How to trust my friends

When I got to the shelter I was terrified of my mother and did not want to return to that house with her. Later she criticised me for that and pretty much at the same time told me, just because I was trying to express issues I had with her with hopes of healing stuff and not making it worse, that I was not allowed to come back to that house. She deflected my attempt at expressing issues I had with her by essentially implying she had so many issues with me that I was not welcome back there. I told her, which I am sure she knew anyway, that I did not want to go back there anyway.

A few days later she talked about how she had apparently weeks ago ir something cleaned the room and prepared for me to come back to it as though she had never told me I wasn’t welcome there at all. I just wanted to clarify how confusing this is to me and how it seems she will either blame me for not wanting to return there or else tell me I can’t depending on which she thinks will hurt most in the moment. I tried to have a conversation about what actually happened; it is completely hopeless, and if you cannot talk about anything that actually happened, you cannot heal wounds, and you can’t have a relationship. I was thinking about bringing up a really big issue, and this was nust a relatively minor ouch; now I’m not so sure, it just doesn’t feel safe to express anything real. She has said a million times that all that happens is I go around in circles and I am so tired of her saying that: yes, when you can never get validation that what happened even happened, nevermind being able to talk about intentions and what was meant and everything, the only conversations I can have with her go in circles.

The ways I felt wounded feel even more wounded due to the lack of validation of my very perceptions and making my attempts to resolve even relatively minor issues I have with her into the blame for why we can’t have a relationship or why we keep going in circles, but no, it is because nothing that actually happened can even be said, and I still do not know her nearly well enough to know if she honestly has no memory of how things went and how I might have perceived them and can’t keep track of any of that stuff or if she knows things happened that way and she just wants to hurt me and mess with my mind. And I keep investing in this, though I know as long as no conversation about anything that concerns me is possible, nothing is going to get better and everything is going to keep going around in circles… she blames me for that but does she actually know she is causing it with her refusal to acknowledge or inability to remember what actually happened?

It is so disempowering, and even if she were open to outside help with our ‘relationship’, and a few days ago she actually said she was, there is no way that I can express myself in such a way that that helping professional would take both of us seriously. She’ll be able to claim that nothing she’s done that hurt me has ever happened and she’ll probably fet that person to believe her too. She can disempower me by invalidating everything I experience that is soooo ouch from the very start and then turn things around and make me the entire problem. And I naïvely care so much I’ll let that happen.

I was just confused, that’s all: it didn’t make sense that she would go back and forth on both wanting me to stay there and my being unwelcome and saying these things at times they were most likely to be hurtful. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt but even resolving the basics of what actually happened: that she blamed me for wanting to stay at the shelter and then she said I couldn’t stay at that house and then she said she had been preparing a room for me there, was impossible. I honestly think she must be playing me and ultimately wanting to terrify me out of my mind: like we noth know she is not veing at all honest with me, but I can’t say it because if I do we are at an impasse and can’t go any further. To continue any relationship at all I just have to accept what she says about having good intentions and never lying to me even though that leads everything to just go in circles… and I need serious help with this ‘relationship’ or I am not going to make it, I am going to lose my mind. So many things she says are not random but meant to trigger me.

She’s trying to draw me in, to make me believe she cares and to struggle exhaustingly to express myself even though nothing but going in circles is possible, and then when my heart is in it she will tear me down again… and these nightmares do not come from nowhere. I can’t deal with what my heart is more and more terrified is true: that she wants to mess with me to no end and her intentions are positively messed up.

I can’t feel in my heart that my own mother’s intentions are that messed up and even evil (or covering up something horrible) and the idea of that is so terrifying I don’t know, I am in an existential crisis and I have never been so terrified by anything in my entire life… that she can just keep pulled ng me in and pretending she cares but my heart doesn’t heal from her surface expressions if care, it just hurts more and more, nothing gets resolved, and when she wants to scare the crap out of me again without any consequences, she’ll do that… and I just can’t believe this has been my life, always in denial that her very intentions might be so nessed up as to be evil… never accepting that this ‘relationship’ is something I can’t change without getting disempowered to the point of my grave. I have no one else to talk to about how she terrifies me to my wits end and how my organism shudders in horror with the fear so I go to her, let myself be the little kid who naïvely trusts her unconditionally that at least she wants goid for me and not evil, and then I get heartbroken out of my absolute mind when disappointment or something much more malicious than that happens again, and it is like I’ll never know what is real, because I never can with her, but it is so messed up that she is the only one I can go to and say oh my god I’m scared I’m scared I’m terrified, and she’ll probably pretend to care and give me a false sense if security that she foes and then wham me with sonethibg that freaks me out to no end when I am most vulnerable and least expecting it.

She doesn’t want a relationship with me, she wants to use me and abuse me, I’m pretty sure, and I am so vulnerable and have nowhere else to go to let out my pain and fear and terror of her, and I don’t know what is what or how to decypher anything at all, but most people would err on the side of encouraging me not to be afraid of my mother, which is certainly not at all what I need. I need to get this absolute horror out of me somehow. Deep down I know at least ger intentions are not nearly as pure as she says they are and I can’t accept that in myself without my body freaking out and losing my mind and I don’t know if there is any escape, any way to get clear intuitive readings of where to go from there. My heart for ever too long has felt like it is being wrung like a sponge and I don’t know if I will ever feel peace or comfort or anything but confusion or fear there again. She doesn’t want a relationship, she sabotages it herself on purpose, and I get blamed for it all.

She texted me, “I feel like our relationship is very unhealthy at this point in time, don’t you?” Ummm yes I do and the thing is for the first time I am not sure there is anything within my power to make things better though maybe with a really supportive friend around all this stuff I could figure out *some* step to take that is within my power. We can’t have real conversations or happy conversation because trust has been broken with me more than it ever has been before and I am so incredibly triggered it hurts. A friend is validatingfor me that they are pissed at my ‘parents’ and yeah I need that from somebody, I never really let myself have it, always assuming it was hopeless to have my own narrative because they are so convincing and no matter how old I am I feel framed as the one with the problem. None if their shortcomings let alone maliciousness really get aconowledged and… I am just starting to have people stand up for *me* rather than considering me a part of a family dynamic and narrative where my parents get most if the power because they get ir he gets to talk about my history as a ‘problem child’ or ‘disturbed’ (yeah, by him, and more and more it seems, both of them) and what am I supposed to do with that?

I am sensitive to people seeing me through the eyes of those who messed me up rather than with my own woundings and right to be totally pissed off at all that happened to me. When people tell me they are pissed at my parents that affirms for me that they are not holding me in my ‘parents’ power structure and narrative of me, the cage I could never escape from, and it is so validating. It feels so protective, actually, and I didn’t realise I *needed* that. When I have friends who validate my anger (and do NOT overstep their bounds like one retreat leader’s ex-girlfriend who knowing nothing about anything tickled me or something and tried to force me to forgive or experience affinity with my ‘father’, like noooo) I deel so much safer with them and I can be myself but the problem is my mother bever lets me even feel like my perceptions of the dysfunction are valid so I jtst dissociate and feel ashamed when I try to talk about it with anyone. I can’t be angry to my mother to her face and expect anything but hearing my perceptions and everything are messed up so it’s really hard to do with friends but now feels essential to claiming my power. That is the validation I need from friends and that is partly how I discern that friends are safe and I can relax around them. Like, thanks to Sia who is here and a really cool person! It gas been a while since I’ve found a friend on this site who has read a bit of my stuff and whose entries I’m committed to reading too!

Just because I always used to wish my family would come to my wedding or something and understand the sacredness of it… but it turns out that’s not going to happen, my mother is always going to try to sabotage my friendships and relationships and the more I let her in the more she will do it, and even the fear of her sabotaging a relationship is enough for me to start getting awkward and paranoid. I need to be really on the same page with someone I live about what is wrong from the beginning and I beed to stand my ground; stop thinking she is going to care for me to have a happy relationship because she somehow just doesn’t, and if my partner isn’t angry as hell at her, for real, based on intimacy with me… well, if they are and can evoke those feelings within themselves while acknowledging how much I hurt because I still want to defend my mother with my life, that helps.

If I am not real about my real feelings about my ‘family’ intimacy is just not possible (whereas I always thought acknowledging those feelings would destroy intimacy). I need to not be afraid to go there and set boundaries so I am safe knowing the people I surround myself with are not my family’s minions. It takes discernment to figure that out because I never ever know with them.

A block to intimacy in my life has been the taboo against expressing my real feelings about my family… I have always been terrified that ‘going there’ would destroy intimacy ir I didn’t know how but if I can’t own my anger at the messed upness I think I can’t really figure out what it takes to trust my friends. I am sorry trust is so hard in a case like this but it takes particular kinds of discernment…

And owning my feelings about my family: ideally this retreat centre I used to go to would be able to really support me in, but I feel like this retreat center came to hold me in stories that were not mine and that became terrifying since these stories were so unhelpful; my mother would orchestrate drama and trigger me intentionally after retreats and when I confessed to a retreat leader I trusted what had happened, how bad I felt for what happened as a result if that altercation, they immediately, without hearing more about my process or how I felt about it, assured me, ‘it’s okay,’ which felt maybe not intentionally but disempowering because it wasn’t okay, first of all, and second, I knew what happened was NOT my fault and I did not need anyone to assure me of that. What I needed was for someone to tell me that what my *mother* did in that instance, screaming at me in my sleep and starting tbe biggest fight ever while I was pretty much sleepwalking and then blaming me for how she fell when I pushed her away — and I had no other choice in the moment but to push her, she came right at me screaming and nothing I did would get her to leave me alone. I did NOT need to hear that it was okay and I was understood and forgiven for pushing her a little bit and making ger fall though I felt terrible about that, of course; I needed someone to be pissed off at my mother. But that is so hard to do myself…

It has always bern really hard to hear people criticise my mother and my heart hurts and I want to profect her but I think I need that kind of friend right now, the one who can hear me and gets why I’m such a kess right now and that it’s mot my fault and who actually sees the ways that my mother has been quite horrible and… no wonder you’re so messed up, it’s not your fault, let’s get you sone healing, you know? Anyway, it is such a small thing but in a dysfunctional family it does not take much to be on guard; and this retreat leader’s immediate rushing in and saying it was okay before I had explained my story of what happened and my *knowing* that it was not my fault put me on guard I guess as far as trusting them but I didn’t realise that was happening at the time. Like, I realise what I need now, and it is friends to be angry at my ‘parents’ with me so I can find my power and heal. That is a solution at least to my fears that I am seen, because if their influence, through others’ eyes in much the same way as tgey see me, and that is *not* me; that is nothing but unhelpful to me, because they don’t see me, though at a certain point I sabotaged myself and expressed myself in precisely the way that they would say that I am and I hate that. I wanted everyone to see me that way, to disempower myself completely to feel everything and see if there was a way out, and I guess I messed up so badly, and I am so afraid of my future…

As hard as it is, and wherever it takes me, I need to have the wisdom to change what I can change, and that may not be my mother, but my own understanding and capacity to connect with people who can relate and empathise, as hard as it can be for me to hear and say, how awful my mother can be sometimes… I still don’t have the courage to discern whether she means to be so awful or not, though deep down I think she means to terrify me so much more than the Wicked Witch of the West terrified Dorothy. I just can’t say that, even to myself; but if I had friends who encouraged me in the direction of, wow that is an awful dysfunctional family, without feeling bad and collapsing and being like I shoyldn’t say such things, I feel bad… like, I never told my friend about my memories of certain sexual abuse within the family but he was like, ‘do you think he messed with you too?’ which was so upfront, but kind of just the blunt way he is… and helpful to hear, like when people give my family less slack than I do, that is a way I know I can trust them. It is believe it ornot hard for me because I do not want to disparage my ‘family’ and I do not call out the dysfunction nearly enough, I question my own perceptions and can’t find my voice because that is what I have been taught to be within the family… so I shut down when it comes to expressing my real emotions with friends and in relationships. And I onow that even as I cannot name the truth to my mother withoyt her questioning my perceptions and guilting and blaming me, sharing these things outside the family is even more taboo… letting myself own my truth and finding friends who accept it could ve the beginning or tbe end of me and it is one of tbe most terrifying things in my life.

It is healing or nothing, this time, methinks. Heal or do not, there is no try? I don’t know but I have a hankering to read a bit of Alice Miller…