This is a very basic form of gaslighting, or perhaps colonizing, or perhaps there's some other word. In fact I know there are other words for it, lots of them. But just now I'm trying to find my words, my own understanding of this.
Again reading ballastexistenz, she's talking about knowing the edges/limits of her own body, proprioception (sensory awareness of the objects around you, I think is what this means?) and the blurring between her sense of self and other.
When people have used this language with her (at least in the posts I've read so far), she seems not to understand. She's still in 'defense of the mother' mode - rebels against the refrigerator mom diagnosis (which I'm not saying she or any other autistic or other kind of person has, just trying to reflect what I've 'heard' her say so far in my readings).
From my own experience, learning to separate from my mother is key to me becoming an adult. I've remained a child so long because I had to, for so many years, be the parent of my parent; show her the way; help her through her emotional difficulties. If I hadn't drawn the line years ago (much to her resentment and not-so-subtle guilt-tripping, though childlike), she'd still be doing it to this day.
As it is, I experience a sapping of my will, a drainage, if you will, of my essential psychic energy. What some of the touchy-feely woo-woo types describe as a 'psychic vampire', and they talk about 'cutting the cord' between you and this person. Also in 'chi' terms, I've seen language that resonates somewhat that says we 'give our energy away' to these people - it depletes our most vital energy source, which in that language is kidney. I don't understand all this at any 'logical' level, but at a gut level I find some truth. The language(s) (all of them) tend to bother me somewhat with their specificity and didacticness (is that the word I mean?), but I use them because they're the closest approximation I have at the moment to what I think I'm experiencing. (Any more disclaimers and I'll be in the next solar system.)
I feel guilty, right this very minute, for cutting my mother out of my life, for drawing the line in the sand, for saying to her, Now I have to live my life. I cannot be your best friend, your big sister, your little buddy any more. I need you to grow up, so that I can, too.
But she won't. She's happy where she is; there's nothing driving her to change. She gets what she needs, more or less, by being who she is.
Well, I can do what I've done: Walk away. But that doesn't appease the hunger for a real mother, as I've probably written about a million billion bajillion times now. I'm still hungry.
I'm learning to let people feed me, when they can and will, like my neighbor the other day. I'm learning how not to demand that people take care of me, but to ask, like a grownup, and to graciously accept when they say, Sorry, but no. And to take the anger that sometimes results (depending on how compassionate the person's refusal seemed), and try to use it to seek help elsewhere - as an impetus to learn from the encounter, which people are true friends and which are simply not. And go ahead and regret or be sad about the loss of - what - an idea? Maybe it's more like a betrayal, a sense that you thought your relationship was one thing, while really, it was something completely different.
The blog entry and comment thread that stirred up this current post was this one. I'm alternating between reading it and writing here...a commenter I'm just reading is talking about understanding boundaries in a 'rational' sense but not having a good 'perceptual and emotional' sense of what boundaries are, or perhaps where they are.
This is what happens when you have a mother who is simultaneously intrusive, needy and unresponsive: She's in your face all the time with her needs, and yet is never there when you need her.
Feels like I should set that off in some way, in all caps, or print it out and frame it, because it pretty much sums up the whole 'victim' thing - playing the martyr, what have you - all the accusations we get that we bring it on ourselves.
Well, no, we don't, actually. We learned this stuff, at a level so deep, so primal, so instinctual that it's a wonder we have any access to it at all, really. When you get down to it, the miracle is that I've survived this long without my construct of reality clashing/crashing/impingeing (sp?) on something-or-other so severely that I came to a grinding, creaking, squeaking halt.
Or, come to think of it, I have come to a grinding, clashing, creaking, squeaking halt. This little machine that is grasshopper can no longer wobble forward on its duct-taped, chewing-gummed, paper-clipped, safety-pinned, and otherwise jury-rigged wheels. The sucker jest ain't hangin' together any longer.
And it's been great, I wouldn't trade it. It's given me an amazing run for my money!
But now I'm ready for a different kind of experience - a kind of connection that I know exists - I can feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it coming. Moments like with my neighbor the other day tell me that my gut belief that there is another way is true, and not a made-up fiction such as the bullies and other power-over types seem to like to believe. The trick is to create enough 'space' for myself to live in this un-coerced way that I prefer... (and for my next trick I'll be usin' Archimedes lever, watch out!!!!!! :-) :-) :-)
***
See, what I grew up with with my mother was the exact opposite what I needed, of what any child needs. What you need is someone who's there when you need them, and not there when you don't need them. Finding the right teachers is the trick. Course, they say, when the moment is right, 'the teacher will appear', or some such. Which sort of feels like what my neighbor is, but I'm afraid of looking at it (him?) directly, for fear he'll disappear. Kind of like the evil eye or something - don't draw attention to something precious by making too much noise about it!
And that's a thought: Can one develop a kind of complex PTSD from an endless series of relational disappointments, over and over and over again, like Charlie Brown? Constantly feeling betrayed and let down? Constantly feeling the rug pulled out from under you? It's the feeling of nothing being safe, no one being trustworthy, no one you can count on, ever. It seems to be the mantra of our culture: 'Take what you can and give nothing back,' like the pirates' code. Remorseless, unforgiving, unrepentant.
***
Skipping back and forth again between ballastexistenz and here, seems to me BE is talking about the basic sense of self that's supposed to develop when the primary caretaker (usually the mother) is sensitive to, and responsive to, the baby's cues about what she needs. Which includes the need to be left alone. If you read Jean Liedloff's stuff on Continuum Concept, she talks about how babies in 'the wild' (so to speak) were never the center of attention the way modern babies are. Primitive babies, or tribal children that she describes in her stories, are largely onlookers - passive participants, observers, in the lives going on around them. These babies gradually absorb adult behaviors simply by experiencing them - they're never, or rarely, activively taught how to behave.
For example yesterday I was in a restaurant and a little baby (just old enough to sit up on its own, not walking or talking yet) was in a high chair next to me. He started flailing around at one point, as if to get his mother to stop staring at him. I recognized the pattern, both from my own experience working through the stuff with my own mom and from my readings on the subject, and played a little peek-a-boo with him with my newspaper. He was instantly smiling and happy, and would have kept on playing the game if I hadn't gotten bored. Mostly I was frustrated with seeing, yet again, so many clueless parents everywhere...
And not being a parent myself, I realize it's an exhausting job, that I have no clue how hard, how endless, relentless and often thankless it is. But yes, I do have a little bit of a sense of it, from time spent with my nieces. I just don't have the 24/7 experience that actual parents do. I'm well aware of that. But still - sometimes it seems like parents create so much more work for themselves by fighting their babies' natural impulses. How much more peaceful life could be, or so it seems, if they just went with the flow....
Thishful winking, yes, I know.
***
Jumping back and forth again, reading a comment of BE's:
Combine that kind of stuff with being accustomed to being watched all day, and I suspect you could get someone who’s a little more confused than they even used to be about who could see their thoughts and who couldn’t. I know that I was out a couple years before I realized that nobody was going to jump out of the bushes and tell me how to walk or something.Part of the feeling of 'vampirism' from my mother was that she was always watching me, as if she was waiting for something, wanting something, needing something. The 'observing' didn't seem to be passive - it seemed - somehow - needy? Or, that's not really the right word. 'Waiting' seems more accurate, almost as if she was trying to learn from me, instead of the other way 'round. Like she always needed me to 'lead', and not in the healthy sense that babies 'cue' their parents as to their needs by crying, thrashing around, what have you.
No, her needs seemed to be deeper than that - for someone to show her how. In fact, there have been times in fairly recent years that she's asked me literally 'how' to do something that I know she's being doing for years. Like boiling an egg, for example. It's really disconcerting, to have this person who's supposed to be your mentor, your support system, turning to you for help and encouragement. (And no, FYI, she's not senile. Just really, really dependent on others, and really, really good at denying this self-same dependence. Which feels like I'm making some sort of circular, or even possibly self-defeating, argument somewhere along the way. But hey - I'ma jest tryin'a work this stuff out here. That's why we call it 'Thinking Out Loud' in the subtitle.)
I suppose it would be different had the shoe ever been on the other foot. But it seems as if I've always been the one doing the leading, always the one venturing into new territory without a safety net, without a cheerleader, without a pit crew or emergency response team. Pretty scary shit.
And I know there are people who've been through worse - war orphans, people abandoned, beaten, abused by parents and other 'caretakers'; and yet, once again, I think it all comes down to expectations - you grow up in this quiet, well-to-do (or well enough-to-do), middle-class suburb. You think, at some entirely unconscious level, that these people are taking care of me. And yet, somehow, major emotional needs go unmet. As if you were actually living in some tiny, tarpaper shack somewhere, struggling through the Great Depression. As if, at any moment, all these bright, new, shiny things that dad strived so hard to obtain, would disappear, and you'd be back to your grungy, dirty, crowded roots. The nightmare never goes away.
So you project it into your reality, and your children experience your projected fears as if they're real.
Some really fucked-up shit there, know what I mean?
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