For years I’ve pretty much been doing the same thing over and over again with my parents and expecting different results.  !BLAM!ming them was doing something different.

By not ever dealing honestly, openly, and calmly with the past and being straight up with them I swept everything under the carpet.  The result was I continued to get walked on and held responsible for their guilt and pain.   This allowed them, but honestly mostly my mother to continue with a lot of her/their hurtful ways.   The most recent examples: the card and phone call to the hospital mentioned in the prior posts.

She’s been bullying me my whole life in similar and much, much harsher ways.  She’s made me responsible (and her husband and son) for her wrongs and guilt.  I finally came to a point where I felt no guilt for what she had done in her life, or to me, or what she ever would do.  I decided that I was giving the guilt and pain back.  I had been bullied long enough…So the !BLAM!

Once I did this I set myself free.
Since I’ve been experiencing freedom, more self-confidence, much more clarity.
Some of the clarity has come in the form of being able to see myself clearer.  Remember my posts on “Peering Down the Rabbit Hole” and I talked about feeling worthless most of my life?  And how now that I see it I can 1) heal it and 2) must to be on the look out for slipping that mask back on?  Well after the hospital phone call I discovered that when it comes to my mother I tend to put that mask on right away.

She hung up on me and I felt worthless.  Unvalidated.  Wrong. Wrong for telling her she hurt me.  That it was wrong what she/they had done to me…  Typically in the past I would have gotten angry and spewed it out.  This time however, when I felt these feelings rise up I stopped.  I began to observe…calmly.  And that’s when I got in touch with “something different…”  I saw the little girl inside me.  She had backed into a corner, drew her knees up to her chest, put her face between her legs, and hid. 

I continued to watch.  She didn’t know how to come out.
I’m 45 for heaven’s sake and I’m reacting as if I’m a child.  Good God who knew?
…Later, the little girl was still in charge and was nervous on the phone with the man in her life that’s showing her love, kindness, and acceptance and hasn’t a problem in the world with her, yet she felt he did and she began to say things that questioned this.  But this time I/the adult saw what I/the little girl was doing.  I/the little girl was creating a situation where he would get upset with her/me, thereby proving to her/myself that I was indeed worthless.  Worthy of the worthless mask.

Once I saw it I countered it by being honest and admitting exactly what was going on, that I was going to do all I could to overcome this illusion, and I needed help.  And I received it    I received love.

Since I have wobbled around coming out of the corner.  But I’ve been observing. Learning things about myself.  Healing and growing and creating new realities.  Happily I haven’t created a mess with him, my children, or my ex as I would have in the past and wondered how it happened.  Instead I have dealt lovingly with myself and strove to not let the past effect my present.  I’m an adult, my mother can’t hurt me this way anymore.  I have value.  I have worth…

Night, love ya,
Theresa Jane
-whose finally leaving the past behind and beginning to really live in the present    because I did something different… I !BLAM!med…