Too emotional!

I get soooo triggered when someone tells me I am just ‘too much’ of something, yesterday I opened up again to let in the so called family ‘friend’ who has put me down in the past and yet again I was told I would not be included in any meeting with one of the executors of Mum’s will because I am ‘too emotional’. This is down to the fact my mother excluded my older sister’s children from her will and left unequal portions to those who don’t need it, its fair enough that it is my Mother’s will to do with as she sees fit but I was passionate in my defence of my nephews and the solicitor was actually on my side when all of this came to light after my mother’s death. And what she is saying relates to other times she has seen me very distressed due to traumatic injuries on a visit to Sydney where she my mother and other sister were quaffing champagne in the bar and didn’t want to be bothered that my abandonment trauma had been activated by that visit. I really wish at that time I got the bus home alone, as the next day they practically ignored me and made me feel like shit. Since then she has told me one too many times that I cry too much and am difficult to be around.

Its really bugging me again today as did the most callous story she told me of how years ago a tenant of hers had a cat and she did not allow pets, when the tenant asked her want to do about the cat she said ‘kill it!” and she actually thought this was quiet funny. I just sat there yesterday almost choking on my coffee and wishing I was miles away from anywhere near to her, the tenant in question was a Buddhist so he was pretty flabbergasted by her response.

I debriefed about this with my nephew today. He is undergoing his own stress and was recently told he was have a ‘too intense’ reaction to something that was legitimately upsetting, he had done a lot of design work for a contract they decided to cancel and he required payment for the work he had done and they were outraged and felt justified just to use his time and not have to pay, meanwhile he may have lost out on other work. The guy told him he was too intense when he firmly asked for his payment to be honoured.

Being shown lack of empathy really triggers me and I know reacting and having to carry the resentment about it only poisons me in the end. But just this one meeting with this person yesterday sent me into a complete tail spin for the remainder of the day. Yes, I wish I didn’t have as intense reactions to it as I do but it touches a raw wound and I was feeling really angry last night. I have never seen this person show one shred of sadness over the loss of our mother who she considered her ‘best friend’, and she felt justified in cutting her own mother out of her life completely when she said nasty things about her behind her back. Maybe her lack of empathy comes out of never having been shown empathy herself.

On the back of this I watched the start of the movie Rocketman last night and parts of that really resonated in fact I woke up at 5 am with the following lines of one of the songs from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album that I used to listen to most afternoons following school as a teenager going over and over in my mind

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We’ve had it with your discipline

I was thinking of how an emotionally repressive, undemonstrative home where you have to behave and ‘be good’ and not extravert or make a noise raises shy, insecure, children who if they are gifted like Reggie Dwight was as a youngster feel on the outer and make them even more prone to addiction and so called ‘tantrums’. Its all a muted or extreme form of protest against not being seen, validated, supported, held or even heard. The self inside must fight back in some way if the invalidation is not to be internalised as suicidal ideation and other forms of anxiety and depression. I only got half way through the movie last night and I am looking forward to seeing the other half this afternoon. Elton John’s two albums Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road formed the soundtrack to my middle to late adolescence and conditions he suffered resonate with me too, I was crying during the scene where Elton imagines the music to the lyrics for Your Song that a young Bernie Taupin gave to him early in their friendship just before being signed to travel to LA. Elton got his lucky break and had to overcome his own shyness to perform. I could not help thinking of my mother either who just loved Elton John and his music, I know the movie would have resonated deeply with her too.