psquared Posted May 10, 2014 Posted May 10, 2014 Dear Sweet Polly, Your family of origin is wrong, wrong, wrong about you. You have some people in your life who greatly admire your courage, integrity and perseverance. Especially in the face of the intensely unhealthy and sadistic past you survived! Let me tell you that again, Polly. You survived! Daddy can't scowl at you any more, rage around and terrify you. You have me now, Polly. Me. I have finally started to learn how to listen to you and just how much you suffered. Mommy and Daddy are not able to hurt you anymore. Michael doesn't know what love is. You showed him a trueness and courage that he is too afraid to see. It exposes him and the sick and twisted dance of his family of origin. Polly, my sweet, kind, genuine, loving little girl, his stories and injustices do not diminish the amazing progress you have made. In spite of a culture which pronouced you permanently flawed and broken to the point of needing daily psych meds, you had the courage to question the true and painful origin of your depression. You had the courage to shed the cloak of a multi-generational pattern of avoidance, betrayal, narcissism, and rage. You decided you wanted to know, to truly know, what the truth of your history was. Were you always skillful as you tumbled, tripped, soared and plunged through the graveyard of your family's history? No, but you have an unbelievable hunger to continue learning. You really do get only one life to live. You know the saying, "Don't cast your pearls before swine"? Polly, Polly, Polly, Michael is a swine. He is duplicitous and cunning. He does not know how to own himself. You have spent so many years trying to make him see your shining light. I know, I know that it hurts to look at that length of time passing. A decade-plus is going to take us a long time to heal but we can do it. Please guard your beauty, the beauty of your soul, the amazing intensity of your capacity for love. Just think of all the times you have become panicked and scared at work. You have cried, ranted, and said some pretty irrational things. What did Brett do? He sat with you through it all. He has never attacked you nor denigrated you. He has never attacked your character. He knows what ad hominems are and he will not resort to those. He has appeared to get anxious and wanting to fix your pain but he could sort of talk about that and in any case, he has never crossed the line of turning his anxiety upon you in a cruel way. He reassured you and showered you with appreciation, admiration, and praise. This, Polly, this is what you deserve from the people you let into your life. You never ever deserved the incredible cruelty inflicted upon you by adults who knew better. You were trapped, Polly, trapped as surely as an inmate in a cage. That is not the truth now. It really isn't. You are not trapped. Michael is a trap. He is a chameleon and changes colors to suit the situation. He desperately needs to be liked by everyone even if it means betraying you. This is unhealthy for you. As it is, I am going to have to sit and talk with you everyday but you can't go back to this dance. It is a crazy, crazy dance Polly. It is making you hardened and suspicious of love. You don't want that. You can't control the stories he is spinning to make himself out to be the victim of your imprisonment. Does it matter if non-thinking people believe him? The people who know you will never believe those lies. The shame and embarrassment around the dissolution of this terrible web of deceit is not yours. Send it back to his mother and father, his stepfather, his brother, your parents and their parents and your siblings. This shame is not yours. Do not carry it for them. It was a fantasy that you were stuck in for a long, long time. Michael has hurt you deeply. He rejected you and was cruel to you. You were a great receptacle for all the feelings he refused to feel. Remember your frustration? It was completely correct. He wanted you to feel for him. All that grief, sadness, and rage, all the tears that he was too afraid to let fall for the little, innocent boy he was so long ago. Seeing you grieve the loss of your childhood was too much for him to bear. You deserve to fully recognize the vastness of who you really are. You deserve to feel safe and content. You deserve to listen to all your parts with openness, kindness, compassion, and curiosity. I am here. I am willing to do whatever it takes. I will hold your hand, stroke your hair and be present for you while we sort through the wreckage of a collapsed fantasy. I will show you that I will not let you fall into this trap again. You can count on me now. When you want to die because you are certain there is no way out? I am here; I will do anything to show you life. Your path is glorious and brave and we can do this. Why are mistakes embarrassing? They don't have to be! You learned that from your parents. They needed you to believe that so you wouldn't be able to see their complete and utter lack of desire to improve, understand and grow. Think of all the books you have read about people who have made life easier for mankind. They made mistakes. It sounds trite, I know, but they kept going and changed course so as not to make the same mistake. Let us not dwell on the mean things that Michael has said, the cruelty of Daddy's words, the abandonment of Mommy. I am here now. We have resources now. You have so much joy and creativity within you. I know that you don't know how it will be expressed. That's okay. It does not mean that you are stupid or inept. Keep feeling your way forward Polly. You have amazing instincts when you listen. Let's listen more; let's follow the guidance of empiricism, reason, logic, philosophy. You're allowed to have standards and criteria for truth. You're allowed to have a definition of love which is not mangled by fear. You realize that Michael claiming you have no laughter is an absurd cruelty, don't you? Polly, it's not much different than Daddy threatening to hit you again for crying from the first time he hit you and then criticizing you for having no sense of humor. Michael only saw you through the distorted and warped lens of his evil and corrupt, abusive parents. You could not win. It was an impossible situation. He sought at almost every turn to paralyze your capacity to reason. He chose not to learn how to listen to and defend his own inner boy. He chose the path of anti-life. Remember Stef's podcast, 'Playing Cards with the Dead'? You were playing house with the dead. Emerge back to life Polly. No one was there for you for many, many years. I know that you are still baffled sometimes by the enormity of the injustice inflicted upon you. I will listen with an open heart to those stories about your kittens, Tinkerbell, and Bingo. As long as you need to tell them, I will listen. But you have choices now. And you have people who will not lie to you, who will stand toe to toe with you and gently but surely ask you to see who you really are. They will question you in a way that helps you know yourself better. You can trust me now. I will not betray you again. I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to work on these things. It's okay, Polly, even if we only make half a step a day, I will be here. WE are what make us whole, no one else. There is no magic cure held by anyone outside of us. Remember that your feelings are transient. Michael will never fix your loneliness. He will never seek true connection wrapped in the clumsy and cruel layers of his false self. Remember that you cannot inflict philosophy on anyone. Think of all the times in your life that you tried. It's incredibly frustrating. You can't turn a non-thinking person into a thinking person with the force of your words. You knew this as a teenager when you wrote this poem: My pen is a weapon And I will kill this paper With my words. I know that you have created a million different arguments over the years to make people see you. It won't work Polly. But what I want you to hear is that I see you now. You don't have to argue your case to me. I'm on your side, always. I promise. I might not do it perfectly but I promise to hone my ability to hear you. If we have to write 10,000 pages to understand your terror, we will. If it takes all night, I'm here. The worst has already happened and we're going to keep surviving until we're thriving. That sounds dumb? Why? You don't have to hide yourself any longer. Mere existence is not all there is. You know that big, expansive feeling you get in your body when you see an amazing vista? When the mountains sing to you? When the sound sparkles in the sun and the clouds sweep the sky? When you feel the joy of being alive? You get to experience that more often. You were born for that, Polly, not the hideous, wretched cruelty of your childhood. Embrace yourself and all that you stand for.
Yeravos Posted May 12, 2014 Posted May 12, 2014 Incredible... The most beautiful thing I've ever read here. Stay strong, and bright!
psquared Posted May 12, 2014 Author Posted May 12, 2014 Thank you all for your comments. I still have so much untangling to do regarding my history. No desire to make a similar mistake. I'm so envious of all the young people who are lucky enough to get exposed to philosophy here. It's very difficult when pretty much everyone around you says you're wrong but as the father of a very good friend of mine said to him when he was young, "You can have a lot of friends, or you can find the truth." If only FreedomainRadio had been around when I was a teenager. Gotta start somewhere though and I definitely would rather face the excruciating difficulty of growth than to go back to how I was even 3 years ago. I had therapists when I was in my mid-twenties and I can't recall any of them ever talking about the inner child, the power disparity between parents and children, etc. This show is what made the connection for me to begin assigning full moral responsibility to my parents which makes it possible to do so for myself.
MysterionMuffles Posted May 14, 2014 Posted May 14, 2014 WOW! What a powerful letter. You have said so much in it that reveals a lot. I feel like I know you already... I can understand that you've been in a relationship with a man lacking quality. A man who had a few good traits that are attractive at a surface level, but there's something about his entanglement with his own behaviour and FOO history that tarnishes the kind of man he can be. For this I am sorry. I also sense a lot of growth in you, one that is vast and confounding in comparison to who you once were. desire Thank you for openness and honesty. A lesser woman would not even begin to admit to such pain or even fault. Your desire to improve is an inspiration to me, and also to my hope in the female populace. The more and more I see women like you on these boards or even in the chatroom and call in shows (the ones with self knowledge and can view their childhoods and past dysfunctions objectively--the more my faith restores in looking for a mate. I hope to find women in my area that are as beautiful as you. And I'm not just talking about your avatar.
psquared Posted May 14, 2014 Author Posted May 14, 2014 Rainbow Jamz, Thank you for taking your time to comment. I think you summed the situation up quite well. I have changed significantly in the last several years. I see many things in a completely different way now. This letter poured through me at 3:00 a.m. and was not edited at all. My inner critic would have me change some things now, mostly due to fear of exposure. It would like to shame me for this expression of myself so I'm exploring that inner conversation. Meanwhile, I am happy to hear that some of my words are encouraging or inspirational to others.
PatrickC Posted May 14, 2014 Posted May 14, 2014 Thanks for sharing Polly, what I assume is a most enlightening piece of journaling for you. Overcoming the shame of our history is often the last bastion of overcoming our false selves.
cherapple Posted May 15, 2014 Posted May 15, 2014 I've also been wowed by your letter, Polly, as a woman of similar age, whose relationship (marriage with kids, in my case ) also didn't survive my commitment and work toward self-knowledge. I married a "family man," hoping that meant I'd find an example of a good family in his, but it ultimately meant that he wouldn't threaten his identity as the "good son" by looking at his own childhood. Stef is right when he says we unconsciously choose the perfect partner. I wanted one who wouldn't be interested in my "shameful" childhood, and I got exactly that. I can identify with a lot of what you've written. "Playing house with the dead" and wondering "where was Freedomain Radio?" when I was looking in therapy, medication, academic philosophy, psychology, literature, books, and marriage and kids -- for so long for someone or something to help me. No therapist (until I learned to look for one) ever said that my anger at my family was justified and that it might help to distance myself physically (the emotional distance was always there) and find out who I was both with and without my family's definition of me. I admire your courage and I'm highly impressed with the things you've been doing and posting. I'm really sorry that it's been so difficult and painful, but I thank you for sharing yourself so deeply.
_LiveFree_ Posted May 15, 2014 Posted May 15, 2014 Oh my. Thank you so much for this, Polly. I read the first paragraph silently but then started over and read the whole thing aloud. I'm feeling... remorse, hope, calm, sadness, and chills all over. I was Michael, and Brett, and you, and a young friend of mine who has just started this journey. She cannot hear herself yet. Although sometimes, for brief moments, she turns into her superhero. I'm so sorry, Polly, for the wrongs heaped upon you. Thank you for posting this letter. Right now, at this moment in my life, it's exactly what I needed to hear. I can't ignore myself any longer. You have my admiration and sincerest thanks not just for the letter, but for all the work you've done to get here.
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