19 - Dear Family, Why I've Gone No Contact (NC)

©Miriam A. Mason

Note:  I am writing this letter for myself here, obviously. I don't expect I will be heard or considered by any blood family members.  They are far too stuck in their idea of right and wrong and good and bad, and being this image they hold up to hold any genuine and meaningful concern about me.  They never have.  I still wish it to be heard, so you, my dear readers, get to be the ones who read it.  Should my family members find it, I fully expect a litany of efforts to shame, embarrass, belittle and dismiss me.  That's okay, actually, I forgive their anger and fear.  They don't know how to do anything else.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/After-Narcissistic-Abuse-There-is-Light-Life-Love/114835348601442

Onward....

Dear Family, I have opted to go No Contact (NC) with you, both immediate and extended.  Perhaps it is time I speak my heart about why, not for justification, but for clarification.  

I know to write you privately would be to simply invite upon myself more of the things that I find deeply dysfunctional about the way you choose to interact and communicate with one another.  It is pointless.  In public, everyone can see exactly what I have said and there is a record of it.  One that I can stand by.  One that you cannot twist into whatever convenient set of judgments you would like to toss at me this time.  And, if any such judgments come my way as a result of this blog, they will also be published here in order to illustrate the method of preferred communication my family uses. (An example of this is below, in fact.)

None-the-less, it is unquestionable that you will take my actions personally and be unable to bring up anything in yourselves but judgment, because that is what you do.  It's actually not really personal any more.  It's a mental and physical health decision, and a safety matter.

You are drains for my well-being.  You suck my joy out of me, attempt to tell me how I should be feeling, use judgment, condemnation and shame in your every day lives.  You make me feel worse, not better.  Being around people who do not understand how to communicate on an emotional level, who do not practice daily at becoming something more authentic and less bound to their egos, who cannot manifest genuine empathy for another being (who is not your child), is not something I choose any longer.  
 

I no longer wish to argue or compete with you.  I do not wish to be better than you, or worse than you.  I do not need or value your judgments, for they are based purely on your incredibly scripted subjective views of the world.  You know almost nothing about me now, only what you can make assumptions about, based on the stories inside your head, which have absolutely nothing to do with my real life.  You don't know me at all, and, deep down, you never have.  I've kept hidden and silent about my real feelings up until now, so you couldn't see my inner responses to the profound dysfunction I have observed unendingly in our family.  It was never safe to speak truths.

Your way of being isn't the way of being I choose for myself.  Or for my family.  Because I haven't chosen to move through the same emotional path as you should not make me a threat, and it should not be hurtful, not where there is real love, instead of the conditional stuff you seem to equate with love.

Source: http://www.facebook.com

The other day, my cousin found a private Facebook account of mine (boundaries), and decided to ask, after the fact (boundaries), if he could post pictures of me on an ancestry site (boundaries).  He also requested, unbelievably, for me to assist him in contacting my sister (boundaries).  I wrote him back briefly to tell him I did not want him to post pictures of me on the internet.  Setting my own healthy boundary, end of story.  All the other stuff he said, which had to do with his interest, his wishes, his efforts, were lacking entirely in any query or question as to what I was doing or why I had done it.

It was a very typical form of communication for my family, one in which there was a request made on the assumption that I would jump in to assist (boundaries), without ever asking me if this was something I would even be willing to do (bang, more boundaries).  When I deleted said Facebook account, my cousin (who seems to NEED to have the last word) got frustrated and stalked down my husband on Friendfeed (BANG, a HUGE boundary!), and wrote him a very unpleasant little note (bang again, well done, another boundary!), which was supposed to scold me.  He said, and I quote: "You can tell your partner that I've done as she has asked. You may also tell her that what she is doing is extremely hurtful and selfish, and would not expected that of her."

Source: https://www.facebook.com/emergingfrombroken

Oh, delicious!  Bing, bang, boom.  Let's take this apart emotionally for a moment, shall we?  We won't even bother to count how many boundaries were crossed in that interaction, it's clear that such crossings were multiple.

"Partner."  I guess my name is mud, he couldn't bring himself to use my name, which means he's utterly disgusted with me.  There is a remote possibility he thought he was protecting me by not naming me, but that is highly unlikely because seeking out my husband on Friendfeed would not be the way to do that.  It is more likely that messaging me through my husband was a desperate (although impotent) attempt at shaming me within my own family.  All of my husband's friends know exactly who I am, are friendly with me, know what my name is, etc.  It was most plausibly an effort to display disgust and attempt to manipulate me into feeling shame.

(This is actually kind of fun.)  

"Hurtful." Well, okay, yeah, I'll give you that, if you aren't used to someone standing up for themselves, then, yes, it can seem a terrible personal hurt for them to suddenly decide to do it.  I guess that hurt had been a long time coming.  I have absorbed hurts for years and years, and more recently, some pretty painful ones from you.  I am done.  Apparently, you are not.  So go ahead, cousin, hurt. Maybe it'll actually lead you into a more authentic emotion, because anger is a great cover for fear.  Sadness and fear are the honest emotions.  Anger is just the cover for them, mostly for fear.

"Selfish," ah, now there's an attempt at trigger-pulling.  Judgment, especially without understanding, is overall a very weak position, no matter who does it.  The statement always refers to the giver rather than the receiver.

Additionally, if "selfish" means taking care of my mental and physical well-being and that of my children, then I embrace selfishness with an open heart. 

Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/After-Narcissistic-Abuse-There-is-Light-Life-Love/114835348601442

Also, the words "may" and "expect" are fairly loaded as well.  For example: Oh, may I tell her she is being selfish and hurtful? As though it's a privilege that he is telling us this "important" information about me.  As well, expect?  What he expects comes from a script I no longer follow.  It is not, nor has it ever been my job to fulfill his expectations.  At all.  Even remotely.

An honest and respectful communication, as a basis for comparison, was my brief note to him.  I made no judgments, no criticism, no implications, I simply told him I didn't want him to post pictures of me on the internet.  His response *could* have been equally honest, and said something to the effect of "Are you okay? I am afraid you are distancing yourself from me because I may be a bad person in your eyes."  (This is the fear his anger was likely covering, it sure was a fear of mine when I was in the middle of all the dysfunction and couldn't see it clearly.)

From my family?  Highly unlikely.  

From my friends? With wonderful consistency. As well from me to them. Honesty and vulnerability opens others up to feel the same.  When I say "I am feeling vulnerable and scared and awful," no longer is that a signal for people close to me to move in like vultures to a kill to list what is wrong with me and  how wrong my feeling is, but instead it's a signal to offer love, compassion and empathy.  And for me to offer the same in return when it is needed.

Alas, the first and foremost thing on your mind, cousin dearest, is how I have hurt you.  It just doesn't cross your mind that I might be responding to being a handy dandy receptacle for everyone's judgment over a long long lifetime by you, by other family members.  It's just not in your paradigm to consider that a possibility.  So off you go wielding your weapon-y words, not even knowing that you are making the gap between us bigger instead of smaller.  If you are unable to perceive the combative mode of your own chosen (taught) manner of communication, I can't do it for you. 

Because really, who ever felt better and thereby did better by being shamed?  Over the long term?  Do you have science that shows that shaming is a long term effective strategy for getting a person to behave in the way you want them to behave?  Then why are you still using it?  Because you have not thought of any other way of being.

It would be an impossible hope that you might have responded with something empathetic, something that says "I hear your hurt."

You know what, cousin, I hear your hurt.  But I cannot assume responsibility for it.  I own mine and you get to own yours.

No.  My pain, my experiences with you, with attempting to communicate with you over the last several years, again, are irrelevant.  And only your hurt matters. You only care about how *you* feel when I respond honestly and hold up my boundaries.  You don't get to choose those boundaries.  I do.  They're mine.

You are not a safe person for me or my family.  You are not someone I would choose to have in my life were you not a relative.  The fact that you are family and blood related is not enough reason to continue to be treated as utterly without boundaries.  You have more recently practiced on or with me, competition, triangulation, ego-feeding, judgment, criticism, arguing, gaslighting, one-upmanship, all very well, cousin.  Congratulations, you have successfully become our fathers.  You win at everything that is apparently important to you.

This is as far from who I want to be as could be.  And not the way I want to spend my time or energy.

What you have not practiced even remotely is genuine empathy, support, openness and unconditional love. You don't know how.  Especially not towards me, you follow the same family script as everybody else.  You buy into the judgment of people who cross my boundaries without a second thought.

'Because the narcissistic family’s structure is controlled by those family members who are narcissistic and wish to make all the others satisfy their wishes and unhealthy needs, deviations from the narcissistic desires present aren’t tolerated — boundaries aren’t respected, and unreasonable responses are the norm. I have often described the narcissistic family as a “tiny cult” whose non-narcissistic members are expected to believe, do, have and be only what the narcissistic family members in power want them to believe, do have and be. Other thoughts and actions are not rewarded – or worse, harshly condemned.' ~ Light's Blog

Further, cousin, you have spoken about my children as though they are statistics (as have other members of your family).  I would never dream of speaking of your children in this manner.  Or even *thinking* of them in this manner.  That right there was enough for me to consider you unsafe, especially with my children and to stop further contact.

I don't owe you the ability to define my boundaries, or define who I am, or define what I'm supposed to say or think OR feel.  Truly, I do not owe you any of that.  None.  You have done nothing in my life or in communication with me that has motivated me to continue our relationship, except make me feel judged, misunderstood, unheard and continually called into question.

I am no longer misunderstood or unheard by my chosen family.  My boundaries are deeply respected and I am with people who love me for exactly who I am right now.  Not for what I have done, or produced. Not for the mask I hold up to the world, which clearly, I am no longer very good at.  I need no masks with them and in fact, they point it out when I start wearing one.  

I have no wish to continue the patterns of dysfunction our family has created as their basis for being in the world.  Between me and them, there is no there there. Their interpretation of reality and mine are very very different.

How my family have treated me (and my sister) is incredibly dismissive, hurtful, dysfunctional, abusive, competitive, with a lot of implied be good, do this, act this way, or you are the first goto word we know, which happens to be "selfish."  You are all very good at telling me how I'm supposed to feel and not hearing how I really am feeling.  

You don't get to do that anymore.  You don't get to define me in any way, according to how you see things.  If my practice of holding healthy boundaries actually upsets you, then it is time to examine that upset in yourselves.  To take a look at your own triggers.  

I choose to love myself, because I am worthy, and by loving myself, I am able to deeply love others and have them love me back.  My blood relatives do not fit into this paradigm.  I therefore choose to walk away from the hate, judgment, anger, criticism, ego, and walk towards the love.

Sincerely,
Miriam Mason