Escaping wage slavery is easy. You leave your job. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a place to stay while working on keeping myself free and self-sufficient. Ironically, this has meant moving back in with my crazy parents where there’s ample rent-free space for me. Although I hadn’t researched how to do this, I’ve learned that my greatest challenge is to resist falling into the child role. It is to remind myself that I am an adult and to be vocal about setting boundaries, having identified signs of toxic parents.
Set Boundaries
It is ok to have boundaries. “If you speak to me in this way, I will remove myself from us”. We are separate. They are people…yes, family members are people too; people with their own emotional damage. Understanding this doesn’t excuse bad behaviour but may help make you less angry and facilitate forgiveness, which is wishing they’d treated you differently in the past. You can only manage your future relationship. The boundaries are for your own protection.
Have Realistic Expectations
They’re the ‘seen and not heard’ generation. Why would you expect them to be good at authentic communication? Appearances is where you’ll find their talent for how things “should be”.
Upon examination, the emotional manipulation. I’m still too enslaved by a mindset to believe it’s conscious, not evolved into a reflex, because of what the alternative would mean—that I was unloved. Conflict avoidance is how one parent operates and, to balance the equation, the magical thinking of a child whose arguments are based, not on fact but belief (seemingly for belief sake) and feelings. Add onset dementia, and hope, never having been transformative, expresses itself as a sigh while I shake my head, lowering it.
Be your own Parent
Being my own parent, I move towards liberating myself from the loop of loss of self-control, of allowing space for bad habits, for not paying attention to my ‘triggers’ and reacting rather than responding—arguing a position that is justified (based on facts) but making rational arguments to the irrational—again, people with their own emotional damage, uninterested in orchestrating their evolution, but, instead, on investing in holding their positions behind masks (that are also shields) in what has been psychological warfare—a line drawn between generations, a line they forbid you from stepping over because they say so.
It is difficult to give up when you imagine all that could be, and what little time you have together on this planet, but a friend recently said, “Not your circus.” Correct! You accept people as they are, but how they treat you has consequences.
With family members it can be a struggle to accept the truth because, to sell cards, Hallmark in collaboration with humans driven to rule over others by breaking their spirits, humans driven to assume the despotic mantle of their predecessors, their teachers, in a type of generational hazing ritual; together, they have brainwashed most of us into believing a mother and a father are faultless, so our egos are fair game for being picked apart, the pieces used to laminate their own (egos).
No more of that rasholery. Grieve if you must, but your survival depended upon their death; the death of who they insist they are, the image often far removed from what their actions reveal them to be. You’re ready to try these 11 Grown-Ass Strategies For Handling Your Mom If She’s Toxic.
Change takes Time
Change is a process. Rewiring the brain means creating new habits. You can’t force change on others by yelling. You can barely be the change you want to see in the world! But that’s your best chance. Got to go through the motions until the ‘e’ catches up.
I understand that I am back for resolution and that that doesn’t require anyone to agree with me or see my truth. I only need continue loving myself and being grateful for the friends who love me for the same reasons so it is easier to continue seeing myself through my own eyes.
Finding resolution by confronting the past
Hope the Root cause of Unhappiness (above) helps you figure shit out…even if you haven’t seen Bojack Horseman. (See it! Also check out The Little Shaman‘s videos on youtube about gaslighting and narcissism—they exorcised many of my demons by calling them by their names).
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