This is the mom thing again.
The obliviation - what's the word - obliteration thing.
I have to understand this.
It's like being eaten from the inside out by a parasite. This thing that absolutely CONSUMES you, and leaves nothing left.
And it's like this pattern applies to everybody in my family that I interact with - my youngest brother, my nieces, my sister-in-law.
There's this PENITENTIAL aspect to it all, like 'guilty 'til proven innocent.'
As if my default setting is 'WRONG', and I have to make up for it somehow. I have to constantly PROVE myself, atone for my sins.
Is that what it really is, at root? The long-standing, generations old puritanical GUILT at work here? The punitive patriarch that lurks in our souls?
How to eradicate it, or him?
I came across this article late last night, and perused it a bit, it seems relevant here:
http://dbs2000ad.com/narayan/where-art-thou-romeo.htm
It kind of goes on and on, and loops back on itself and repeats a lot, but it seems to capture many of the ideas I've had myself about how all this crap fits together (or doesn't), a kind of unified field theory of human nature and relationships and what not.
Let's see if I can find a representative quote that sums it up fairly tidily. Ach, doesn't look like it'll fit into a handy-sized nutshell, so I'll just quote some bits:
The foundational source of most of these difficulties is the paranoid patriarchal system under which we have been living for about 8000 years. And the basic parameter here is the intensely destructive gender roles that have been imposed across the board. What has happened is that males and females have been separated and trained into highly specialized and mutually incomprehensible patterns of functioning.Hell, I'm just going to quote this whole long section, from 'Problematic Parameters':
The male is expected to be basically a problem-solving impersonal machine who is feeling-avoidant and relationship-incompetent. He is paid for being a walking cerebrum and a pair of hands, period. Sometimes he is even expected to just LOOK like a certain image. He is not paid to be a human being with feelings and with relationship capabilities and a family and commitments and needs that compete with the work world.
In the meantime, the female is basically put in responsibility almost single-handedly for the entire emotional/ecological system. What that means is that nearly everything about the process of being human and rearing children lands on her shoulders. And since this is a basic biological impossibility to pull off, her failures then become the target of much attack. The male is neither capable of handling the requirements of the situation nor is he emotionally and often even physically present.
To make matters worse, the household is expected to be a "hymn to him" process in which he is minimally demanded of emotionally and his word and whims are law. He is also the "enforcer", as in "Just wait till your father gets home!". He IS expected to bring home the bacon and to handle physical maintenance and protection, but anything in the realm of emotions, relationship and child rearing is beyond his call of duty and his ken and his capability.
For the male child, therefore, that means that he has to piece together what it means to be a man from the little snatches he gets of this distant and mysterious figure who won't tell him anything about what is going on inside and who works at a job which is highly complicated, technical and situationally set up in such a way that a child can't comprehend what's going on when his father engages in his work. So he has no one to look up to as a model and he has to fall back on mother's attitude and shaping in terms of creating his masculine manifestation.
He also learns that the real action is in the realm outside the home in a technical society that requires complete emotional suppression. In addition, he learns the "buck stops here" ultimate accountability, responsibility and authority role in which every time anything goes wrong, everybody turns to the male in the situation and he has no one to turn to. It's his job to come up with the resources and the solution to the problem. The result is a problem-solving machine.
In the meantime, the female child is inundated with training experiences in how to handle ecologies, emotions, far-reaching responsibilities, and relationships. Not infrequently, she becomes the mother's sole source of intimate love, perhaps even going into erotic involvement. In addition, she's usually pressed into service to assist in the overwhelming overload of responsibilities of her mother early on, and she very frequently is even forced to reverse roles and to be her mother's mother from a very early age. Yet at the same time, she is supposed to be nonthreateningly incompetent in many areas of personal power expression and competent world handling, so that "Big Daddy" can "take care of her". She quickly learns to hide her candle under a basket and to handle the "home front".
Now the mother in the isolated nuclear family is the lifeline for the child of either gender, especially during the first four years when the child is putting God on her face in the "in loco Deity" response resulting from the "commons" evolutionary history. But she is also the "polarity parent" (the other gender) who establishes the boy's gender identity, his personal worth as a male, and the "stand-in" for the "Home Office". She is in effect everything to him, especially in the light of the absence of the father. She thus becomes a "Statue of Liberty" figure for him -- she can crush him in an instant.
Very frequently, he also becomes her spouse-substitute and even her father-substitute due to the severe limitations of the male gender role and its effects. He in effect becomes the man in her life because she has never been fulfilled and she has been in effect neglected or abandoned by the masculine all her life. But of course, he can't deliver the goods, and she then projects all her betrayal-rage on him. He then can do no right for his unpleasable mother. She also seeks to prevent his developing his personal power, both because she doesn't want to lose him, and because she is afraid of his abuse of his power. He is thus expected to be her man while at the same time not manifesting his masculinity. He ends up utterly enraged and perplexed by women.
For the female child, the situation is one of severe deprivation of validation and gracefulness training from her father. He doesn't intervene in the profound "double bubble" dependency relationship between her and her mother, who is using her as an associate or role-reversed parent. Between his non-involvement and his non-intervention, she ends up believing she is undeserving of his attention, and she ends up depressed, self-denigrating and longing for love from a male.
This situation is horrendously confounded if in addition, he becomes sexually involved with her on the emotional or even the physical level (the latter now being reported at 60% and perhaps as high as 90%). In such a situation, all of the above reactions are extremely exacerbated because of our evolutionary history in which the female was the determiner of who became sexually involved with her. This results in her being biologically programmed to believe that she is the one responsible for this situation.
As a result of all this, she often wants to avoid full feminine maturity, and she wants to be protected and taken care of in the little girl experience she never had. She rejects her sexuality and power in order to remain an eternal girl. The eating disorders revolve around this desire not to become a mature female. And because of her profound frustrations, suppressed rage and powerlessness programming, they are also prone to helplessness feelings, seething "tripod-rage" and cancer.
Yet at the same time, she feels totally responsible and accountable for the entire emotional and physical ecology, and she therefore feels that it is all her fault when things go wrong there. This also results in her believing that all the negative things that happen to her are her "just deserts" for not having handled things in such a way as to avoid the negative outcomes for which she feels responsible.
Simultaneously, between her mother's programming and her father's betrayals, she ends up full of "tripod-rage" in which "he can do no right". But then again, she finds herself "romancing the stone" of her father-stand-ins while simultaneously subconsciously hating them. And if she gets a really relevant male, she can't relate to him because she doesn't deserve it, and besides he can do no right.
The male comes out of his experience fascinated by, terrified of, dependent upon and extremely vulnerable to women. He also puts his worst foot forward with them as a result of his "You can do no right!" experiential history with his mother. He ends up full of male shame for all his betrayals and incompetences and failures, while at the same time he is full of fury for his mother's effective destiny-destruction. And he falls into the pattern of not-thereness, exploitation and authoritation abusiveness in a hate-mate relationship pattern. The only emotions he can express are artificially inflated sexuality and rage.
The net effect of all this is that when a male and a female get together to form an intimate relationship, all of these dynamics come into play and all hell breaks loose and interacts with all the other processes going on in relationships today. And the situation is even more complex when same gender pairings occur, inasmuch as all the societal rejection comes into play, along with all the extremely confusing complications arising from the gender role dynamics having to be played out in a multi-layered kaleidoscope of profoundly painful playouts.
One of the commonest forms this takes is the "demonic dynamic". This is a situation where within seconds, the two individuals are in a blind, perhaps even homicidal rage over some passing trivial issue. It is the resultant of all the damage, pain, rage and neurotic interlocks that are the outcome of all the parameters involved. It is a mutual jackhammering process that can get physically dangerous very quickly. It reflects all the horror and pain they have both gone through all their lives in intimate relationships, starting with the most rejecting parent phenomenon.
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