Ability To Deal With Normal Emotions In A Family

[BradyLady]

I'm talking about either our own emotions, or that of another person in the family. It's hard to adjust to healthy thinking and healthy situations. When things have always been crazy, you come to expect things to be crazy. "Normal" throws you for a loop.

Last night as I was settling into bed, our cat walked across my foot and dug her claw into the base of my toenail. It hurt pretty bad. That's a sensitive area. My response to the sudden and unexpected pain was to yell "ouch" and then kick the air in her general direction. Understand that I did not make contact and actually kick her, but the motion startled her into jumping off the bed. Now I'm fighting to shut out the ghost voices from the past, telling me what a horrible person I am. So what if I did kick the air, not the cat? The point is, I *got angry.* Even the gesture makes me a monster. I wasn't allowed negative emotions before. Of course, other people were allowed to get as angry with me as they wanted to, but how dare I ever be anything other than serene and content and uncomplaining at all times? The cat didn't draw blood, did she? Then it was no big deal, and as usual, I'm making mountains out of molehills. That's how childhood family would have spun it. I'm sure people in the household with me now would be much more sympathetic.

My twenty-one-year-old nephew moved in with us a couple of years ago. My thirty-year-old daughter lives here too. Both of them also have PTSD. Well, goodness, they've dealt with my mother too, and I know how she gets. Daughter had some pretty big anger management issues at first, but we're both in therapy, and she's made a lot of progress dealing with it. When Nephew first moved here, he seemed to be afraid of his own shadow. If something broke, he was so afraid of being blamed for it, he wouldn't say anything. He'd just live with it. If someone said something that offended him, he'd just swallow it rather than speak his mind. My husband guarantees me that I was the same way when we first got together. It used to be that dire things happened if we p!$$ed off the Queen. It's not that way anymore. But it's an adjustment.

Anyone have any insight? How have you dealt with normalizing after you're used to chaos? (And if you're not at that point, bless you, and I hope you are soon.)

 

[Deleted member 33052]

Welcome, BradyLady! First, I want to say that your nephew is very fortunate to be able to live people who understand what he's going through. It's wonderful that you share your home with him.

My situation was similar, but in my home, anger was the only emotion that was allowed, even encouraged. I wasn't able to express any other emotion until I became a mother.

For myself, I find it really helpful to recognize the feelings hiding behind the anger, because anger is always the product of another feeling. When your cat clawed you, you may have felt pain, maybe you felt startled, and on the deepest level, you may have felt unsafe. Now that I'm learning how to recognize the feelings, my anger is beginning to lose its sharp edge.

I don't know if any of that was helpful, but know that you are being heard. :)

 

[Sandstone]

I identify with the reaction that makes everything my fault if I react.

 

[BradyLady]

Thanks for your responses. They are helpful. And thank you for the reassurance I'm being heard. That is a big battle of mine sometimes.

When my nephew first moved in with us, as I say, he was terrified. He'd dealt with my mother so much, he expected long lectures and tirades and yelling and threats of being thrown out into the streets, over any little mistake. I know that came from my mother. She just doesn't let a young person breathe without telling them how much air to take in and how fast. For me personally, I know I can't recall a conversation I've ever had with her that didn't center around what a screwup I am, and everything I'm doing that I should be doing differently. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

As for his mother, my sister, she's barely competent. That's not her fault. She suffered a serious head injury when she was ten years old. As a result she is constantly in some stage of sleep, so she may not be fully aware of what she's doing, and she makes about as much sense as anybody makes who's talking in their sleep. I don't know, but I've heard that she had to stop her medication (mild amphetamines to keep her awake) because her husband (not my nephew's father) would find it and use it for himself. So, she is hardly even functional. She probably also has PTSD, but it's hard to spot under the nearly constant incoherent ramblings.

That's why, with his mother barely able to take care of him, his grandmother was a big part of the picture. So when he's old enough that nobody can tell him no, he comes and moves in with us. For the first couple of years, all he did was sit in his room. If my husband had to speak to him about anything, such as doing a chore around the house, he felt threatened. He'd stand at attention and parrot back "yes sir" and then worry that we were going to make him leave. If something in his room broke, he wouldn't say anything because he was afraid he'd be blamed. That's easy to understand, because he'd never really seen anything done to solve a problem. Something broke, it got griped about, but it never got fixed or replaced. And when it came to chores, he really didn't know how to do much, because my sister wasn't able to focus enough to teach him.

Now he's a little more relaxed. He's un-paralyzed himself enough to start college. If he has something to say, he knows he's welcome to say it. And he's come to realize we are NOT tossing him out of here. What's really heartwarming is hearing my husband (not my first; we've only been married seven years) start to refer to him as "my" nephew rather than "my wife's" nephew.

You know, with all of my mother's idealistic lectures on how families are supposed to be, she never really made it that way. This is how families are supposed to be. :inlove: Perfect? Heck no. But able to deal with the bumps along the way without coming to a complete halt to look for someone to blame and then give them :devilish: for it.

 

[Deleted member 33052]

Kudos to you and your husband. That boy needed saving.

Your mother and my mother were quite similar... I'm grateful that you survived and are strong enough to fight the good fight. :hug:

 

[BradyLady]

I had to heal quite a bit myself, before I could help someone else. To do that, I had to get the hell away from my childhood family once and for all. They kept trying to hoover me back in. I *knew* the lifestyle was crazy, but since I was the odd one out, the only one complaining, it was easy to convince themselves AND me that I was the one who was nuts.

For instance, I'm the only one in recovery from alcohol. Everyone else is still active in either that or other drugs. No one substance is "better" than another, so it really doesn't matter to me exactly what substance they're users of. I paint it all with the same brush. Addiction is addiction.

Well, my newest stepfather is in recovery also, but then that leads to this: He is my mother's *ninth* marriage. She married a total of eight men, my father twice. My father is the only one among them who was not an alcoholic, either active or in recovery, and even he was mentally ill. He wasn't getting help, so I can't give a definitive diagnosis, but I'd be willing to bet anything he was bipolar. This doesn't include the men she lived with and didn't marry. I didn't keep track of how many of those, but you can bet she expected us to give every one of them the respect and honor we would normally give a father. Yet they were all, every last one of them, abusive in some way.

So, in summary, she's never been married to a healthy, stable man. We lived all over the place. I went to twenty different schools in seven different states before I graduated. If the men she was married to didn't abuse us directly, we were traumatized by watching them abuse her. Then when the marriage split up, we'd be homeless until she moved on to the next one. Plus, consider how poor we were, which meant that basically we didn't get to participate in life. Forget going to a doctor if we're sick, and whatever activity was going on with school, we couldn't afford it. Nor could we afford to wear clothes that made us look like normal kids instead of freaks, which led to a lot of bullying and ridicule. Mom didn't care about the quality of our education so much as she cared about having us out of the house for a few hours every day. To her, giving Mom a break from the kids is what school is for. Everything else is just fluff, reserved only for rich people.

Yet they want to try to convince me that life "wasn't that bad," because we only got beat up once a month or so, instead of every day. Everybody knows it has to be a physical beating before it's considered "abuse," right? And other people have been beat up much worse than I was, so what am I complaining about? Neglect? What's that? You mean you're complaining because you had to go without something? Boo hoo. People in hell want ice water. Yes, that's pretty much the attitude.

Then I got away, and when I did, my life improved dramatically. That's when I got really mad, because I realized the way my husband is treating me is the way I should have been treated all along. So I cut off contact with basically anyone in my family who is older than I am. Those my generation or younger are more inclined to understand. And when they did see me get better, the younger ones wanted out too. Of course they did.

 

[Lady of Longbourn]

My thought reading your post is to say that you can only control your own actions and no one else. After taking away that bit of power, I deal with people a lot better because I realize that a lot of things have little to do with me.

 

[BradyLady]

I'm bringing this back up again because of an ongoing issue with my husband. He has PTSD also, plus social anxiety, and I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up diagnosed with Avoidant Personality as well. He himself suspects he is on the autism spectrum.

He simply is incapable of resolving a conflict. All he wants to do is run away from it. When he does, he automatically puts one hundred percent of it on *my* mental conditions, and doesn't for even a minute consider his own. I was once on medication for depression. It has since been discontinued, doctor's idea, not mine. Knowing that I do have a diagnosed mental condition, though, he tends to assume that any emotion I show is a symptom of relapse. I cannot cry or get angry in the least degree. If I do, he shuts down completely and will not discuss the problem with me. And how is it supposed to be solved without discussing it?

I've asked him to come with me to my next psychology session, AND thank God, he's finally made one for himself. If he comes with me, I would like to enlist her help in explaining to him exactly how much damage it does when he shuts me down with, "I can't handle you when you're like this," every time I have the slightest amount of emotion in my voice. Having him join me on my sessions has helped before. It was with a therapist who has since left to take another job, but he sure was great, and the psychologist I now work with is too. During one session, very early in our marriage, I was crying, and my husband pretty much freaked out. He's looking at my therapist like, "See? This is how she gets. Doesn't she need to be hospitalized or something? I mean, she's having a breakdown right here in front of you." The therapist had to explain to him that it was OK for me to do that, and people cry in his office all the time. I was merely showing an emotion, not having a crisis.

My husband freely admits he can't tell the difference between the two. But when he dismisses me with that sentence, "I can't handle you when you're like this," he may very well create a self-fulfilling prophesy by *escalating* it into a crisis where none existed before. I feel unheard and misunderstood, and I get even more upset. Then he'll say, "See? I knew you were having a relapse." Yeah, well, it didn't have to be that way, did it?

When he wants to avoid a conflict rather than resolving it, that is HIS issue, not mine. But to hear him talk, it's all me, and nothing but me.

 

[EveHarrington]

Do you see spectrum traits in him?

 

[BradyLady]

Do you see spectrum traits in him?

Some. Current thinking, according to my own psychologist, is that a sense of humor rules it out, but I know people with an autistic family member who would disagree. The thing is, sense of humor can be learned. So can social skills. It's just harder for some people than others.

Hubby is extremely flat with his emotional expression. He is hard to read if you don't know him very well. He rarely shows anger or fear, and he has cried only once in the nine years I've known him. That's when his cat died. Even losing his grandmother, who he adored, didn't do it, but the cat did.

He seems to have only one facial expression, and his tone of voice varies little. Speaking of tone of voice, he can't detect it, in himself or in anyone else. He can hear high and low pitch, or loud and soft volume, but he can't hear sharp or gentle tone. He can just bite somebody's head off without realizing he did it. If confronted, he'll defend his word choice, thinking that's what offended. When he's told it's not what he said, it was the tone he said it in, he'll be puzzled. "There was no tone." Of course, there is always some type of tone, but he can't hear it. Because he can't pick up subtle undercurrents of disapproval that certain offensive words are said in, it has taken him a while to learn that those words are offensive. He knows what a cussword is, but there was a time in his far past that he thought, for example, that the n-word was just a generic synonym for a black person. He honestly didn't realize it was a slur. Over 50 years of life lessons has taught him some of these things, but there are other pieces he just can't grasp. (On the other side of the coin, he'll apologize for word choice when it didn't offend at all, but he knows that in another context, it would have. He just can't discern the context.)

Another biggie is that he just HATES change. Once he learns a certain way to do things, he doesn't want to learn something else. He just wants to keep doing as he's already doing. For example, he does sometimes pay a bill by telephone, but mostly it still involves a checkbook and the post office.

Also, as mentioned, he can't see the difference between someone who is merely upset, and someone who is having a mental crisis.

 

[EveHarrington]

IME a "sense of humor" doesn't rule out being on the spectrum. I advise reading as much as you can about autism as I think it would help. I did and had a number of enlightening moments (and moments of despair too). It's not something easy to understand or to handle. :hug:

 

[BradyLady]

He says it's not enough notice to take the day off and make the appointment with me. I was thinking maybe we could discuss it with our pastor or a deacon instead, then, but he wanted me to just go ahead and tell him what I had to say. The result is that he has agreed, when I'm bothered, to say "I can't handle this," as opposed to "I can't handle you when you're like this." I tried to explain about how one statement sounds like blame and putting it all on me, and the other statement is more neutral. I reminded him that it's OK to have emotions even when you have a diagnosed mental illness. Yet he still doesn't understand the difference. To him, it's only eliminating four of the words. He can't hear the change in meaning.