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Sunday: drama, walks, soul-searching
Jan. 10th, 2021 07:50 pmThe drama was, as usual, Florida BIL. The goal is independence, and all the right words are said, but every single time he has any kind of need, his hand is out. And training the _entire_ family to decline the opportunity to put green stuff in the hand is a Struggle. Today, we learned one BIL declined — and that another BIL had gotten conned into fronting money in the name of frugality. Understandable! But he had not talked to the group, until other BIL spoke up, and then it all came out without a lot of thought and I lost All Of My Shit. Everyone was very kind about my losing of my shit, and then the one who got conned handed it to Florida BIL, because straight up Florida BIL was up to his old tricks of asking everyone separately until someone fell for it. *sigh* Now Florida BIL is back to his snippy I Want to Be Independent nonsense, and we are collectively wishing fervently that that was true and trying to figure out how we can advance from here. I have as yet incompletely formed Ideas, that basically amount to, toss it back to the therapist(s) to chew on in the next personal and/or group sessions, and in the meantime, put together a full list of everything that is a financial connection between Florida BIL and anyone else (like the storage area I still pay for) and create a plan to close all that shit down.
If independence is the goal — and it is, it truly is — then let’s make some action items.
I walked with M.
I did the long walk by myself.
The soul searching was partly about the BIL nonsense, but it was also an ongoing discussion about some deeply unpleasant feelings from my early childhood WRT JWs and 1975. I was very young at the time (6 and under), and I had congregation peers who were not starting school when I did because 1975. Then 1975, and the world just kept ticking along much as it had before, minus, of course, some of the people who used to attend meetings and now did not. There were a lot of recriminations: had the WTBTS actually said 1975? Or was that something that the membership cooked up on their own? Who bore the responsibility for _this_ failed prediction?
Recent events with Q, especially WRT the election and Jan 6 have dredged up a lot of those negative feelings of Too Much Chaos and angry adults and a lot of confusion and having to keep on keeping on despite it all. The soul searching has produced some interesting conclusions. Notably: I recalled the article I read long ago about over-representation of paranoid schizophrenia among JWs. I think that is a lot of the vibe I get from the profile of the woman who was (rightly) shot, for example.
What kind of responsibility do we have for the dangerously unhinged among us? After talking to Priestess for a while, I was really struck by one way that she summarizes how I live my life, and in what ways I try to help those I care about and more generally anyone around me. I really am the Anti-Enabler, and that is despite _also_ being the Permission Fairy. I want people to enjoy life and have a little fun. Life is brutal and short and it is all we have. Being kind to each other is pretty much the Peak Experience we get. But helping someone along the path to destruction is _not_ being kind, so my Permission does not extend to unmitigated self-destruction (which was a really interesting nuance!).
As a practical matter, I think that means I should work diligently to finish the project of disentangling BIL’s unhealthy dependencies on others who want things for him that does not want for himself, and which expose them to being leveraged by him to do things that they know better than to do. And I think it means that I need to be even more bluntly specific when I point out things that people say that are absolutely not aligned with reality in dangerous ways, and insist that people pay attention to that.
If a group is electing someone to congress, and then breaching the capital, we can’t just laugh it off and go about our business. That group needs our focused attention.
If independence is the goal — and it is, it truly is — then let’s make some action items.
I walked with M.
I did the long walk by myself.
The soul searching was partly about the BIL nonsense, but it was also an ongoing discussion about some deeply unpleasant feelings from my early childhood WRT JWs and 1975. I was very young at the time (6 and under), and I had congregation peers who were not starting school when I did because 1975. Then 1975, and the world just kept ticking along much as it had before, minus, of course, some of the people who used to attend meetings and now did not. There were a lot of recriminations: had the WTBTS actually said 1975? Or was that something that the membership cooked up on their own? Who bore the responsibility for _this_ failed prediction?
Recent events with Q, especially WRT the election and Jan 6 have dredged up a lot of those negative feelings of Too Much Chaos and angry adults and a lot of confusion and having to keep on keeping on despite it all. The soul searching has produced some interesting conclusions. Notably: I recalled the article I read long ago about over-representation of paranoid schizophrenia among JWs. I think that is a lot of the vibe I get from the profile of the woman who was (rightly) shot, for example.
What kind of responsibility do we have for the dangerously unhinged among us? After talking to Priestess for a while, I was really struck by one way that she summarizes how I live my life, and in what ways I try to help those I care about and more generally anyone around me. I really am the Anti-Enabler, and that is despite _also_ being the Permission Fairy. I want people to enjoy life and have a little fun. Life is brutal and short and it is all we have. Being kind to each other is pretty much the Peak Experience we get. But helping someone along the path to destruction is _not_ being kind, so my Permission does not extend to unmitigated self-destruction (which was a really interesting nuance!).
As a practical matter, I think that means I should work diligently to finish the project of disentangling BIL’s unhealthy dependencies on others who want things for him that does not want for himself, and which expose them to being leveraged by him to do things that they know better than to do. And I think it means that I need to be even more bluntly specific when I point out things that people say that are absolutely not aligned with reality in dangerous ways, and insist that people pay attention to that.
If a group is electing someone to congress, and then breaching the capital, we can’t just laugh it off and go about our business. That group needs our focused attention.