When deciding on a blog topic and looking for a photo, I landed on this one. This is me with a dog we called Muppet when he had long hair, and we called Ricky when he had short. I was about 9 in this picture and we were living in Elizabeth, Colorado.
I have gotten a lot of counseling in my adult life. I’ve worked along chaplains when I worked as a chaplain in a church I attended in California. Many of them were also counselors and psychologists and we became friends.. I have read many self-help books, and in many cases ended up meeting the authors and doing workshops with them. I worked at a psychological publishing house, and studied religions of all kinds in addition to the one I was a part of.
My family doesn’t know much about that part of me. They don’t seem to be aware of the one who had to heal from a lot of the things that happened in childhood, especially during the Elizabeth days. One of the reasons our family moved to Colorado Springs area is because I started crying all of the time. We would be having a normal family moment and I would burst into tears. It got to the point even I didn’t know why.
After many decades, and much help from others, I understand my childhood better. It is taboo in the family even now to say the most basic experiences of my childhood. So we don’t in my opinion REALLY talk. I know very little about anyone in our family other than what everyone else knows. We don’t talk about deep important things, but always deflect to surface topics. I am glad of what I have done thus far in life, and for all the work I have done on myself. I am glad I know and like myself. I am glad I have healed.
While in Elizabeth, the dog pictured above was given to my best friend’s family by my mother. As directed by her, they took it to the humane society. I therefore suddenly no longer had this dog, or that friend.
That was a better fate than one of our previous dogs. My mother loaded her three kids and the family dog in the car, then dumped the dog far out of town bringing home three screeching unconsolable children. We never spoke of it again. I often at the time wished my older siblings could stand up to the cruelty for all of us so some of this could stop, and we could heal. I was the youngest. I wished my father would stand up for us when things like that happened. Instead everything would drop down to a bloody, toxic silence and we’d all advance forward more psychologically wounded. Maybe others in the family would see these events differently. This blog is obviously my point of view.
Before we moved to Colorado Springs, my brother was wrestling me to the ground every afternoon before my parents arrived home. I think he was just bored. There wasn’t much to do in Elizabeth and we were isolated in a house away from town. When I told my mother to get him to stop, she told him it was a good way to hone his wrestling skills. Now it is pretty easy looking back to understand why I cried so much just before moving.
Luckily everything changed in Colorado Springs. My brother and I were never in the same school at the same time so some of the dynamics healed. I got involved in my extracurricular activities which didn’t exist in Elizabeth, and he and my sister got involved with theirs and we all diverged into our own life paths. We aren’t close friends, but we aren’t enemies either. I respect both my sister and brother and wish them well.
When we arrived in Black Forest just north of Colorado Springs, I made friends. One who became one of my best friends had a father who was a psychologist. Having him in my life from then on seemed to solve a lot of things. My mother didn’t like him. I didn’t care. The good influences through school including that family were how I made it through middle and high school.
Fast forward to today.
I am grateful for the last 6 years back in Colorado, because a lot of integration of myself had yet to be accomplished. I wasn’t aware I needed that until I returned to Colorado. When Trump was elected, my mother said to me, “Now J D Vance is going to fix you without your permission!” referencing something Trump had said about fixing women without their permission. It signaled to me she is still the same person in my life she has always been, in that very particular way.
I don’t fear J D Vance. I think if he were standing there in that moment, he’d have said “Whoa there Jan, take it down a notch! I don’t do illegal stuff.” At least that is what I would hope he’d say. The political difference I have with almost all of my family seem more a symptom than a cause of a more longer term dynamic between us.
I forgive her for the long term toxicity carefully and quietly injected usually when there is no one else in the room with us, and I forgive myself for taking so long to heal. The emotional instability cost me my primary boyfriend early in life, and therefore my husband and kids. It has cost me countless directions I have tried and sometimes succeeded. Then the family tribal dynamics would kick in, and I would find myself drifting out of control back into service roles for the family. My actual life and all my actual adult relationships would dissolve like sea foam. This wasn’t the family’s fault. In adulthood I am responsible for my own life. I hadn’t yet healed enough.
I understand democracy vs fascism better now. Ironically, having Trump as a president, has helped me finally fully understand my life and my family. Emotionally, there is no up, only more chaos, only more pain. No mom, I won’t sleep with the family friend and make you a baby. Shame on you for lying to the rest of my family about the boyfriend you met… and my health history… and even my sexual orientation. I wasn’t aware of some of the lies she has told family until she admitted them to me in the last few years. I guess when you want to be a bully, lies assist in that process.
When I was a little girl, not much older than the photo above, I’d made a promise to myself that one day I would marry for love. I would choose my husband and would not submit to my family choosing him. Intuitively, I knew even then they would try. I had no idea how far they would take it.
If I have learned anything in life it is to go with your gut. I failed on that in one very specific way in life. I should have stood up to the toxicity of my family in my twenties after I was able to move away. I also understand, some of these issues transcend my family. Currents in society affect us all. That is what makes it easier to forgive individuals because I know even though their words and behavior may look toxic to me, they seem normal and right to them given their own life experiences.
I debated whether to write this blog, for the same reasons I have always refrained. The topics of this blog are taboo in the family. Why I went ahead and chose to write it is I believe my brother and sister, and their children might benefit from this perspective which they don’t currently know. They may never read this, or maybe it is no help to them if they did. I feel obligated to stand for honesty in my experience and all others can engage with it or not as they see fit. If my parents read this or other posts like it and want me to leave their home, I am fine with that. In the same way I need to say my truth, they also need to say theirs.
I will continue to do what I have always done which is pray for peace, harmony, resolution, and restoration within my own heart and in relationships. The prayer of St. Frances has been particularly helpful. I’ve had it memorized since my twenties because I use it so much:
Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace
Where there is hatred, let me sow love
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy
Oh divine master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console
To be loved as to love
To be understood as to understand
For it is in giving that we receive
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.
That says it better than I ever could…