Getting it out in the open

It pisses me off when other people can be happy when I'm not. When other people can laugh when I don't feel like laughing. Of course, "other people" almost always just means "my immediate family".

It seems to me that sometimes they like to make my life extraordinarily difficult just because they can. No other reason. They are subversive and manipulative and shadowed and hidden and always, always veiled, just because it pleases them to be so. It doesn't matter how their actions affect other people. It doesn't matter that someone might have emotional fallout, emotional devastation, from their actions. So long as it makes them happy to do something, they'll do it, and fuck what other people think, because those other people will be ready to bounce back when they are wanted.

The trouble is... that's exactly what does happen in my family. Everyone, including me, gets away with emotional "murder", and then later all come crawling back to each other, proverbially kissing all the asses and "making up". Only the making up just happens on the outside, because inside, all the currents and tension still resonate. They continue to hum somewhere way, way down, only for them to crop up the next time something random happens to somebody and they get the chance to make themselves known again.

I have known for a good while now that living in this house is poisonous to me -- probably at least a year. Ever since I began therapy with Jane -- the one who, by the way, my mom has always said "seemed to make me worse". Of course that would be her reaction to the one person who has ever fucking helped me. The one who stirred up emotions. The one who refused to let me keep burying myself and my thoughts and my feelings. Of course anybody being more open about their self-destruction and anger and pain would make my mom feel, on a basal, fundamental level, that something was wrong. Because, to my mom, emotional expression feels wrong.

I don't say that lightly either. I have had lots of time -- that year, plus many more previous years of cloudier observation -- to study and analyze and form that hypothesis, and I still believe it. To my mother, manipulation and subversity are methods of communication, and they seem far easier to her than to just be open about things that touch nerves. Overt physical aggression is absolutely intolerable, and irrefutably WRONG, to her; but mental aggression is to her just a normal way of being.

I have also speculated, in recent days and weeks, that when people have outbursts in response to her manipulations, it actually makes her feel more in control. When people whom she expects to blow up are composed -- and have rational arguments that are not founded in what she sees as skewed thinking -- it makes her feel as though, proverbially speaking, her world is unsettled, and she must do whatever she can to make it feel safe again. This means, among other things, that she projects her own feelings at us -- only she does it in ways that makes it seem as though her emotions have nothing to do with it.

For a small and significantly more trivial example: One night, my mother got mad at me about using her work laptop and told me to just "get off" it, seeming to be angry with me. But I learned, by remarks she had made before and did make afterwards, that she was not angry at me... she was merely afraid of the fallout she would experience if she had to take the blame for something I did. This all seems insignificant; but to her it seemed as though having to take the blame for something she didn't do would somehow fundamentally upset the precise balance of her world. If this happened, she could not handle it. Therefore, instead of acknowledging her fear of that happening, she instead proceeded to drive her daughter away from the machine by whatever means were necessary. It did not occur to her that this would hurt her daughter; it was far more important to her that her daughter Not Harm The Machine for it was a Very Important Piece Of Equipment. Because if something happened to work property under her care, maybe she could get reprimanded. Maybe she could face losing her job if she got enough reprimands. And then she wouldn't be making money anymore -- then she wouldn't have something to do with those 40 hours -- then her whole existence would completely fall apart.

Melodramatic? Yeah, it seems that way when I describe it like that. But nothing about it feels like a melodrama or even like something out-of-proportion. However, I suspect that she herself, in her current headspace, would never even be able to begin acknowledging any part of this analysis as "correct". After all, if she accepted any of my analyses as even remotely possible, it would mean that her world is not as comfortable as she thinks, and this is something she must avoid at all costs. Hence her complete denial that anything is wrong with her. Oh, no: This is me having been brainwashed by that unhelpful Jane person. This is me projecting my own insecurities on her. This is a million other things that have nothing to do with her. Just as long as it never gets discovered that she lives under a self-constructed protective bubble -- just as long as she does not get disrupted -- just as long as things seem stable to her, that's all that matters. If we get hurt in the process of her ensuring her own safety, that is regrettable but necessary.

Yes. Now that I write it all down, it all seems even more true. The sad thing is that my mother has built her bubble so carefully and to such complexity that the chances of her ever breaking out of it are slim to none. The family therapy we did, the one thing I had hoped would finally make some of those walls come down, turned out to actually bolster her. This is because we happened to go to a really shitty family therapist ("But she has the credentials and she does family therapy all the time, so she is right and you are WRONG") who basically joined my parents in saying, "How do we deal with this crazy child?" And of course all three of them denied that this was what they were doing -- as people with that psychological mindset would!!!

Can you understand, though, why this frustrates me SO fucking much!? Can you understand why, for the last two years, all I've really wanted is to get out of my house, out of this pervasively psychologically BAD atmosphere? All I do here is suffer. All I do here is get worse in my current "disorders" or "develop" "new" ones. It all comes from the same place -- a place which is so much easier to wallow in and believe in when I'm around two people who project such negative psychological energy. Because, of course, my dad bolsters Mom's opinions on everything at least 95% of the time. Somehow, I think he is innately attuned to my mother's need for this psychological protection, and refuses to let me break it. Gets upset when I try to break it. Acts out irrationally, in his own different ways, when I do try. Don't get me wrong -- my dad is not the psychologically unhealthy one here. But he does not try to make anything better, either, and in doing his little mostly-passive thing he only succeeds in fueling her and making all of this that much worse.

One thing I am a bit afraid of is what's going to happen to my sister, living in such an atmosphere, especially if I go. I think that me being actively "mentally ill" detracts a little bit from Mom and Dad's focus on my sister, which is already very intense and often fairly psychologically negative. If I was to go -- how else would they focus on her? What would they start to project on her that, currently, they are able to project on me instead? I don't know. I do know that my sister has a history of restriction, and anxiety, and intense emotions -- like the ones I had at her age. What happens to her over these next three or four years is going to have a very significant part in determining what happens to her after that. And I can't help being worried. What will those ignorant, oblivious parents of mine do to her without realizing it? I can only keep my optimism that maybe nothing so bad will happen. Or that if something does happen it will be fixable.

As for me, though... sometimes I severely doubt whether I am "fixable" or not. But I honestly think that unless I can get away from my parents' influence, and stay away for a significant period of time, I will not get better. I will not recover. In fact, I think that under their thumb I will probably continue to deteriorate. I think part of the reason I want to go to Homewood SO badly is to just fucking GET AWAY from them. Be able to recover under my own self-chosen terms and forget that my parents even exist. That's why I honestly think it's a mistake to make me do family therapy when I'm up there, even over the phone. I mean, we tried that, and it didn't work at all... and, in actuality, succeeded in making things way worse. I don't want to have to deal with that huge, black energy when I'm up there. I have enough of their residual negative energies in me -- I don't need MORE!

Woah. This is like... a novel. But I think it needed to be said. And I know it was important for me to write it down somewhere. This is just the place I happened to choose. Please don't comment with anything superficial or irrelevant, because, frankly, that would hurt me a lot right now. I have to say, I feel rather fragile. I suppose you would, too, if you thought you were in a terrible, hurtful place and had no hope of getting out until at LEAST early March. Especially if you had just realized that the place was more terrible than you could have imagined at first.

And it still hurts to know that if she ever read this she would completely, 100% invalidate everything I've written here as complete bullshit. It does. It hurts to know that my own mother can't see and respect my intelligence and intuition. And, god, I wish it didn't. But what can I possibly do about it?