell the family secrets, weren't supposed to show the dirty laundry.  It was like a totalitarian  closed system.  When friends really liked me and cared about me, my mother would say, they only like you because they don't know you, if they really knew you they wouldn't like you.  And so the message was that my mother's mirroring of me was accurate and that others who loved me were being fooled by me.  She built a psychological prison for me, an emotional Berlin wall.

How often in my life, I neglected or minimized or even had contempt for people, wonderful people in my life, who really loved me and were so good to me because I felt as though they didn't know the real me or that they couldn't have been worth very much if they loved me, that Berlin wall that kept me from freedom.  And I was terrified of breaking away psychologically from my mother and my toxic family system which she dominated, going over that psychological Berlin wall to the other side, the side of loving, healthy, regulated people.  Now, she built that system on violence, both physical, psychological and emotional violence and I felt that trauma in my body and still do.  Violence was truly inherent in the system.  

Now, some of this came back strongly to me when I had a recent conversation with my brother.  My brother scares me too, like my mother he has a lot of bullying qualities.  He was the golden child and speaks with the same kind of unquestioning"authority" as my mother.  He seems to lack the capacity to truly be sorry for anything that he does or to see his part in what he does.  He will dismiss my feelings with insinuations that I am too sensitive or that I just haven't gotten over things.  I minimize my exposure to him.  In this particular conversation, he attacked my art as being sick because I express certain things in it and make it public that express my feelings about what I experienced as a child in the family system.  And he thought it was bizarre and sick that I go to strangers with my issues.  So, here I am posting on this site.  Now, that to me is attacking the core of my recovery, that I have come out of hiding with these secrets about the family illness, about my mother's mental illness and cruelty.  He was unwittingly parroting as he so often does my mother's version of reality. It was abusive to convince a child, as my mother did, that it was unsafe to reach out to others, to build healthy and loving relationships with others.  There is terror in my body when I try to do that.

I am not a child and I am not a young man, but the trauma of the experience of having lived there, often makes me want to appease these people still as a way of feeling safe, and to not break away. The real hope is in connection outside of the family system and to people who do not act and think like those within my family of origin that were either uBPD or were appeasing it.  The hope is going over that psychological Berlin wall to freedom, to the outside, but how scary it has been for me to do that.

Contrary to all evidence, I was taught the doublethink of the outside world is dangerous, but your mother and sticking with your mother will make you safe.  The terror of not knowing what or who to trust. Now, that was the dynamic that my uBPD mother set up, that she was going to make me safe and that the outside world was going to trick me, deceive me, and hurt me or that all women were like her anyway.  Now, there are people out there to be cautious and discerning about.  But my mother and my brother were both very unsafe and unhealthy to me, very hostile to my growth and thriving as a person, and they both advocate a system in which going to others with my story and my needs is to be condemned.

So, there have been wonderful people in my life, many of whom I rejected while I sought after people like my mother, withholding, manipulative, unable to see or love me,  or love in general, not really loving me, were exploiting me, preferred others to me, because I felt that my mother's mirroring of me was right, and the loving people didn't really know me. I was terrified of freedom from her, even though it was a  psychological prison to be bound to someone so violent, vile and harmful to me.  It was like an addiction to a life-destroying drug, the psychological bondage to my mother. This was never a loving relationship which invites freedom and encourages freedom, it was psychological bondage planted in ground of violence and terror.  At the core of it was this terror, which came from violence and conditioning under violence, with the irrational conditioning that remaining psychologically bound to a violent and destructive mother would keep me safe, but that these people on the outside would deceive me and hurt me.  This was never about me, this was about my uBPD mother's need to not be abandoned and her needing to control her children, so that they would never leave her for others.

I am trying to resource myself with the comforting memories of so many friends and even romantic partners who truly loved and cared about me throughout the years and were good to me, but who I often rejected for the people who were "challenges" to make love me. They did offer me an alternative to what I experienced from my mother and from my family of origin.  When undermined my connections and attachments to so many wonderful people was that at the core of my psyche,of my identity from early trauma was my psychological bondage to my uBPD mother and the family of origin.  That pain contributed to heartache and literal physical illness.  Leaving it and breaking free of the pyschological bondage to the uBPD mother and the identity she projected on me still makes me feel like I am going to die.

Wanting so much to break free of that and to really grow, to really embrace loving people and to finally confront the terror, absolute terror that I feel about finally being psychologically free from my mother, my family of origin system and their horrible attitudes about life and people and me.  It feels terrifying to go to the outside. Posting this is scary.  Trying to go where it's warm and loving and to feel safe in that place and with healthy, loving people, feeling safe in knowing that there are places of joy and love and safety, that my scary, violent, crazy mother  can no longer take from me.  And I don't know if anyone else has this feeling, that the uBPD mother is so powerful that she will find my joy and destroy it, that she would literally kill me before she would allow anyone else to love me or before she would allow me to be free from her psychological hold.

I guess that is the part of it that I am feeling most keenly, the feeling of trauma that I have and terror inside of my body, that my uBPD "witch" mother will kill me, and it has become general, that I will be killed if I leave the psychological internalized uBPD mother now inside of me.  I know that the terror of my childhood is over, trying to release the terror that remains and build and embrace a happy, safe,loving environment for myself.  I am working with a great therapist who is helping me through this and I do have some loving friends for whom I am so grateful.  And I am grateful for this place to share.

Best,

Calsun

[Kwamina]

Hi Calsun,

Sorry to read that you're going through some hard times now, I can see why your brother's comments got to you like this. You're working hard to move forward and by saying these things your brother is trying to prevent your growth/escape. He's also probably trying to protect his own imaginary world.

I have had similar experiences with my uBPD mom and sis. My mother also made these kind of remarks about my friends. She would say things like "they only want to spend time with you to steal your knowledge" or would say that people might be wanting to poison me. Growing up with such a controlling mother really does feel like you're living in a prison. Even when my mother wasn't around I felt like something was controlling me from the inside. The prison was all around me.

I'm glad to hear you're working with a good therapist and also have some loving friends to help you. I don't think you're alone in feeling like your BPD mother is so powerful that she can and will destroy your joy. Fear is something they use to keep us imprisoned even as adults. It takes a lot of work breaking free from this, I'm also working on it and find it hard realizing just how much my life has been influenced by my mother. It's like I was just a marionette and she was pulling all the strings.

[Calsun]

Thanks, Kwamina.  I'm trying to be understanding with myself about the effect of the trauma.  You're right, my brother is highly defensive because so much of his life is built on my mother's attitudes and understanding of reality.  In religious circles, they call this psychological stronghold "trusting in oppression."  That's what I was taught to do. Moving toward trusting in love and goodness and embracing the love and goodness in myself.  For the longest time, I thought that the way to heal from this, my uBPD mother's violence and rage, was to become hard and angry myself, to be tough.  Now, I know how harmful that is.  The only solution is to be loving with myself and others, to embrace healthy, loving people and detach from those who don't act in that way.  You don't fight fire with fire, you fight it with water.  When I was a child, my mother convinced me that love wasn't real and that I was unlovable.  She even told me that.  I now know that my mother was incapable of truly loving.  She could manipulate, coerce, be violent, humiliate, create a bond built on oppression, one that kept her children psychologically bound to her, but Berlin walls do come down, history tells me and dictators do fall.  Love does prevail, I believe.

Best,

Calsun

Calsun