Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
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Good Morning, Friends! As I have been sharing with you my angst over the estrangement with my daughter, here is the latest chapter. Without intruding on her "NO contact" law, every month I am entitled to a significant amount of over-the-counter drugs on my insurance policy. I have always shared half with my daughter. This month I ordered the items she usually asks for, and I sent them to her in a brightly-printed mail bag. She texted me back: "Thanks for the meds. I'm all stocked up." Which means: I don't need YOU for anything. Leave me alone!
I should be used to rejection by now. My Grandmother, Mother, and sister rejected me. My Jewish relatives looked at me as an outcast because my Mother was Catholic. My mother's family looked at me as a "Dirty Jew" because my father was Jewish. Because I had a high I.Q. I was rejected in elementary school, and became a loner. As a teenager, alone on Miami Beach with no one to care for me, I became a rebel, rejected by mainstream society. It wasn't until I became involved with my first "significant other," the Captain, at age 16, (he was 26) and moved onto his sailboat with him, that I became part of a "tribe" of anti-establishment outcasts and finally felt I "belonged" somewhere.
During the 17 years of my marriage and child-bearing, I identified as a wife and mother- but I always owned my own business as well- first as a fashion designer for 10 years, with design boutiques in New England and California. So I "belonged" to the business world and the world of "Creatives" as well.
And during my criminal activity, I identified with being a criminal also. Then I worked as a private undercover detective for 10 years, but in tandem with the top cops in my area, so I identified with the police.
When I spent time in the psyche wards because of my withdrawal from alcohol, I identified with the other nut cases.
When I drink, I identify with being a drunk.
So, having had all these "identities" how can I really feel rejected? I have been woven into the fiber of society in so many ways. Yet, having my daughter reject me as her Mother is a challenge! I have to pull back and realize, I have been the best Mother that I could be to her. If she doesn't love me and appreciate me- there is nothing I can do about that but accept it. It's her feeling. Like Bonnie Raitt sang: "I can't make you love me if you don't...I can't make your heart feel something it won't."
Day by day, I have to rely on my Zen wisdom of non-attachment, and impermanence, and practice unconditional acceptance.
I have a mantra that I run through my head "less talk, less talk, less talk, fewer rules, fewer boundaries, less talk, less talk, less talk". Pick battles and a poor memory.
Conventional wisdom often seems more designed to throw up walls than to knock them down.
It's my profession to be both English speaking and Spanish teaching at my college, it's so obvious in how I make my living teaching Spanish half time and teaching psychology classes half time. I teach half the day in Spanish and half the day in English every day. But in the States folks, even fellow teachers at my college, are still bothered by my both/and "bi" identity. They want to make sure I'm not a disloyal American, they tell me, favoring illegal immigration from Mexico--I'm not kidding.
I've heard that from my LGBT friends, too, that folks sometimes will pressure a bi person to stop being both/and and be loyally either/or, choose between sexual orientations and settle on just one identity. Not just straight persons, either, they've told me sometimes gay folks were pressuring them to pick a team to be loyal to, as it were.
But our personalities' identities are more complex than that, be they cultural, linguistic, national, sexual, or of the even greater situational ones you mention. We're organic beings, not robots whose software can be wiped clean and reinstalled. We grow as people, we don't program as machines, and as we grow, we absorb from the environment that nurtures us. We have to, as you put it, embrace it.
That can be good or bad, so as we embrace it we've also got to process it and not let nurture be destiny, As you said, being around criminals doesn't mean you just get to become one yourself.
But when I was a halfway house director over 40 federal felons, it did help that embracing my own background made it possible to embrace theirs enough to think like a criminal for the purpose of acceptance and of being a good leader in the house. The lesson from the Bonnie Raitt song you quote here applied. I couldn't MAKE the guys go straight, but if I understood them I could support them in THEIR efforts to go straight.
Almost all of my guys screwed up and ended up in the local jail at some point for shoplifting and stupid stuff. They'd call me from jail, and I wouldn't bail them out. Boundaries. But I'd say if they learned their lesson, and when they'd served their local jail time I'd understand and they'd get a second chance at my house.
Out of 40 guys, 39 kept the bargain. Only one took me for a fool and learned the hard way that I still did have boundaries. A SWAT team I called took him out of the house in front of the rest of the guys and back to federal prison.
They didn't turn on me for that, though, they accepted it with a Zen outlook because they knew the score. Karma can be a bear. But most of the time, if you seek balance, karma might work for you, too. At least you're approachable then, and folks can support you as you try to work on your recovery with that wisdom in mind. It's what I try to do in my own PTSD recovery, anway. So far so good.
Muji, you are brilliant!
I have been on both sides of this divide - both as a daughter and as a mother. Your willingness to work on yourself and not try to force anything out of your daughter will surely bear fruit in future healing between you.