OUR VERSION OF EVENTS

To all my ACoN friends.

"Read All About It" by Emeli Sande.

You've got the words to change a nation
but you're biting your tongue
You've spent a life time stuck in silence
afraid you'll say something wrong
If no one ever hears it how we gonna learn your song?
So come, on come on 
Come on, come on 
You've got a heart as loud as lions 
So why let your voice be tamed?
Baby we're a little different
there's no need to be ashamed
You've got the light to fight the shadows
so stop hiding it away
Come on, Come on

I wanna sing, I wanna shout
I wanna scream till the words dry out
so put it in all of the papers, 
i'm not afraid
they can read all about it 
read all about it oh
oh-oh-oh

At night we're waking up the neighbours 
while we sing away the blues
making sure that we remember yeah
cause we all matter too 
if the truth has been forbidden 
then we're breaking all the rules
so come on, come on
come on, come on, 
lets get the tv and the radio 
to play our tune again
its 'bout time we got some airplay of our version of events

there's no need to be afraid
i will sing with you my friend
Come on, come on
I wanna sing, I wanna shout
I wanna scream till the words dry out
so put it in all of the papers, 
i'm not afraid
they can read all about it 
read all about it oh
oh-oh-oh

Yeah we're all wonderful, wonderful people
so when did we all get so fearful?
Now we're finally finding our voices
so take a chance, come help me sing this
Yeah we're all wonderful, wonderful people
so when did we all get so fearful?
and now we're finally finding our voices
so take a chance, come help me sing this

I wanna sing, I wanna shout
I wanna scream till the words dry out
so put it in all of the papers, 
i'm not afraid
they can read all about it 
read all about it oh
oh-oh-oh


I wanna sing, I wanna shout
I wanna scream till the words dry out
so put it in all of the papers, 
i'm not afraid
they can read all about it 
read all about it oh

Standing Up for Yourself (Part I)

        I feel that standing up for oneself is like lifting weights. You have to start small and build yourself up. I wish I had had a chance to build myself up before I had to confront an N in my FOO. Having no skills at all in this department and being thrown down at the deep end I found the experience highly stressful and emotionally damaging. Still, at least I learned that I could do it and the world didn't end.

        When I first started realising that things had to change, someone lent me a book about boundaries. It discussed at length the importance of being able to say no. I remember thinking at the time that there was no way that I could ever do this, even imagining myself saying no to people other than my husband made me feel anxious. I could see that this was the way to go, I just didn't think that I'd ever be able to do it. However I realise now that saying no is like every other skill: it becomes easier with practice. So practise with people you feel safe with (or with people you who might never see ever again: salesmen, waiters, etc). It's also a good idea to practice asking for things as well. I'm one of these people that I would never ask for anything: I  have no sugar in my tea because when I was younger I was too shy to tell the host that I'd like sugar in my tea. (You can see what a long way this has been for me if I couldn't even say: Could I have some sugar, please?)

       Something else I learned is to buy myself time before I agreed to anything. I learned to say things like: 

• Can I get back to you on that?
• I need to check my diary.
• Not sure what I'm doing yet.
• I'll let you know.

These replies buy you a bit of time so you can think about whether you really want to do what is asked.  Be prepared for people who will ask you what you're doing on a particular day first so that when they tell you what they want you to do you have no excuse. Well I suppose you could just say: "Sorry, I don't fancy doing that." I'm not that far ahead, not saying that I will not be one day, I'm just not there yet. So my defence line for people like that is to say: "Why are you asking?"

Being able to return questions with another question is an invaluable skill to have. We are not obliged to give an answer just because someone is asking it. Besides I have found that there are a lot of nosy people who are always "fishing" for information but never volunteer any about themselves. "Those who fetch, carry", best not to give them anything to "carry". There is another trick that nosy people have up their sleeve: they keep silent until it becomes so uncomfortable that before you know it you've told them everything they wanted to know. I'm training myself to be silent with those people, see who can hold out the longest. It is really hard at first, because we are so programmed to fill in the silence, but I promise you: it does get easier with practice.           

        

Why is it Hard to Stand up for Yourself?

If you come from an Nfamily and you find it hard to stand up for yourself, know that this is because your defence mechanism has been disabled since birth. It is not because you have no backbone or you are not strong. If that was the case you would not have made it this far. A fellow blogger, Elena K , put it beautifully in one of her comments:
     
"surviving despite those feelings of weakness and brokenness is worth something, isn't it? Just being here today means we were strong enough to make it, despite everything."

Yes, we are strong. We've just been conditioned to think that we are not. Our parents  wanted robots, not independent thinkers, so they raised us accordingly: to never say NO, to never rock the boat, to make no demands. Then they send us into the world without any shield or weapon to protect ourselves. Like sending a sheep among wolves. The poor sheep stands no chance.

Also against us is the old "it takes a thief to catch a thief", so if I'm not a thief how can I possibly recognise that somebody else is? For a long time I believed the idea that anyone who was being horrible to me in some way, must be hurting inside, until one day the logic didn't stand anymore, because I was also hurting but I was not behaving that way, and someone who was hurting, out of all people would know what it feels like and would go out of his/her way to not do that to others. I could not excuse these people any longer. 
I felt like I had been conned my whole life. It was only when I was able to "see" the reality of the situation that I was able to attempt to start standing up for myself. 

The way I look at it now is this: If someone is standing on my toes, whether they're doing it on purpose or they're not aware of it at all, is irrelevant, I still need to tell them to step off my toes. If they're honest people they'll be sorry and apologise, however if they're an N, they'll start arguing with you about their "right" to stand on your toes (this was my experience with the Ns in my life-both friends and family).  This is no mean feat, since most of us don't particularly enjoy confrontation and deep down we sense that the Ns will not give up their "conquered" territory without a fight. I can't say that there is an easy way about it, and I'm not sure that even if I had had the tools I have now I would not have ended in the same place. It's impossible to know. I think that's the other side of the coin: that when you do stand up for yourself you know there is a fair risk that is going to be the end of the relationship as you know it. There is something frightening about finding out someone's true colours, specially if they're a family member or a close friend. Your gut is telling you something is wrong but you just can't bring yourself to believe that that person would be as bad as your gut is telling you they are. You keep telling yourself: nah, surely that can't be it! There is a lot of emotional investment in those relationships and having to acknowledge that it's time to "cash in your chips" and go, really hurts. And once you know, there is no undoing it, you can't go back to not know it.
I think this is why, for some many of us, this is such a long process. 

The Core of the Matter

     Another concept that really stuck with me when I read the book on Adrenal Fatigue was this:

"For more than seventy-five years we have known that the adrenal glands cannot heal from fatigue unless they have the opportunity to rest. Long periods of bed rest are not feasible for most people, nor are they usually necessary. The particular kind of rest you need when you have adrenal fatigue comes not so much from lying down, but from standing up for yourself, and from removing or minimizing the harmful stresses in your life."

    I think this is where the core of the matter lies: To stand up for yourself. I can see now how that one thing would be the one that would make the most difference in my life. I didn't know how to do it though.
When I read that, I thought: "That's all very well, but how on earth do I do that?" I just simply didn't have a clue. If my FOO asked to come over to stay I didn't feel that I could say no even if it was inconvenient. If I was invited to a social event I felt I had to accept even if I didn't feel like it. I always felt like I couldn't say NO. It's like it didn't exist in my vocabulary. I only felt that I could say NO if I had a valid excuse, but to say a plain NO was just beyond my capabilities. I couldn't even imagine myself just saying NO.
I think this is the thing that kills me with a lot of self-help books: 1) a lot of the material is focused on what the problem is (which is kind of pointless, because we already know what the problem is, otherwise we wouldn't be reading the book in the first place) and 2) they tell you what to do but not how to do it.
So why was I unable to say NO? The short answer is because in my FOO saying NO was not an option. When I did start saying NO to one of my siblings, she turned into a gorgon (well, not quite literally, but you know what I mean). So I wonder if this inability of saying NO came from the deep down knowledge that the minute you said it, all hell would break loose. Come to think of it, I have no problem saying NO to my husband. So maybe it wasn't so much that I was not capable of saying NO but the fact that I knew the battle that would ensue if I did. The way things were going with this particular sibling was that I either stood up for myself or accepted a life of endless servitude. So I had to really improvise as I went along because there's no way I was going to be anyone's unpaid slave. Later on I did find some really helpful stuff which I wish had been available to me for when I was in the eye of the storm but to paraphrase my favourite french writer: "our destinies and our desires rarely play in unison." Still, better late than never. Some of these new found tools are proving really useful, because at the end of the day, there's plenty of narcissists to go around and even if you have cut or limited your association with the Ns in your FOO you might still have to deal with the ones that you might come across one way or another.
Standing up for yourself is like lifting weights, you have to build yourself up first. More on that in the next post.