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Hidden in plain sight

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I think it is interesting how there are some posts that I won’t share on my Facebook feed, but I’ll still write them and post them. There are some people and situations that I want to write about that I feel won’t be received well by my friends or my family, so I don’t share them there. But I do share them with total strangers all over the world.

Perhaps it is a sign to me that I should talk to those people privately about what I see. Sometimes family or friends are doing something that I think is dangerous or stupid or counterproductive. Sometimes I can see that the direction they are going will result in making their lives even more difficult. But instead of telling them, I vent about it here.

But then again, I’ve noticed that people are unwilling or unable to heed advice when they didn’t seek it.

For a while I had a filter, where I would share posts with certain people but not others. I could block out a group. It turned out that group was either family or friends of family. Family tends to get upset when I talk about family. My brother had a real issue with it – something about family honor and pride and name. But if he was so darned interested in family honor and pride and name, he should have acted better.

I was just reporting the facts. Is it embarrassing to be called out for your repeated violations of your own honor code? His lies and machinations finally got to me. It was either my sanity and health or his “honor”.

Then there is my married family. There is quite a bit of unsettled business there, and it is ugly to watch people act like teenagers when they are in their 70s. If lessons aren’t learned when you are young, you will continue to stay at that emotional age.

I got called out for pointing out hypocrisy and lies and maladaptive behavior in my family – birth and married. I got challenged by members, saying that I should just put up and shut up and make peace. It isn’t my place to make peace with someone who has abused me. I am not in the wrong for standing up for myself.

If someone breaks into my house and robs me, I am not the person who should apologize and make things right.

Being mentally harmed by a family member, even after I have pointed out the harm and asked him to stop, is the same as being robbed. My mental peace had been stolen. But for another family member to write me and say I should make peace for the sake of the family is even more insulting, and further harms me. It says that I am the antagonist.

I was attacked for what I wrote about the church too – by members of the parish I went to, and by strangers here who thought I was being divisive and harming the Church. I’m not. I’m showing how we are damaging it. I want it to be stronger, but it can’t be until we remove the weak parts. Like all the parts that Jesus not only didn’t tell us to do, but also all the parts that Jesus told us especially not to do.

I will not be silent anymore. I was silent for many years. But now I’ve found my voice, and I will speak. The more people who try to silence me actually strengthens me, because I see it as a sign I’m on the right path. Just like in aikido, I use my opponents’ energy in my favor.

Listen to the barking dog – on instinct

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Say your dog is barking at night. All you want to do is go to sleep, yet the dog keeps barking and keeps you awake. You want to go outside and yell at the dog “Hey! Shut up!”

But then you forget this is why you bought the dog to start off with.

The dog is letting you know that there is an intruder around. The dog is letting you know that there is something wrong happening and you need to attend to it.

Our feelings are the same way. They are the barking dog. But we silence them and we ignore them.

We tell them to shut up when we stop paying attention to them. Now of course we didn’t buy the internal dog – that is part of the standard package that comes with being human. We were given it for free when we were born. It is a gift to us from God. These thoughts and feelings are there to keep us safe.

Remember how they say you should always trust your gut? Your gut is where your dog lives. Always pay attention to it if you feel like something is wrong. Follow that feeling.

Now this doesn’t mean to let your fears rule you. It doesn’t mean to always hide and run away from problems.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the person or the situation in front of you. Sometimes the problem is what you think about the person or the situation in front of you. You may be having a reaction or a memory to some bad thing that happened to you in the past. You may not remember what the problem was to start off with. You are having a reaction or a reflex.

You should always heed your feelings because your feelings will let you know that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

This is called projection and it is important to deal with. It is important to understand and face. Now, instead of running away from the situation, sometimes what you need to do is lean into it.

Sometimes you may need to look at it sort of sideways and not necessarily face it head on. Sometimes facing it head on is very scary. But more importantly, don’t run away from it. If you’re running away from it then you’re telling the dog to shut up.

Ignoring the problem and running away from it are both dangerous they seem opposite but really they both involve not dealing with the intruder. You have to deal with the intruder because otherwise if you ignore it then it is simply going to come in and steal everything in your house. Your house represents your safety and your sanity. If you run away from it or tell it to shut up, then you’re not using this as a valuable lesson to strengthen up your defenses.

In-laws and outlaws

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You know the difference between in-laws and outlaws? Outlaws are wanted.

In-laws are like an arranged marriage. You didn’t pick them – they were picked for you. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. It is great when it does, but it is horrible when it doesn’t.

You can’t drop them like you can drop a new friend.

With a new friend, one you are trying out, things might not work out the way you both hoped. You can just stop calling and making dates with each other.

Family is different. You are stuck with them. All the major holidays, all the big celebrations, you are expected to spend with your family. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Weddings. Funerals.

The most important days of your life, and you are stuck with people you didn’t pick.

This makes no sense.

The only thing that will make bad in-laws go away is divorce. Either you leave, or they do.

Or, better yet – re-invent the idea of holidays. Don’t make it mandatory to spend time with people you don’t like. Create new traditions. Invent your own ideas.

Being stuck with people you didn’t pick doesn’t make sense.

Perhaps this is why people hate holidays so much. They are expected to spend time with people they think, by society’s rules, that they have to get along with.

Why fake it anymore?

My inner skunk

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Today I’m getting in touch with my inner skunk.

They don’t attack. They just hold their ground. People tend to leave them alone and not cross them, because their bold coloring warns who they are.

I’m getting tired of people thinking I’m a pushover. I’m getting tired of feeling like I’m doing it all and everybody else is slacking.

Today I told the annoying page to pull her cart out of the walkway. I didn’t even care if she got mad. She gets mad all the time. She can say “Excuse me?” in a way that sounds like she is saying “Screw off!” She says “Excuse me?” when she wants you to repeat what you have said. She says it in just such a way that you never want to ask her anything ever again.

But today was it. I’d patiently waited for her to pull the cart out of the way on her own before, and thanked her for it, and explained how it is totally in my way when she puts her cart there. I did it that way because otherwise there would have been a confrontation. It went well for a while, but today it was halfway into the walkway again. There is at least ten feet of space she can work in, and she chooses the worst possible section that is totally in the way of traffic flow.

I am desperately trying to not say what I’m thinking too. This has been going on all day.

I don’t have any patience for people who only get movies. I’m jealous of all that time that they have. Then I wonder why they waste it the way they do. Then I wonder at the people who are there all day, who are my age. Don’t they have jobs? If not, why not? I’m jealous.

I’m angry that I’m angry. I’m in a bad mood about the fact that I’m in a bad mood.

I think about the teachers and counselors who have told me that I’m angry, when I didn’t feel like I was. The fact that they said that I’m angry when I don’t feel like I’m angry makes me angry.

Maybe “angry” is my normal, and I need to get used to it. I need to learn that this is who I am, or at least who I am right now. I spent so long letting people (especially my brother and boyfriends) walk all over me and push me around. I’m waking up from that stupor.

Skunks are seen as antisocial creatures, but they aren’t, really. They just don’t want to put up with anybody’s nonsense. They don’t start fights, but they don’t walk away from them either.

Payoff

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What is the payoff?

If you are constantly stuck in a rut, doing things that you don’t want to do, there has to be a payoff. Discover what that is and address it, and you’ll fix the problem.

Say you want to get in shape, but you keep overeating and “cheating” on your exercise routine. You “forget” to walk or go to the gym. You eat three pieces of pie when really you only wanted half a piece. You eat too much at the buffet, even though you say you don’t want to, again and again.

You feel guilty after you do these things, but you keep doing them.

They are symptoms, not the source.

Dig down further.

Who first taught you what to feel about yourself? What did they say? How did they make you feel?

Perhaps your family ignored you most of the time. Perhaps the only time that they even talked to you was to complain about your size or how you “were eating them out of house and home.” You were called fat, lazy, worthless.

Negative attention is still attention.

So as an adult, you still need attention.

But you’ve been taught that the only way to get attention is to be fat, lazy, or worthless.

So you keep repeating that message to yourself.

So you’ll overeat, and skip the gym, and fail, over and over, because that is how you were taught you should be treated. Even though they aren’t telling you this message anymore, you are now telling it to yourself.

Time to learn a new message, and retrain your brain.

Time to create a different payoff – where you get happy that you have achieved a goal. Maybe the goal was only eating two plates at the buffet, instead of four. Maybe the goal was parking the car further away in the parking lot so you had to walk further to get to work.

Little goals count. They add up.

Just like coming off being addicted to a drug, relearning how to treat yourself with kindness takes a lot of work. You have to rewire your brain. New healthy habits don’t have the same kind of payoff that the old bad habits do – not yet. The old habits were wired into you for years – and the work was done by people you should have been able to trust – your family or friends.

It is hard to go against the feeling of loyalty to your family. It is hard to treat yourself differently than how they treated you, even if it is healthier.

But if they weren’t kind and loving to you, they were your family or friends in name only.

Your first and best obligation is to yourself. Your body and your mind are your first and truest homes.

It is time to remodel.

It is going to be messy.

It is worth it.

You are worth it.

True mental health hospital

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I envision a new kind of rehab hospital for people who are mentally ill. Perhaps better said, it will be for people who don’t know how to be human. It will teach people how to take care of themselves. It will teach them how to live on their own in a healthy way.

Rehab shouldn’t just be about getting off drugs but about how to get on life.

People would be there to learn, so they would be students, not patients. “Patient” is a passive word – something is done to you. You are sick, an “in-valid” – a “not-true” person. The word “student” implies an active engaging in learning for self-betterment. Teachers, not therapists, are there to help students help themselves.

One of the most important things will be that students will learn how to have a healthy relationship with food. They will learn what food is healthy and how to buy and prepare it. Every person will learn how to cook. Every person will learn what foods are best for them. There will be a blend of nutritionists and home-economics teachers.

The teachers will find ways that the students can exercise in a way that they will enjoy and are able to do. Exercise is essential to mental health and happy bodies. Not every exercise is possible for every person, and not every person likes every exercise. The trick is to find one or two that the student likes and will stick with. Then they have to commit to doing it daily. Every little bit counts.

This whole idea that I’m envisioning is to teach people how to live in their own bodies as their own homes. Your body is your first and best house. If you don’t take care of it you will be miserable. I have learned from my own personal experience that mental health is directly related to physical health.

It is also important that they discuss what happens when you fall off the wagon. Perhaps the stigma needs to be taken away from falling off the wagon, because falling off the wagon is part of the journey.

For some people it wouldn’t be “re-hab” because there was no “hab” that happened to start off with. They never learned how to take care of themselves in the first place. It isn’t that they forgot, it is that that they never were taught.

Ideally, everyone would learn how to take care of themselves early on in life. Ideally, people wouldn’t have to wait for a crisis in order to learn that they have to take care of themselves.

Perhaps that is just simply part of our society. We seem to fix things after they are broken rather than prevent them from breaking in the first place. This is a habit that should be unlearned. People need to become pro-active about their lives.

Rehab needs to teach people healthy coping mechanisms for life. Students would learn about codependency and enabling and boundaries. They would learn how to be helpful in a way that is safe for them and for the person they are helping.

They would learn the value of volunteering. It is a way to put your own needs and problems into perspective, and to feel not only a part of the community, but a part of the solution to problems.

They would learn how to take care of their bodies and their minds at the same time and learn that they are not separate things. Through books, they would be introduced to teachers from all over the world and all across time. They all have useful information about this thing we call life. Most importantly, they would be given the tools to be able to learn more on their own.

My biggest dream is that rehab hospitals aren’t ever needed, because everyone has already been taught how to handle life’s ups and downs in healthy ways. But until then, we have some catching up to do.

The best medicine you can ever take is to not get sick in the first place. And the best way to do that is to learn how to take care of yourself through eating well, exercise, and learning to establish boundaries.

Counting doesn’t count

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I saw a lady whose son was hanging onto the gates near the door at the library. It wasn’t time for the family to leave yet, and she was trying to get him to come back to the children’s section. He was having none of it. He was about 6.

She looked at him and said “1.” Pause. She gave him a stern look. “2”. Pause. Another stern look. “2” she said again, looking at him like he better get the clue. And yet again, she said “2”.

I said “No, you have to say 3, otherwise 2 has no meaning.” She said three, he didn’t come, and she went to him, took him by the arm and marched him back to where he was supposed to be.

He cried, of course, and that is what she was trying to avoid. But if she isn’t firm and consistent with expectations and consequences, then she might as well not say anything at all.

Rules have to have consequences if they are broken. Otherwise they have no meaning.

Sayings “shhh” doesn’t mean anything either. The child learns that they yell, and Mom says “shhh”. It is just an exchange of sounds. The parent has to say “Please be quiet” or explain that “shhh” means that. Otherwise “shhh” is just a sound.

Then there was the mom whose child would not stay with her. He kept running to the door, or just away from her. She told him what to do and he kept not doing it.

There were no consequences. He had no reason to obey her.

It was yet another example of “Stop doing that or I’ll say stop doing that again.”

However you want your child to act as an adult, you need to mold them as a child. You are supposed to be a parent, not a friend.

Sure, they won’t like it. That isn’t the point. It isn’t child abuse to set rules and enforce consequences. It is child abuse to not do this. Otherwise they grow up wild.

Jealousy leprosy

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Jealousy is a terrible emotion. It makes you think that you are not in control of your life. It makes you think that other people have stolen something from you that is yours. Rather, something that you think should be yours. But the bad part is the reason you are stuck in the place you are is because of your jealousy. When you start to blame other people for your problems, that is your problem.

Eleanor Roosevelt said “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Likewise, all of your emotions are up to you. Someone else cannot make you feel angry or sad or upset or even happy. You choose to feel these feelings when they say or do whatever they say or do. You are entirely responsible for how you feel, not other people. For you to make your happiness or sadness dependent on someone else is to give away all of your power.

Taking care of your parents when the relationship is bad

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There is nothing about being an adult child that means you want to take care of your parents. There is nothing about the situation that says you even know how to.

You didn’t enter into this relationship voluntarily. Nobody asked you if you wanted to be the child of these people, and nobody asked you if you wanted to take care of them as they got older.

Just because they raised you doesn’t mean you are obliged.

What if they did a poor job of raising you? What if they were abusive? What are your obligations and responsibilities then?

Sure, there is social pressure and Christian guilt to deal with. Society expects you to drop everything and take care of these people. Forget the fact that you barely have enough time money or energy to take care of yourself.

Getting married is a legal commitment. You swear before your friends and family and a witness that you will take care of each other, no matter what happens. You make no such commitment to your parents. It is all passive. You are born into this family. You have no choice, and you haven’t promised anybody anything.

But yet you are expected to drive them around when they can’t anymore, to cook for them, to spend the night at their house when they are afraid…the list goes on and on.

Taking care of your parents is like taking care of children, but in reverse. As they grow older, they grow more needy and less able to care for themselves. As they grow older, they grow less independent and more dependent.

The really big problem is that unlike children, they remember being independent, and they don’t know how to receive help. They certainly don’t want to get help from their children, regardless of their age. They feel that something is wrong with this situation, and that they are losing control and power. That only makes the situation more difficult.

Another problem is that nobody trains you, the adult child, how to take over responsibility. Nobody tells you that now you are the parent and they are the child. So it is hard for you and for your parents.

If there is a history of abuse or neglect it is even harder.

People who had a great relationship with their parents cannot understand this.

Adulthood – being independent versus being an “adult child”.

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I saw a Facebook post recently that I really liked. It said “I think you should pay for your own mortgage, birth control, college loans, food, and cell phones. This isn’t because I’m a Conservative. It is because I’m an adult.”

If you have to have someone else pay for these things, whether it is your parents or the government, you aren’t an adult.

I’ve never identified as a Conservative, but I agree with this.

I feel that people need to take care of themselves, and the more that we do for them, the more we are harming them. The more we let people take care of us, the more we are stunting our own growth.

Remember the phrase “Age is just a number”? That is usually used to say that it is never too late to play. It goes along with “You are only as old as you feel”. These are meant to be inspiring. These are meant to encourage you to follow your dreams and to be yourself.

But they have another side to them. You can be 40, even 60, years old and still dependent. You can be technically an adult and still act like a child – expecting everybody else to take care of you and clean up after you. You can be an adult legally, but a child emotionally.

Now, is that your fault, or the fault of the people who rescue you? If nobody rescued you, you’d have to take care of yourself.

Some important words here –
Codependency.
Enabling.

I know too many “adult children” who use their parent’s library cards because they have run up the fines on their own. I know too many “adult children” who blame everybody else for their own problems. I know too many “adult children” who live at home with their parents.

I’ve met many “adult children” who still use their parent’s address as their legal address. They say “Well, your parents are always going to be there, right?”

No, they aren’t.

I’m starting to think that one of the best things my parents ever did for me was to die when I was 25. It made me grow up fast. It made me have to become independent. If things get hard, I can’t just move back in with my parents. I can’t just quit my job or get divorced when things get hard and retreat back to my old room. I can’t call them up and beg for money when there is an emergency.

I have to plan ahead and look out for myself. I had to become an adult.

And I expect everybody else to do the same.