Wednesday: conversations, cleaning
Aug. 10th, 2022 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutR. and I went to Azucar in Maynard. Really good idea! We had the duck and the stuffed dates again. They continue to be awesome. We tried the papas bravas, which I felt silly ordering because it is potatoes but I am so glad that I did because I don’t know that I have ever had bravas sauce and it is amazing. I need to learn how to make that.
I had a bunch of conversations. I had a nice long convo with J. I had about an hour zoom with I. In between I had a longish convo with my sister about the micro-model of interactions with people with personality disorder I’m putting together. I’m feeling more strongly that this should go into the I Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Brother book. That was a messed up conversation, but illuminating. She’s right to point out how awesome it is that Reddit threads about what it’s like to be in a relationship *especially raised by* someone with a personality disorder are so supportive now of going low or no contact. I definitely remember on more than one occasion finding a book about family relationships that fractured, and trying to find _any_ that would accept _any_ fracture as a good thing. For so long, there was just nothing from the therapeutic community in support of terminating a familial relationship. Which was weird and obviously wrong.
Over the long haul, if we can normalize this in our society, it will go a long ways to reducing trauma / damage, in much the same way that normalizing divorce did.
That’s the good part. The rest of the conversation was a mess. I _think_ what was going on was basically _as soon as_ I described what it is like to interact with someone with a personality disorder, she locked onto memories of our mother, and her personal trauma exiting our family of origin and the cult, without any support system. That’s all traumatizing, of course, and I did not bring up our mother at all, and I consciously framed the entirely hypothetical relationship between the personality disordered person and the other person as between a man and a woman, details otherwise unspecified but presumed to be an LTR or marriage or whatever.
But you know, when someone locks onto a bad memory, that’s pretty much all that’s going to be happening for a while. I eventually deployed cartoonishly (and honestly sarcastically) expansive validation of how amazing she was to do this all on her own with absolutely no help from anyone at all ever. That brought her back down to expressing feelings of guilt about not knowing how to help other people in similar situations because obviously other people don’t necessarily have her internal resources and possibly some luck.
I usually assume the judgy commentary (name calling, blaming the victim) to be a short cut to reduce cognitive load in a situation where she has no idea how to deal with something — if it’s their fault, then she just has to not be stupid and she’ll be safe. Common strategy. I find this aggravating, because I’d much rather understand how it works. Also, name calling and blaming the victim does not reassure me that I won’t become the victim; if anything, it makes me feel even more vulnerable. I _used_ to be more reactive to the judgy commentary, because it was so reminiscent of our mother; I’m no longer particularly reactive in that way. The comparison is still valid! One of the reasons why I’m really interested in a micro-model of the interaction between someone with a personality disorder and …. Another Person is because having now popped two individuals out of really, really, really bad relationships with people who have personality disorders (complete end to an LTR in one case; in the other case, the financial support of an adult sibling stopped), and an entire family system out, the very many limitations of a successful rescue are becoming extremely clear to me.
My sister self-extracted from our mother, but the trauma of doing so has been an active element of so many of our conversations over the years that honestly, it’s not clear that she got out at all. The person I popped out of the LTR (that was the cheapest, easiest and most effective intervention I’ve ever been involved in — I just arranged an outing with other ex’s and got the ball rolling; information from other people who had been where she was was all she needed) is an amazing person in every way, and continues to struggle with all kinds of mess in her family of origin, and also with at least one close friend and, if we are being honest, possibly more people in her life. And I’m clearly going to be morbidly watching and waiting for my inlaws to relapse. They haven’t, but they keep talking about things in a way that makes me just go, gah.
Helping someone understand that _this_ relationship is not working now and they have exhausted all the possibilities and continuing in this way is quite bad for a lot of people — honestly? That’s not that hard to do. If you can keep your wits about you and wait until they are really sick of it, and communicate clearly that you understand, you really _get_ why they did all that, and then help them see clearly, in neutral language, _what_ their interactions with their personality disordered persons are in detail, they’ll pop right out. You don’t even have to tell them to (honestly, you should not tell them or advise them to — that’ll make it take longer.)
Helping someone understand how to be conscious enough in their relationships so as to notice this happening again — or elsewhere in their lives, in slightly different ways — is much harder.
Code phrase for the micro-model: persistently disruptive of reciprocal pro-social norms
I had a bunch of conversations. I had a nice long convo with J. I had about an hour zoom with I. In between I had a longish convo with my sister about the micro-model of interactions with people with personality disorder I’m putting together. I’m feeling more strongly that this should go into the I Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Brother book. That was a messed up conversation, but illuminating. She’s right to point out how awesome it is that Reddit threads about what it’s like to be in a relationship *especially raised by* someone with a personality disorder are so supportive now of going low or no contact. I definitely remember on more than one occasion finding a book about family relationships that fractured, and trying to find _any_ that would accept _any_ fracture as a good thing. For so long, there was just nothing from the therapeutic community in support of terminating a familial relationship. Which was weird and obviously wrong.
Over the long haul, if we can normalize this in our society, it will go a long ways to reducing trauma / damage, in much the same way that normalizing divorce did.
That’s the good part. The rest of the conversation was a mess. I _think_ what was going on was basically _as soon as_ I described what it is like to interact with someone with a personality disorder, she locked onto memories of our mother, and her personal trauma exiting our family of origin and the cult, without any support system. That’s all traumatizing, of course, and I did not bring up our mother at all, and I consciously framed the entirely hypothetical relationship between the personality disordered person and the other person as between a man and a woman, details otherwise unspecified but presumed to be an LTR or marriage or whatever.
But you know, when someone locks onto a bad memory, that’s pretty much all that’s going to be happening for a while. I eventually deployed cartoonishly (and honestly sarcastically) expansive validation of how amazing she was to do this all on her own with absolutely no help from anyone at all ever. That brought her back down to expressing feelings of guilt about not knowing how to help other people in similar situations because obviously other people don’t necessarily have her internal resources and possibly some luck.
I usually assume the judgy commentary (name calling, blaming the victim) to be a short cut to reduce cognitive load in a situation where she has no idea how to deal with something — if it’s their fault, then she just has to not be stupid and she’ll be safe. Common strategy. I find this aggravating, because I’d much rather understand how it works. Also, name calling and blaming the victim does not reassure me that I won’t become the victim; if anything, it makes me feel even more vulnerable. I _used_ to be more reactive to the judgy commentary, because it was so reminiscent of our mother; I’m no longer particularly reactive in that way. The comparison is still valid! One of the reasons why I’m really interested in a micro-model of the interaction between someone with a personality disorder and …. Another Person is because having now popped two individuals out of really, really, really bad relationships with people who have personality disorders (complete end to an LTR in one case; in the other case, the financial support of an adult sibling stopped), and an entire family system out, the very many limitations of a successful rescue are becoming extremely clear to me.
My sister self-extracted from our mother, but the trauma of doing so has been an active element of so many of our conversations over the years that honestly, it’s not clear that she got out at all. The person I popped out of the LTR (that was the cheapest, easiest and most effective intervention I’ve ever been involved in — I just arranged an outing with other ex’s and got the ball rolling; information from other people who had been where she was was all she needed) is an amazing person in every way, and continues to struggle with all kinds of mess in her family of origin, and also with at least one close friend and, if we are being honest, possibly more people in her life. And I’m clearly going to be morbidly watching and waiting for my inlaws to relapse. They haven’t, but they keep talking about things in a way that makes me just go, gah.
Helping someone understand that _this_ relationship is not working now and they have exhausted all the possibilities and continuing in this way is quite bad for a lot of people — honestly? That’s not that hard to do. If you can keep your wits about you and wait until they are really sick of it, and communicate clearly that you understand, you really _get_ why they did all that, and then help them see clearly, in neutral language, _what_ their interactions with their personality disordered persons are in detail, they’ll pop right out. You don’t even have to tell them to (honestly, you should not tell them or advise them to — that’ll make it take longer.)
Helping someone understand how to be conscious enough in their relationships so as to notice this happening again — or elsewhere in their lives, in slightly different ways — is much harder.
Code phrase for the micro-model: persistently disruptive of reciprocal pro-social norms