Need Support

maybe it is true that no one understands what it really feels like.
but you are not alone

Thank you for writing back, L.

It was a big achievement for us to get out of bed today. We are not in danger but we are consistently in a very dark place.

We like your blog.

MDs

i wouldnt have left the bed if Mike didnt take the initiative to do some reading.
he will totally use it for the blog... its about shame that leaves you feel isolated, weak, disgusted by yourself.... he thought of you and Asti and others we know while reading...

If Mike wants to post his thoughts, either on the forum or on the blog, we'll read it. Thank you.

MDs

give him some time to read and then some more time in his man-cave to figure things out
i hope you guys have something halfway decent to eat today.

We should also say that a great deal of our pain revolves around unresolved attachment issues. With both parents now gone (2000 and 2014), we have no way of getting secure attachment from the people who were supposed to provide it.

The body may now be 55, but emotionally there's a very hurt, very young child who can't get what she needs, and is living in a body with adults who are incapable and unwilling to provide it, because they themselves are still severely hurt by the original trauma.

MDs

how are things now?

Hi BeccaBee,

BeccaBee wrote:how are things now?

We've done quite a bit of blogging this past week, mostly reposts of things that we post here and on another forum. We see that we're making some progress, and I'm feeling cautiously hopeful.

Rachel doesn't like change. She prefers being angry because, among other things, that's all she knows. When one of us takes the chance to heal, the others follow and we all benefit. It's a natural consequence, whether Rachel likes it or not.

I will not be the only adult working on this. People say that life isn't fair. I intend to make our inner life as fair as possible, whether Rachel likes it or not.

I want something better for all of us. Whether Rachel likes it or not.

Charity

Today Deborah said that she could never be like me. She could never have my strength or resoluteness or...she didn't mention any specific qualities, but I could feel what she was thinking.

I don't want to be anybody's role model. I don't want the pressure to live up to what they see, or the obligation to be responsible for anybody's well-being, even indirectly. I have a difficult enough time accepting myself and living my life as myself to take on that kind of burden.

It's hard enough to know who I am.

Allegra says that hearing Deborah say what she said is a breakthrough. That she said it is a breakthrough as well. I agree. And I support any progress any of us makes. I just don't want to be responsible for it.

I'm trying really hard to ignore the old tapes that say that I should feel guilty for putting my own needs first, for being selfish, for not wanting to be the meek, well-behaved, perfect, self-sacrificing helper and "good girl." Rachel would like our grandmother to do something physically impossible. Our grandmother never held us to impossibly high standards, but she held our mother to them. And even though our mother never willfully did the same to us, the imprint of our grandmother's abuse was seared into our mother's psyche well before we were born, so there was know way that we couldn't be affected by it.

I really hate our grandmother. I still feel that I shouldn't say this, or feel it, and it's hard to ignore those old tapes. But I strongly believe that our grandmother is the single outside force most responsible for our life being as miserable as it's been.

Charity

[In response to somebody at another site who said that there's nothing wrong with being a role model.]

I believe it depends on the situation. Let me tell you a little more about us. On the outside, we are the oldest of three siblings. We have a brother who is two years younger, and our second brother is six and a half years younger than we are. Our second brother has Tourette Syndrome and an unspecified learning disability. He can live alone and work full-time, but beyond that he needs guidance from us and our brother.

At this point in this post, unless I say otherwise, I am going to speak about myself as an individual system member. When we were growing up, I had mixed feelings about us being the oldest. To some people being the oldest can seem like a special status. In reality, the only thing that it means was that we were born first. We're just beginning to realize that perhaps on one level, we (or I) believed that being born first meant that our parents chose us over our siblings to be the firstborn. Obviously, since none of us were adopted, this can't be true. But it's always felt to me/us that our parents were all-powerful, so we had no reason not to believe that they could choose which child to have.

Let me repeat here that we were not aware of this possible reasoning until now. But knowing ourselves as we do, it would be just like us to think and feel like this on a subconscious level. The external reality is that our parents did not treat any of us differently. In fact, they were more determined to treat us fairly after they realized our second brother's special needs. Our mother's parents insisted that our parents should operate under the assumption that brother number 2 would need more resources, financial and otherwise, throughout his life, to see to his needs. Our parents made it known to all of us that our inheritance shares would be equal, and we were glad for this--not just because of the money, but because it was one of the rare times in which our mother stood up to her parents.

Despite this effort toward fairness, brother number 2's needs ended up consuming our mother's attention, both on a conscious level and subconsciously. She didn't have a paying job, so she dove into advocating for our brother's needs and the needs for special-ed children in general. While she had an activist nature, we believe that on some level, she felt guilty for having had a child with special needs, as if she had caused our brother's problems in some way. This kind of reasoning is not too different from what I said earlier about the notion of our parents choosing to have us born first. We often wonder how our mother would have divided her energy if our second brother had been born without his issues.

Even with all of this going on, we/MDs were not pressured by our family to be a role model. Because we were so close in age to our first brother, the two of us were treated similarly--given the same bedtime, the same rules, etc. I think that perhaps on some level, I wish that I had had more privileges, or that I had been given privileges earlier than our brother. Otherwise there were no benefits to being the oldest after all.

So many years later, in the earliest days of knowing we were multiple, I wanted our system to have certain values and ground rules. Adults, not minors, were to be responsible for the system's well-being. I was the oldest in our system--I've always been the oldest--so I assumed that this meant that I was in charge. I didn't want our system to be a dictatorship, though; I wanted all of our adults to participate fairly in decision-making and responsibility. We would govern by committee and vote on important issues. Unfortunately, none of us wanted to lead the committee, and this remains an issue to this day.

In the end, I don't have a direct answer as to why I don't like feeling like a role model. The important thing is that people respect my feelings.

Charity