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- #25
@Charbella
@Ecdysis
@Midnightmoon
@Movingforward10
@Rose White
@Sideways
@somerandomguy
Your questions, observations and advice here last month are extremely appreciated. I want to say a big thank you for being dear friendly strangers, to whom I would like to return the kindness directly or at least pay it forward.
As mentioned elsewhere am in my late 40s and since childhood have been through survival of complex trauma, reform and personal growth: so am familiar with the basics of concepts such as co-dependence, rock bottom and the long dark night of the soul. I have been asking myself about my own part played in the situation we've discussed and any connection it may have with my childhood.
In the meantime I did some research. I've watched Youtube videos on co-dependency, trauma, narcissism and adult children of alcoholics. I've now read the first half of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk.
Having now also read the first half of Codependent No More by Melody Beattie, it emphasises to me that even stronger boundaries for my friend/partner, and stronger assertion of my own needs, is a good idea.
Yet it is a relief to read that I don't fit what Beattie defines as core traits of the archetypal codependent; namely a person who controls, infantilizes and makes things worse for the addict through their 'help'. I've never policed her eating disorder and nothing in my life shows I get any thrill from having power over other people. On the contrary, I could be criticized for having been too independent, individualistic, detached, uninvolved, negligent, stingy, selfish and a failure in the social expectation among much of society (women equally as men) to be a provider for my woman.
I have a detail to add. A few months ago, after moving out of my place into hers, my friend/partner was attacked by a stalker who entered her home as she was opening her door; he left her with bruised arms. She called the police and because he waited outside they interviewed him and took his details. She commenced a lawsuit to obtain restraining order. She asked to move back in with me and I declined, but I gave her money towards the legal fees.
Last weekend my friend/partner said she was being called from a hidden/private number and stalked on the internet, she asked to stay over at my place. Knowing that was a major crossing of a boundary since she's moved to her place, and also dreading another of her monologues of catastrophising, doom, blaming and complaining, I said no, because I was having a hard time myself.
The next morning I was physically shaking. I don't know whether this is because I had forced myself to say "no" to the request for help from my friend/partner which didn't come naturally. Did I force myself to say no because she is bulimic on the grounds that I mustn't be co-dependent? I don't know whether this is because she is in physical danger, and that works like a vice of guilt on my head to say "yes". I really don't know.
Because I also don't know whether the shaking was because the Kolk book about trauma I am reading reminded me what is my first memory of asking my mother for something. It is a memory of asking my mother not to kill my father. He was lying in front of her car shouting at her to go ahead and kill him as she revved the engine with a maniacal smile on her face. I was about four years old and in the back seat, and leant forward over the front passenger seat to plead with her. I know because one of the reasons she has said she divorced him was that it was better for me than if she murdered him. I also know that because she then joined a cult (these days known as a social addiction) to reprogram her brain from potential murderer into dissociated zombie, which is who I grew up with as my primary caregiver. Her father and brother were alcoholics, and she is a rape victim. There was a co-dependent trait forced on me as a child, but I don't believe I am fully or very co-dependent or a classic case of the term.
This is what I meant by telling my friend/partner that I am having a hard time myself. And so I am letting her get on with her stalker, her brain damage, her chronic fatigue syndrome, her chronic systemic inflammation, her endometrioses, her tetany, her brain fog, her cognitive impairment, her poverty, her mental illness and her yearning for euthanasia (read suicide) by herself, and I am declining her specific request for my help.
I sent her a link to social services I found.
I did call her brother, by the way, and said I was calling about his sister. I liked the idea of letting him know that I felt his sister needs to know about our love, and leaving it at that without telling him about risk of suicide. I thought that I could run an idea past him that we could at least work together to help her finish her kitchen, so that she no longer depends on me as a laundry service, and so that perhaps he could express his love in a way he knows how, and in a way that she would understand. Before we even got to that he said he was busy and would call me back two days later. That was a month ago.
After I declined my friend/partner's request for help by staying over with me, again she barraged me with complaining about her life. I replied: "I am in such a bad state that I do not have the mental strength to listen to any complaints today."
I got a reply from her which read: "I want you to know that I feel like I am falling and don't know what to do. And I don't feel like I am complaining, I am just describing my state."
I asked her to leave me in peace, which is unusual for me. Came her reply: "I am so sorry to hear about your state. Did I do something wrong?" Again I asked her to leave me in peace.
After a few days of no contact later, she came to my door and left some laundry of mine she'd accidentally taken with hers, plus a card sending me her love and a pastry. Yes, that's a slim, beautiful bulimic leaving me a pastry. Yet she did actively listen to what I had told her, and in response she did something nice.
In conclusion, I think it was good that I spoke up for how I feel rather than react to her complaints about her life and how she feels. But as shocking for me as it is to ask this, was it also good that I didn't respond to her plea for safety from a predatory, violent man? Does that make me not co-dependent and 'lovingly detached'? Or does that make me uncaring, selfish and cruel?
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