Cutting Ties With Toxic Family

[ms spock]

My thing is I have left the toxic and sadistic family behind. What I need to build now is a relationship with myself and then relationships with other people.

 

[Philippa]

I started doing an exercise about a year and a half ago, which entailed getting in contact with the inner family...and there were "functional parents", "Adult", "Adolescent" and "Inner child", and each personality held a certain gift for me. They really answered me...I wrote the replies to my questions down, and it made me feel so ...good to know they were always there inside of me, to call upon whenever I need to. I forget a lot of the time, but I drew a picture of my inner mother and keep that by my bed, and I sometimes look at the replies they gave me, which came from such an authentic space. It really helped. I highly recommend everyone trying this.

All you have to do is get quiet, like in a meditative space, and with a notepad nearby, call forth your functional parents (by literally asking them to come forward and express your intent to meet with them and nurture a relationship. Once you feel them present (for some people, they can see them visually, and if you are very visual, try and take note of every detail you can about them...often they won't look anything like your actual family members, so that can be comforting.)

Then you can start asking them questions like "What gifts do you bring?" or "How can you be of service to me in my life at this time?" Stuff like that.

Once you're finished, thank them, and then call upon the adult, and so on...try it.

 

[WillThereBeCake]

but if you weren't trying to hurt anyone or doing it solely for amusement purposes, from your perspective where does the manipulation come into play?

Glad you're back Sweatpants, after all, it's your thread. No, I think what you're doing is prudent. People like us want to be fair and know that we have baggage. I think it's wise to feel out potential friends and see if they are willing to accept our beat up Samsonite, or if they can only deal with people carrying a pristine designer bag.

What I was talking about was the intentional creation of drama, just to put people in a spot where they had to be your Knight in Shining Armor, even though there was no real need for rescue. It's a sick tactic, and one I learned from my mother. The phrase, "Wait until your father gets home!" took on new meaning in our house. That woman would just flat out lie and tell him of some horrible transgression that one of us had committed just to see if he would punish us and "rescue" her from the beasts. Don't get me wrong, I know kids can be naughty, but even if you'd spent your day hiding out from her and her tirades, you might become the perpetrator of a bank robbery by the time she'd brief daddy after he came home exhausted from a day of work.

Luckily, I was able to identify this tactic, but it took conscious effort to break it. Break that need to feel like someone was always rushing to my rescue and take care of myself.

If you've never witnessed this, then you are the lucky one. It's a manipulative and perverse method for getting attention and one that permeates my whole family. It includes small things like lying about something someone said, all the way up to faking deadly illnesses. I am so glad I'm left or I would have a hard time in my own treatment. I can now clearly see the difference between trauma and drama. They were experts at making their dramas my traumas.

 

[Pencil]

One of the amazing things about talking (typing) about this with other people, is how much comes to the surface that you didn't realize was buried. My relatives are aware of at least half of my traumas because they were either there causing them or were around enabling. Because so much has happened, I've encounted a couple of people over the years who didn't believe me which really hurt. All that to say, maybe there was also a fear of cutting ties because I wanted someone in my life who knew what happened and thus believed me. Don't know if anyone identifies with this.

Yes, I do. I think the responses are so varied, and not many of them positive. In my case, my sister uses my symptoms as 'evidence' against me, which is pretty sick but very clever, seeing that she is the cause of most of them.

Sweatpants, I want to ask you a very personal question, and I hope you don't mind: :bag: Do you think about your biological mother / family?

You have a difficult issue: to be adopted and then abused. I think of this often, but have never expressed it - I tend to shy away from things that affect me, which is silly because I then so easily come across as uncaring.

 

[SweatpantsHairTied]

Glad you're back Sweatpants, after all, it's your thread

Thanks. There's definitely a part of me that's yelling "AVOID FACING YOUR EMOTIONS!!", but I'm trying to train myself to log in every day regardless.

Luckily, I was able to identify this tactic, but it took conscious effort to break it. Break that need to feel like someone was always rushing to my rescue and take care of myself.

Ahhh I understand what you're saying. Did your mother try the tactic on you and your siblings too or just with your father?

I feel like in relationships I go to the opposite extreme...wanting someone to attempt to rescue/fix me even though I don't specify any particular needs. It's this fantasy of someone telepathically knowing that my "I'm fine" is the equivilent of a 'regular' person yelling "Help me!" into a megaphone. And then magically knowing how to fix the problem at hand. Of course romantic comedies are no help. I've learned that it's a good idea for me to cut back on the Katherine Heigl movies and Shonda Rhimes dramas...they're just too tempting to use as measuring sticks:p

I think it's wise to feel out potential friends and see if they are willing to accept our beat up Samsonite, or if they can only deal with people carrying a pristine designer bag.

Yes. When I was 19, I had a male friend say that he preferred to be around females who had a story. He said that he felt like they were more compassionate, perceptive, and mature. I was so surprised to hear that at the time. I had assumed that everyone in the world wanted women around them whose worst day ever was when they got two hangnails on the same hand. Now that I'm older I do feel like having the Samsonite offers something unique...it's not the lightest baggage but there are still some great things inside of it.

I started doing an exercise about a year and a half ago, which entailed getting in contact with the inner family...and there were "functional parents", "Adult", "Adolescent" and "Inner child"

Has anyone noticed a change in their voice depending on which inner family member happens to be in the foreground? It was pointed out to me once that my voice becomes higher pitched and more timid and soft (inner child) when I'm in the presence of someone I don't trust. Blew my mind.

Sweatpants, I want to ask you a very personal question, and I hope you don't mind: Do you think about your biological mother / family? You have a difficult issue: to be adopted and then abused.

Oh, that's not too personal. I've had contact with my biological mother and a half brother, but she is lying about who my father is (two men so far have taken paternity tests) and I doubt I'll get it out of her without a court order. At first it was all hard to swallow. She gave birth to a son who she kept, got divorced, got pregnant with me, put me up for adoption before I was born, got remarried, had a second son who she kept. There were obviously questions of worth immediately (why was I the only one she got rid of?) and then dealing with my adoptive family didn't help the situation.

I'm also slightly different than my adoptive family. I don't want to go into detail and risk any of them identifying me, but as an example they could all be Jewish and I come from a different bloodline. With that said, I have wondered more than once if my abuse would have been to a lesser extent if I were more like them. I'll never know. I do know that my biological family blatantly speaks to and treats people badly in general, which honestly makes it a lot easier to come to terms with being given up. There are definitely still underlying abandonment issues there though.

I tend to shy away from things that affect me, which is silly because I then so easily come across as uncaring.

I'm working on the same thing. Are you an adoptee too?

 

[WillThereBeCake]

Did your mother try the tactic on you and your siblings too or just with your father?

She not only did it with everyone, she trained everyone else how to do it. Some of the things these people have said/done is so unbelievable, I can't even give examples because I would lose credibility because people would think I was making stuff up. It was like they were constantly trying to outdo each other to see what they could make people fall for and what they could get out of it. They did not see a thing wrong with it.

Oh, and with each drama, you have to chose which team you were on. It might be a squabble between two relatives, or just one person with some out of the world story, and then you had to choose the believe them team, or the not believe them team. This created a whole secondary world of drama with everyone fighting that often outlived the original situation or lie.

In retrospect, I am kind of thankful that it was so over the top because it made it a lot easier to identify it as a dysfunction that was not the normal "bumps" that families sometimes endure, and made it easier to abandon it. Easier mentally, it was like belonging to a street gang of neurotics, and no one is ever allowed to leave the gang. I had to go into the Mental Fitness Protection Program ;)

 

[Pencil]

you have to chose which team you were on.

Ditto

I'm working on the same thing. Are you an adoptee too?

No, I am not. It's just that I sometimes reads someone's post and I kind of feel for them, but never express it, for fear of overstepping something, or coming across as soppy or something.

 

[ms spock]

My mother played those games and set up all her children against each other, with such blatant lies.

 

[WillThereBeCake]

My mother played those games and set up all her children against each other, with such blatant lies.

As a fellow member of the Tribe of Insanity, I'm sorry you had to go through this. It shows they never had to lay a hand on your to really mess you up. I still have over-the-top reactions when I discover even the most minor lie. My brain just flashes back and realizes how these little spins on the truth can escalate into full scale dramas. Sometimes quiet violent.

 

[Pencil]

little spins on the truth

I call my sister the Master of the Morph. She is brilliant at morphing an issue into something else altogether - also often with violent results. But when you (or anyone) try to correct the detail, it comes across as petty, or defensiveness, or denial or outright lying or ..

 

[ms spock]

One of my brothers said to me that when he heard our mother talk to other people, like her friends, that he really liked the world that she lived in, and he hoped to visit there one day. We had a laugh about it.

 

[ms spock]

As a fellow member of the Tribe of Insanity, I'm sorry you had to go through this. It shows they never had to lay a hand on your to really mess you up.

Thanks.

And you know the physical and the sexual abuse is much easier to deal with rather than these mind games. And mind games is such a pedestrian description of it all.