Posted by Partlycloudy on July 29, 2008, at 16:09:11
Of course, it didn't dawn on me that that's what we were working on until I got home from my session. We talked about how I'm not nohow, noway ready to forgive my mother for leaving me to take care of my dad while I was still in high school. (My grades went into the toilet, I started to act out, and hopes of going to university fled, etc. etc.) I'm all grown up now, and still telling the same old story - abandonment. How she shouldn't have left a teenager to caretake an alcoholic.
OK, then. So by talking and crying and sitting with it, by the end of the hour I come to see how the timing wasn't anything special. Her decision had nothing to do with me at all. And most of all, the abandonment had happened decades earlier, when I was a baby. Emotional abandonment. Blew my socks off - the relief at letting go of my old story was almost like saying goodbye to an old friend.
Who am I without this story?
I now think that it was purely coincidental - that my mom had gotten to the point where she had saved up enough money and was able to support herself financially, and that's when she moved out. It happened to coincide with my troubles during my teenage years - and when the guidance counselor got wind of the home situation - "oh, divorce!", they quietly let me drop a class here and there, my dropping grades were no longer commented on; my being on track to university was recalculated to "maybe you're better suited to working on an assembly line"; and of course I stayed out to all hours of the night. Who was watching? Nobody - but then, nobody EVER was watching. I think those things probably would have happened without my mom's leaving. Who knows?
What an interesting day.
poster:Partlycloudy
thread:842886
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20080727/msgs/842886.html