HELP. I think I've crossed over into indifference. Now family want to visit ?

[feralcat]

I know it's a dance. My T said last week that maybe FOO don't know how much THEIR indifference towards me hurts. I.e. I should tell them. Nope. I do value her, and she is a trained trauma counsellor, but I don't think people get it unless they've lived it. I have no desire to undertake that particular experiment,  just to get kicked in the teeth (with much self righteous indignation of course). Again.

Sooo.. My conundrum for today.
Four of my FOO went to a cafe during the highest levels of transmission thus far ..and caught Omicron. They all seem to have recovered pretty quickly. Bit of residual fatigue etc. Now, I've had Long Covid since March 2020. It's very debilitating but I'm getting on with it. As Ive always had to do. I did tell several of them early on that Id been very ill, and seem to have ongoing issues. Reaction ? Nothing. So, when they acquired a dose themselves ,I thought maybe they'd be more empathic ( ps I have been texting each of them regularly to see how they were getting on).

The nothing part hurt. I got triggered , flashbacks etc. Ruminated. Wanted to get a flame thrower out and go scorched earth on them.

So I have decided I need to detach more . See things more objectively Practice self care. I watched Dr Ramini's video on Indifference. She is excellent , thanks to the many people who recommended. And when  I examined my feelings afterwards I realised I have indeed detached a lot more.  Was this the final straw ? As with my unPdM (LC ) it had just ...happened.
So I texted M and said I needed no more telephone conversations ( monologues) for a few weeks, as I needed to look after myself now. Her response " Good for you, Feralcat". Ok ???? Then, surprise surprise,  yesterday the two siblings I had been 'closest' to said they'd like to visit sometime. And sorry I have long Covid.Argh. FMs, fact finding mission, afraid I'm rocking the faaaaamily boat , gas lighting tour ??

I haven't replied yet. I will be saying not for a while ,as I know that they'll know what I told M. That they're just reacting to my boundary.
Also I feel I need the detachment - to heal. I'll never heal optimally whilst FOO are in my brain. And I continue to gaslight myself . I expect nothing, but the hope still flickers.

So, any ideas from you wise and understanding folks on how to proceed ? How to respond, how to behave . My mission is to remain objective/detached, but I don't want to hurt them.

[notrightinthehead]

Yes the hope is hard to kill, especially if you basically are an optimistic, happy person who likes to give the benefit of the doubt, like me.
As for your question, I can only recommend to go back to the Toolbox and implement when you have to deal with your family. Otherwise get as much support as you possibly can and keep your mind on yourself as much as you can. The less space toxic people have in your mind, the less damage they can cause.
I like your Struwelpeter!

[feralcat]

Thanks for your replyNotRight
Yes I need to use the Tools. I just watched a Dr Ramani video about minimalisation ( you can tell it's raining here). I am going to grey rock it, as I know that anything I say will be either taken as 'competition ' ( cos all illness has to be hierarchical y'know /criticism of them in some way - or an invitation to talk about other people.
I will be extremely boring , but polite!

Ah yes, the Struwelpeter. My M is German . I used to love that book. 101 ways of grotesquely  punishing 'naughty' children. I recently took part in a banner making workshop. I'm better with a plan. So I decided that I'd be a variant of him. It's an easy image.
Naughty old delinquent hippy , at long last rebeling against  'rules' and expectations. The FOG, basically.

[Hilltop]

Detachment is a great place to be.  I think is where you can respond kindly and not hurt others because you are responding without emotion. 

As Notright says, the hope is hard to kill and not dwelling on it is hard too. I find the less I think about them, the past, the hurts, the better I am and the better I feel.

It sounds like you are in a great place and no doubt with some time for yourself you will feel stronger about dealing with them.

[Call Me Cordelia]

"So I texted M and said I needed no more telephone conversations ( monologues) for a few weeks, as I needed to look after myself now. Her response " Good for you, Feralcat". Ok ????"

If this we my mother the response would have meant, "Good, I'm tired of taking care of all your problems for you!" Which is absolutely laughable but it's how she saw our relationship! Amazing projection.

There's a difference between hurting others and them simply not liking your boundaries. They might want to visit, but you are not hurting them by saying no that doesn't work for you right now. It's okay to disappoint other people in things to which they are not actually entitled. You can be honest. Actual harm is fairly narrow, when what you are doing is actually an injustice. It can help me to put on my objectivity glasses and deliberately forget about how the other person is likely to feel, and deliberately check in with how *I* feel and put that first. It's the opposite of how I was raised to be, and it still feels unnatural much of the time. Someone may say, "Oh I'm so hurt you won't come for Easter," or whatever. But are they entitled to you coming? No! So you are not actually doing anything wrong here. In that case, their feelings are their own responsibility, not yours.

[treesgrowslowly]

Hello feralcat,

Nice to meet you. I've been a member here for several years. I went NC with my family years and years ago. The healing journey has been a long process, but it does get easier.

I agree with you, you need detachment to heal. You' can't really thrive in the environment these family members create - what you describe here is so so familiar to me. The family scapegoat - always being told yet again, how much WE hurt their feelings.

I agree with what Call me Cordelia already wrote here.

It is not really indifference - it is detachment. There is a difference. Indifference suggests that you don't care. Detachment is about practicing drawing healthy boundaries in an unhealthy family system. Which you are in. You can see it - you don't need us to sugar coat that. You get it. They are pulling you in, and they have FMs, a really good sign you are in a narcissistic family system.

You can care about them, and also not have any energy left to deal with them anymore. Most people around you will not understand this. Like you said in your post, if people have not been through this, they might not know what it is like to detach from people we care about.

Dealing with this is extremely hard emotionally at times. Not all therapists get it. I am a bit frustrated with your counsellor on your behalf here - and in my decades of working with counsellors for my own stuff, I have had more than a few who also don't get it about the "family guilt system". Do they really think that the solution to long-standing dysfunctions in our families is that we have not told our relatives how we feel? I find this harder and harder to defend - we are in the year 2022, therapists need to learn about scapegoats and emotional abuse.

Why go to our abuser to tell them how we feel? I don't think any counsellor should ever advocate that. For some reason, some still do. I am sorry you dealt with this. Perhaps that counsellor is inexperienced. It is not your job to educate her.

I have learned a few precious rules for living over the years. One is that unhealthy people will always feel entitled to our kindness, our time, our understanding, and they will feel entitled to access to us.

You will heal over time, with the tools you are learning to use over and over. It gets easier, with practice, to use these tools. You very likely grew up in a family that discouraged you from using the tools in the toolbox on this website. It was very hard for me to accept that I had spent the first 20 years of my life, learning the wrong things, and being punished for using tools like: boundaries, clear communication, assertiveness, etc....

Those tools are necessary for your future - but your family sadly, is not interested in this. So detachment is the right path.

The detachment work is very scary at the start, because it is still very stigmatized in the culture today, to detach from our FOO. You'll no doubt have people around you who don't understand why you would detach from your FOO. They have no idea what it has been like for you.

I mean, your counsellor doesn't really understand how important detachment is to your own healing. I do wonder if this counsellor understands that a narcissistic parent can't have healthy relationships with their own kids. I do wonder if there are some counsellors who don't want to face the truth that we face here on this forum. It is not possible for someone so self-absorbed, to have healthy communication, healthy boundaries, healthy, safe, productive conversations. And yet, some of us are told by therapists, to go into those spaces anyways and tell these people how we feel. Nonsense.

The topic of finding good counsellors comes up every so often here on the site. It is invaluable to find a counsellor that understands you well, but even if you don't have that right now, just talking through how you feel should help you... as you have come from a family that probably has a long history of not listening to you and taking your feelings seriously.

Detachment is absolutely necessary for healing. It means pulling away from the person so that you can focus on your feelings more than focusing on theirs. It means repeating yourself, through your actions - showing through your boundaries,  that you are done with their ways. It is not your responsibility to get them to understand this. They might never understand your detachment. I mean, I highly doubt any of my FOO could tell you why I detached. They will never understand. And it is not my job to make sure their feelings never get hurt. These are adults. It is their job to investigate (in therapy) their hurt feelings. That is their work. Not yours.

I am glad you are here. Keep posting, keep reading about the tools.

Trees

[Starboard Song]

 

This is my analytical self, my emotional self, my insecure self, my ethical self, and my egotistical self all agreeing that Trees just nailed this to the ground to stay.

Well said.

[feralcat]

Thank you all so much !!!
It's fantastic to be so understood. And for the advice.

My two siblings will be visiting . The last weekend of May. Tbh it doesn't bother me much any more. I actually doubt they'll come - they're both unreliable -, but even if they do they may well be disappointed. I still , and will, feel detached. Even indifferent. And will bean dip, any and every time complaining / talking about FOO come up. Or attempts by Sis to gaslight me by 'guessing' my thoughts /feelings In order to elicit an emotional response/ get me to out break of my grey rocking.

Still no contact from unPdM. I can only think that she feels stymied by the fact that my health issues would, normally, require a supportive word or two. And she can't do that. Never could. I'm fighting my inner Nice Girl reaction to get in touch though.

As for my counsellor, I speak to her tomorrow. Tbh she's been ok when I've challenged her in the past. I do rate her, and I've no one else to talk to about this in real life.. Im going to talk to her about her thoughts on leave and cleave , re FOO. I've said that I have very little contact with some of them, but never actually asked her that question.
I see it less of an training/experience thing , but more of a ....how can you understand abuse unless you've been through it yourself , and self aware enough/ willing to acknowledge these sort of issues ? (I can see so many people living in dysfunction, but they'll never try to break out. For whatever reason. Like my FOO).

Getting Out of the FOG has been painful and uncomfortable , and must make me seem odd sometimes, but I'm so glad I am/have. I grieve for the person I used to be. Sad, insecure, confused.

[treesgrowslowly]

That is awesome feral cat - that you feel understood here!

There are a lot of good folks here who have a lot more experience than me in terms of Low Contact (LC) and the type of FOO visit you describe. They can help you with questions as you prepare mentally and emotionally for the visit. I went NC, no contact...and so I am not as familiar with how to keep some level of ties going, but a lot of folks do!

I think it is a good idea to ask your therapist her thoughts on people who go NC. I've had the whole gamut of responses from different counsellors.

And, as I have written about here before, when I first went NC, the fact that the very first counsellors I disclosed this to - did not judge me and criticize me for it, made a huge difference to me. The first few people in my life that I told, had huge, negative reactions (projecting!). So having a therapist / counsellor who accepted that I had chosen NC, and assumed from the start that I had good reasons, that helped me to feel seen back when it was really really important.

In a family like mine, there's enough gaslighting, and having a therapist gaslight me about going NC, would have held me back, rather than helped me.

I am pretty sure that some of the helpful counsellors - the ones who understood and validated my NC decision - had not been through it themselves, but they understood that for some people, their abuser is their family member. We are in an age where most counsellors will understand why someone breaks up with an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend - so then the same understanding can be applied to family members who are emotionally abusive. It is just that there are some counsellors who can't make that connection - they will support a client leaving an abuser, unless it is a family member. Then for some reason, they can't seem to 'get it'. I hope your counsellor gets it. It sounds like she might.

What you wrote about your siblings is familiar - I have found 2 categories of response when I grey rocked during family visits. When the other person isn't that invested either, and is really just going through the motions, and is kinda avoidant about the family dramas, then the grey rock doesn't bother them as much - in general. But, for those family members who are enmeshed, the FMs, the ones who are most involved in the family drama, my grey rock stuff really upset them. They didn't like that I wouldn't dance the dance. Thankfully you are here and can post about how it goes for you. Like you said, your sister will likely try to break your grey rock mode. You have time to build up your tool box before the visit (if it happens).

Good luck with everything. Keep posting!

Trees