Lies, deception, clarity and truth

I went out to eat with my mother last night. Phone conversation before that started with arguing: she does not understand how I cannot immediately get over what happened the last few months and just trust her. I try to tell her what I need from her is lots of gentleness and patience and let me have my feelings: there is no way at all I can just force myself to trust or not be suspicious that she is deceiving me along with the rest of the ‘family’. Of course I would live to be able to figure out how to trust my mother again but there are so many reasons it only makes sense for me to be suspicious of that. I need clarity and I need spiritual direction and I need to figure out what and who I can trust and how I can trust life again.

She could just be a really good actor, good at getting what she wants, while assuring me she is doing things for me and has no selfish bone in her body. Acting dissociative to mess with me but jot actually breing so and then conveniently pretending to forget everything she has done that has hurt me. I try to explain how helpful it is to just be able to express my feelings and perceptions and judgments without hurtful criticism and her jumping in and interrupting me before I’ve gotten a word out and questioning my perceptions and getting mad at me for having my feelings. None of that is helpful. We should both have a right to our feelings.

I actually was self-injurious and it was caused to a large extent by all the dysfunction going on in that house and my mother’s inability to empathise at all (and really quite the opposite). I expressed serious immediate thoughts of fibding ways to hurt myself out of desperation that came out of realising sonething I should have realised an awful long time ago: that family just did not ultimately care about my pain. One of the first thibgs that happened when I got back to that house: my mother was dealing with this heart condition and… oh, my brother screams at her to check her blood sugar and stuff, and is just mean about it; her husband seems to want to hurt me by showing me, yeah, I could do a lot more for her, make sure her vitals get checked frequently, but I don’t actually care. It reeeally got to me one time when he and my mother and the dog were in the room opposite me and her husband says something for me to hear (and everything said when I am in that house is meant for me to hear and to hurt me, no wonder I sink into a depression. He says, when he has made it clear to ne he isn’t taking due care with my mother’s health: “You were a pain in the a**.”

Then sarcastically as a comment for me he says: “He doesn’t know what I *mean*.” It petrified me because I didn’t: was it a threat to me that he would hurt my mother (that would slip right by her) or a threat to the dog (that would also slip right by her)? That’s whT I thought at the time but now I think she is smarter than that and they both meant to confuse and petrify me with those ambiguous words (that were just a start to all the ways my caring and my heart got messed with after that). What did he mean, anyway? My mind got messed up more and more with fear and paranoia. I did not know who was in danger or how but day by day I got worn down and was sure horrible things were intended, and horrible things were happening to me, being shown that I was worthless every single day. I was terrified about my mother’s health, so sad that they both keep the dog I got for depression and PTSD away from me, and then it was just all my caring and my sensitive heart getting used against me, just constant berating and triggering all of my worst fears and gaslighting me into losing my absolute mind.

I was so stupid and naïve though. I never should have returned to a place after having memories of that kind of abuse but I could not think and when memories like that surface everything feels hopeless anyway. I never should have taunted him with it when I got back there, I should have just gotten the hell out of there a long time ago instead of getting i to dramas that I could never win… because there was jever any intention to collaborate or see the light on his part, though that is all I wanted…

I somehow still trusted her husband cared at the most basic level and that at least I could trust my ‘family’ to let out my pain about childhood abuse, naïvely somehow expecting caring in response to my expressions of deep pain perpetrated within the family, but what was I thinking?

Honestly I did not take any of this stuff as seriously as I should have taken it. When you remember things like that perpetrated by others even in your own family that’s not something to be messed with; it’s not a game, taunting him as I did, yelling from downstairs and calling him things connected to the way he abused me (the only way I knew to release my pain stuck in that house as it was) is unlikely to do anything but cause lashback and revenge, and I taunted him all along, but he was never going to get it. The abuse was dangerous and just because it is so distant now and so hard to believe it actually happened despite my memories of it doesn’t mean calling it out won’t be dangerous too, but that is what I did, never considering despite my aversion to him that he did not actually care about me in any way at all, that he would seek to hurt me where he knows it hurts most, and just not care. I think he would destroy me if not for my mother so as far as the possibility of trusting her again in the midst of this mess at least there is that, maybe…

As much as I can’t begin to trust her, when she arrived in her car, after getting lost for a ling while, I had this smile response that I tried to hide. It has kept happening to me lately and it is so connected to early childhood anuse, like I was made to smile when I was being abused, or tickled or something, I don’t know, but when I have painful body memories of early childhood abuse, lately this smile forms on my face which is my body temembering something and I don’t know what but whatever it is is not happy at all so I hate that I have a smile response when my trauma is triggered.

We were hoping to go to a vegan place, she was okay with it but I thought she might rather somewhere else and we ultimateky agreed on the Italian place where I had my high school graduation. She acted like her normal self in a lit of ways but once again is that just acting and when she wants to bring me down again for some reason will she just pounce on me again, getting irrational and acting insane and attacking all my triggers precisely because she knows she can hurt me with that? I don’t believe for a second that she has no idea whatsoever what she might have done to hurt me in those months, that she has no memory at all of any of the thibgs that hurt me to no end, and her rationale for calling 911 when she did is completely bogus.

There was total lack of any sense of caring when I was actively self-injurious and I explained how hurtful and horrifying the hospital had been to me and how I was terrified to go back. I made her breakfast in bed one night and the next night I think it was I was trying so hard to explain how that triggering hurt me and I truly did not even express being self-injurious at all, just a vague statement that her words to me were making me feel terrible and I didn’t want to end up feeling that way again. It was just… talking… but she immediately picked up the phone to call 911 in such an aggressive way and I was terified and confused because there was absolutely no warning, no conversation about what I had said, and that she was concerned about me or anything. She talked about driving me to the hospital before, we could have done it that way, but if she had *heard* me she would have known there was nothing at that time to be concerned about… but when thibgs are concerning, she is callously distant, and when nothing concerning is actually happening, that is when she chooses to hurt me by aggressively and meanly (I hate you I hate you I hate you) bringing both tbe police and the hospital into it. I was terrified, she’sd never done anything lieke that in her life, and to be so mean about it, too… I started screaming for her to not do that, talk to me first, to be gentle because expressing hurt means I need gentleness, this wasn’t the right solution… she made me feel worse by telling tbe police I was screaming in her face and I was terrified if what she was doing, of course I was screaming, and tbe police had already called me trash when I tried to get help; I did not trust that my mother had nothing to do with the horrors that happened to me at the previous hospital and even if she truly didn’t nothing can explain her husband’s voice on the intercom at that hospital and the wY what happened in that hospital was definitely a collaboration with him if not both of them and maybe even others I thought I could trust is sonething I don’t know if I can ever figure out a way to resolve. There is no way to explain to my mother, if shre didn’t actually know, that her husband’s voice came on like that in tbat hospital and they were trying to make me insane in tbe same way that house was; they kibd of succeeded, but will I ever be able to puece together any of it? My mother claims to know absolutely nothing about anything that happened to me in those hospitals which I don’t believe and I know for absolutely certain her husband was in communication with that ‘hospital’ in ways that feel horribly exceuciatingly unethical to me. I don’t know how to put my story together and share it so it makes sense to anyone. I have such a deep need for honezty, transparency, and clarity in relationship with others. What can I trust in tbe wake of constant deception from my own family? Was that hospital experience something my mother had a part in, too, or was it orchestrated precisely to make me lose trust in my mother? If I stop trusting my mother and she actually doesn’t deserve that, it was a trick orchestrated by these others, I feel horrible. I just don’t know what to do. I need clarity and honezty and transparency from somewhere and I need to heal crom this complex PTSD created by my family. I had it before; now it is worse than ever, and I do not even trust that my own mother does not *want* me to experience this. It is so impossible right now to inagine she cares that I thrive. I know the others don’t but I wish I could get some clarity around my mother. I wish I could connect in healthy ways with others, sharing in refreshingly derp, honest, transparent ways… I am so tired of feeling deceived by the world… please just give me a moment of truth… someone who will tell tbe complete truth to me and let me share mine would be so, so, so welcome, I cannot even say. I am traumatised, I pray there are those out there who care, who do want to see me happy…