It is always challenging visiting my sister.. I try my best to be there but its hard to see how many of her memories are obliterated with this latest round of ECT and to see that they seem to have emptied her out of her own self and process so much that she has next to no conversation.. I do what I can to help, it isn’t much, I try to get the things she needs she lacks the power to get. She told me this afternoon a family meeting has been scheduled for next week. I asked if I could go along and she said yes, at no time has the doctor acknowledged my existence and I am told her son should be the one to be in charge.. But he lacks the skills too. I will text him anyway to ask that I be included because, as I have shared before if I do not get proactive I will never be contacted about anything at all.
I accept how it is now, I have to put my own hurts or feelings aside, today after getting home painful things she has said to me in the past rose up, I wept a bit, but the hurting passed, it is what it is.. I just really want my own life now, outside of family.. I saw so clearly today that I still come at things from the child’s perspective still linked into the emotionally unresponsive family, and I see the ridiculousness and hubris of thinking anything I could do could help but give love.. And even that may, in the end, affect no change.
The truth is I missed out and suffered so many developmental arrests in my family.. My accident derailed a lot but it also made me maybe try even less, it left me with a feeling of deep powerlessness which is not the truth in all situations and is, as I have been reading, one of the major limiting aspects of childhood Complex PTSD.. I am trying to recognise these arrests and limits better now but try also to be less passive, less paralysed.
In AA and Al Anon we are taught to look for the things we do have power over and can control and focus on them, handing over to God what is God’s as it is so far out of our control. When we try to fight our battles over things and circumstances and people so far outside of our control we only end up frustrated, resentful or exhausted. Learning what to let go of, what we do not have the power to change is so important. As much as we love someone and may wish them the best maybe in the end we do not have the power to give them that.. Grace means we accept this, humility allows our fallible limited humanity, while courage and persistence help us to act on strengths and try our level best to build upon and be realistic about potential capabilities. That is what I need to focus on now..
This is my time to be my own adult and to let those still stuck in childhood trauma make the choices to deal or not deal with it.. hubris would be continuing to act under the delusion I had any kind of power over things, situations and people that were and always will be outside of my control.
Emerging From The Dark Night 