It’s so bloody cold and icy here today and not a shard of sun to light the gloom, so I am having to hold fast to the inner fire today.. There are blockages all round, my sister is back in the darkness, I went to visit two times in three days. The second time I didn’t hang around, she was in a group session and by that time I had been out for most of the day and was tired so I honored my needs and boundaries.
I keep thinking how important it is to keep showing support while not enabling her to stay disempowered, held captive by negative thoughts and fears or surrendering to the sense that she is ‘the worst she has ever been” This said on Saturday and I have seen her far far worse many times over the past 9 years. That said I know how much if a challenge it was for her to keep generating her life everyday and push on so hard with not much coming back her way in terms of love. I just had coffee with a family friend who said that she feels her family use her at times as a babysitter when needed but don’t actually extend themselves to give much more. I see then trying their best and being younger not really knowing how she for buried a lot in our family by being the good one. Maybe its hard for them to understand about the roots of her pain and struggle, and know how to provide much comfort to her. I am sure this also happens a lot for others who struggle to stay afloat…
Also under discussion was the fact our inheritance is being held back.. Those in control are too concerned with maximising gains and minimising losses to see a bigger picture of abundance and free things up to move foward.. it all feels too frustrating if I focus on it too much.. as if I am being held down or stymied again. When my sister goes down and collapses and stops fighting it becomes harder, there is pressure on me to support her and be the strong one when its a full time work to keep generating and supporting my own life. Today I didn’t get Jasper out to walk (yet), it was just too bloody cold for me.
Apart from this nothing much new to report…Therapy was intense yesterday with dives into the past, but I get conflicted, I am no longer that young girl who was drinking and drugging… I am an adult now capable of different choices, I just struggle at times with loneliness and finding a path out in the world to make some form of positive contribution and reach for life enhancing connections and activities, while knowing and acknowledging the importance of quiet time and rest too. My blog gives me a focus out there and I need to remember these are isolating times.
On another note, I started Mary Trump’s book about the formative influences in her Uncle’s life.. It makes sad and confronting reading to learn of the forces that led to her own father becoming an addict. Particularly poignant are the following excerpts.
Weakness was perhaps the greatest sin of all, and Fred (Donald’s father) worried that Freddie (his oldest son) was more like his own brother…soft, and though not unambitious, interested in the wrong things, such as engineering and physics, which Fred found esoteric and unimportant. Such softness was unthinkable in his namesake, and by the time the family moved into the House when Freddy was ten, Fred had already determined to toughen him up. Like most people who aren’t paying attention to where they’re going, however, he over-corrected.
“That’s stupid,” Fred said whenever Freddy expressed a desire to get a pet or play a practical joke. “What do you want to do that for?” Fred said, with such contempt in his voice that it made Freddie flinch, which only annoyed Fred more. Fred hated it when his oldest son screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more when, after being taken to task, Freddy apologised. “Sorry, Dad,” Fred would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a “killer” in his parlance .. and he was temperamentally the opposite of that. Being a killer was really code for being invulnerable.
She goes on to explain how in the face of his father’s death, the older Fred didn’t seem to feel anything, while being overwhelmed by his mother’s sadness. How the loss had made him feel a vulnerability and no longer the center of the universe and how in order to retain a sense of control and invulnerability, he refused to acknowledged or feel any sense of loss (something very key to malignant narcissism.)
Trump continues :
it was easier for Freddie to think that his father had his son’s best interests at heart and that he, Freddy, was the problem. In other words, protecting his love for his father was more important than protecting himself from his father’s abuse. Donald would have taken his father’s treatment of his brother at face value: “Dad’s not trying to hurt Freddy. He’s only trying to teach us how to be real man. And Freddy’s failing.”
Fred dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had not use for him.
Self recrimination, is not something that we are born with, but something we learn and have introjected into us as small children… Learning to find the true self that needed to live beneath what the ‘invulnerable” parent projected or expected can take a lot of work and it seems addiction took the younger Fred Trump before he could do so. For the ones who watched on and learned the painful lesson it was perhaps easier to side with the abuser and devaluer and to similarly reject all feeling.
By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father’s ambitions, became similarly limited… neither of his parents interacted with him in a way that helped him to make sense of his world, which contributed to his inability to get on with other people..it also made reading social cues extremely difficult.
I can identify at times to that sense of being a person who finds it very hard to relate and interact due to a history of emotional distance with my own parents who themselves were very lonely isolated kids.. Donald Trump’s father left Germany for the ‘free world” set on building a profitable empire and did not honor a code of generosity or philanthropy, giving back and sharing of the spoils he managed to amass through sheer force of hard work and other freely available resources of support.
It is interesting to acknowledge the forces and formative influences that shape us.. For myself I see the importance of both understanding and insight especially into our own buried desires, feelings, needs and longings… Seeking validation from a parent or not being able to call out abuse and invalidation makes us permanently vulnerable to self negation or self recrimination. When then either internalise that invalidation as an inner critic/psychic killing force, or alternatively externalise it in criticism of so called ‘weaker’ souls who are actually willing to express and be brave enough to feel and acknowledge the depths of their own human vulnerability to wounding, rather than deflect or project it.
Emerging From The Dark Night 