EveningRose

It's been mentioned in other threads, but I'll ask it here separately.

One of the ways I (and I think many of us) have come to terms and found some compassion and forgiveness for our alcoholic parent is by understanding that they often came out of a lousy situation themselves; realizing maybe managing to give us something better than what they got was as good as they were capable of; understanding how broken they were.

For me, this is why I don't feel more anger or hatred toward my AF.

My mother, however, is a different story. She spent my life letting me know how lousy my father's family was and how wonderful hers was. His side of the family (including my cousins who had nothing to do with any of it, obviously) were all Bad, and my cousins, aunts, uncles, everyone on her side, were all Good, smart, beautiful, funny, wonderful in every way.

Apart from her stories, I do know that it seems to be a fairly close-knit family even now; they still enjoy getting together a few times a year. Her mother was awarded a Mother of the Year award two years running by their church.

So it makes it hard for me to understand what her 'excuse' is. It makes it hard for me to have compassion. Yes, I know she has spent 50 years married to an abuser, but she has been negative and critical for the last 40 that I can remember. She had an education and supportive family--ie, she had the resources to leave him, but she chose not to, even after outright violence leading to jail time for him.

She tells me stories about her childhood that leave me thinking she was bitter, envious, critical, negative, and jealous long before she married my father, anyway.

So where do I go with this? Having some understanding has helped me with my AF, but to me it looks like she much more willingly chose negativity every step of the way.

Day by day, I'm getting a little better at shrugging and saying it's between her and God and not my place to worry about why, but I'd love to hear any input from others, too.

dbh

Your post sounds so much like my family!

Growing up, we too were told that my father's side of the family was "bad". Granted, there was a lot of drug and alcohol problems on that side. After my parents divorced the time I spent with aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father's side was almost non-existent.

My mother's side was the "good" side. They were the people who truly cared about us (or so we were told).

I was in my thirties when I started to notice the dysfunction on my mother's side. There were no alcohol problems, but my grandmother was extremely critical and verbally abusive to her children while they were growing up. In hindsight, I think that she might of had a personality disorder.

Outwardly, my mom seems like the perfect mom and she is close with both or her sisters. If you look more deeply though, you can see that they are really co-dependent with each other. Tons of gossip, unsolicited advice, and criticism. Not very healthy relationships.

So, I do think that even though my mom grew up in what looked like a loving home it wasn't. There was something within her that made her attracted to a man like my father and she stayed with him for 15 years. I sometimes wonder if my mother is dealing with her own untreated mental health issues. But, I'm getting to the point where I'm okay with not trying to analyze her and just focus on me.

What I find ironic is that I now actually feel closer to the relatives on my father's side. Even though many of them had addiction problems, a number of them found recovery and are clean and sober now. Even though I never struggled with addiction, I understand dysfunction, co-dependency, and of course living with an active alcoholic (which all of our fathers were). We can truly relate to one another when we get together.

On my mother's side, no one has really changed and there is still a lot of dysfunction in the way that they interact with one another.

You never know where life is going to lead you ....

Thanks for letting me share.

db

Willybluedog

I am at a loss in my family on both sides, my grandmothers were good churchgoing women who never drank, swore, etc, were not mean to their kids, my grandfathers drank occasionally but were not alcoholics, were strict but not abusive, then my mom turns up as a acid-tongued raging alcoholic and my dad is physically and verbally brutal with me, it's like where the hell did all this come from.

My therapist says my mother has to be burying some kind of pain (abuse, etc.) because this stuff does not just come out of the blue.

I don't know, but I am struggling to forgive my mom because she is in totla denial about the drinking and the abuse, my dad has at least said that he botched it and he was sorry.

I just keep plodding along with SR, with my therapy, and my acoa workbook, and hope someday that I can get past all this.

Thanks for sharing,

Big hugs to you,

Bill

Kialua

My Mom liked to paint my grandparents as ogres but they weren't. They were farmers and she wasn't the rich girl in town so she hated them and was a brat. She had nice life and wanted to live on the wild side with a partyer and this is what it got her:
-an alcoholic husband who beat his kids and taught her to beat them,
-worried her parents to death,
-estranged her from the whole family because she had to the keep the secret,
-friendless because of the same, keeping secrets,
-children who tolerate her,
-and a life of hypochondriacism to deal with it all.

I decided a long time ago that I didn't care "why" my parents were the way they were, it was never going to help me deal with my life. Whether they grew up happy or sad doesn't make a difference. I grew up beat and unhappy but I made a better life for myself and my family.

So forgiving them didn't hinge on why they did, or what they did, or if they deserved it or not. It was merely for me. To some I may sound bitter in the above explanation but I'm not. I know I can share the harsh realities that we have all lived, without sugar coating it like I have to for others not familiar with ACA.

I think it's a big breakthrough for you to be dealing with this now.

bluebelle

Kialua, Your mom sounds like my mom. Wow! My mom also came from a pretty good, decent family. She always acted like they are the cause of all of her problems. She never takes responsibility for anything. My mom was also a partier. Her mental health deteriorated over the years of taking drugs. I sometimes wonder what could have happened to make her have the drug problem and end up with a string of abusive boyriends/husbands. I may never be able to answer that. My mom has also had a life of hypochrondriasm. That's one of the way she deals with things--she blames it on her physical health. Really, she just never takes responsibility for anything. I have some compasion for her because I think that she must really hate herself. She treats everybody really badly, but her respect for herself must be even worse. She treats herself very poorly and is a pretty miserable person. So, somedays I feel compassion and forgiveness. Other days, I feel very angry, or sometimes just very sad. I do think she is very miserable, even if it is all self-created.

DesertEyes

I used to have that problem too. One of the "issues" I have had to deal with is that the concepts people use out there in the "normal" world are not the ones I learned as a chlid. Concepts like "love", "kindness", "gift", "respect". All those things I had in my head the definition seen thru the eyes of an abused child.

Like you mention, I tried to understand _why_ those people did the things they did. I got into Psychology up to my eyeballs, went so far as to read Freud in the original German.

Yes, I know, that clearly shows a bit too much obsessive behavior on my part.

All of which _did_ help me understand the toxic behavior that my family exhibited. The problem I had then is that all that knowledge did absolutely _nothing_ to change my feelings. When I first started recovery I had no idea what the _correct_ meaning of "compassion" really is. My emotions were so tangled up I could not even _name_ them correctly, never mind something deep and complex like "compassion".

What I was doing was trying to find an intellectual solution to my emotional confusion. That did not work for me at all.

I struggled with that for a long time. I believed that both my parents did _not_ do the best they could. I believed that they _could_ have chosen to get into therapy, or get divorced, or any of a million other solutions.

My sponsor helped me clear that up. He asked me to sit down with two pieces of paper and assume, just for the purpose of excercise, that my parents did _not_ do the best they could. Assume that I had some kind of magical crystal ball that could go backwards in time and read their minds.

On one piece of paper I was write down how my _future_ would be different if my parents did _not_ do the best they could.

On the other piece of paper write down my _future_ as if they _had_ done the best they could.

I thought that was a totally stupid idea. Nobody can tell the future.

My sponsor said he could tell what my future was, with that wry grin that sponsors get when they know they have you lined up for a "zinger".

He said that as long as I kept looking at my past my future would continue to be my past. He said that the moment I started putting as much effort into my future as I was doing into my past I would actually _have_ a future.

That is exactly what I did, along with lots of meetings and a couple good therapists.

At one point I was able to establish a boundary with my biological mother. She used to call me two, three times a day dumping all her problems on me, wanting me to fix my father, or my aunt, or my uncle, or whoever she was angry at. I suspect that those demands are part of the reason why I became such a "hero child" and so focused on "understanding" my toxic family.

One day I told her that I was not her shrink, and if she wanted me to become her shrink I wanted 100 dollars an hour for the "counseling session". I stood firm on that boundary, it took a few months, and I actually made a few hundred bucks, and then she stopped.

My biological parents are long gone, and I still don't know if they did the best they could, or if they were too messed up to do otherwise, or if they were just plain evil, or any of a million possible explanations.

What I do know is that I no longer care, because it makes no difference in my future.

Mike

dbh

Once again I find myself so grateful for your wisdom Mike.

Thank you!

db

Plath

I always just assume that people have serious problems like alcoholism or abusive behaviors for a reason, I suppose. Whether it's a chemical imbalance, or something we may never know about, it's just been my experience that it rarely occurs without some sort of source.

Someone may have had a seemingly normal family, but something may have happened to them along the way that they never told anyone about...or their family, while seeming to be healthy and "good", may have been codependent, critical, etc., even on a subtle level that we may not see but the recipients have been affected by.

That's what I have seen from my personal experience with friends, family, etc., anyway.

My best friend's family looks as though they are the most caring, hard working family a person could ask for (I say "best friend" because she has literally been like a sister to me for 32 years). However, behind the scenes, her mother was neurotic in a very passive-aggressive way, playing favorites, demonizing one sibling and then another, etc.

I can remember being about five years old and my friend yelling at her mom to "shut up and leave me alone! Shut the door!" and I was frozen in fear, because if I had ever dared to speak even in a yelling tone to my mom there would have been he!! to pay. But her mom just shut the door, and muttered about how she was an awful child. It was weird that there were no boundaries.
My friend was also always overweight, even as young as five years old, and her mom would say things to my mom in front of all of us like "well, I have to buy her the best clothes, to make up for how she is so that the kids don't make fun of her", etc., as if being overweight obviously made her some sort of hideous monster who had to be protected from how hideous she was.

And her father, while a quiet man who worked his entire life in the orchards and as our high school janitor, was not emotionally available to her.
She was made fun of a lot in school for being fat, etc.

My friend has had major addiction issues for almost 20 years, she has five children from five different low-life men (except for her first husband, who died before their daughter turned one year), four who live with her aging parents and always have, and she's still using drugs and living with an abusive @ss.

From the outside looking in, a person would wonder why she is the way she is--even she can't figure out why she is the way she is--but from my perspective, I can understand how her life was lacking in order or boundaries, was erosive to her self-esteem, etc...

So, anyway, that's just an odd perspective from my experience. I have found that many people have little compassion for her, as they think that her family was so healthy and "normal", but I can see it for what it is, which is really dysfunctional, albeit on a less overt level.

Anyway, I suppose that's just my story about why I generally assume that somewhere along the line, something went wrong when people are irresponsible, abusive, unavailable, addicted, etc.

I also know of many people who were abused in some way throughout the course of their childhoods, and either never spoke a word about it to their families, or were not believed and just went about their lives as if it didn't happen. But when such things happen, the damage is done, of course, whether it's acknowledged or not.

We may not know what, where, how, or why, or we can just assume that they are/were just not nice people to begin with.
I suppose the end result is what everyone else has said, and that is that the forgiveness is for us, and we don't necessarily have to understand. But it does make it a lot easier if we are able to understand it...unfortunately, many of us don't always have that luxury.

Many warm wishes to you on your journey, and thank you for letting me share my experience.

EveningRose

Thank you, Plath.

I do see that forgiveness is for us, not them. But it helps me to be able to forgive if I can look at someone with compassion for the hurdles they faced instead of taking it personally. Your post helps me a lot, because my mother has long talked about how she was teased for being a 'bookworm.' Okay, sounds silly here and now. But I think her brothers tormented her.

It still, to my mind, doesn't make it aceptable, understandable, or okay on any level that she let herself be so weak and then took it out on me. And yet...it helps me to at least make some sense of it.

In a funny sort of way, it gives me strength, too, to see that I chose to be strong rather than weak.

Plath

My mom was also teased by her older brother, and she looked up to him because he was popular in school, as was her sister. He would tease her cruelly on the bus to school in front of all the other kids, and she wasn't as close to her mom as her other two siblings were. Strangely, it was their awful, cruel alcoholic father who stuck up for my mom and told my uncle not to make fun of her.

So while my aunt and uncle made it out okay, my mom was lacking that rapport with her own mother, and she didn't have the same level of acceptance from her peers to fall back on.

I always kind of assume that's why she's more neurotic (or at least more visibly so) than my aunt and uncle.

Even though their family wasn't by any means "normal" or healthy, I can still see how my mom was a very fragmented person, more so than her siblings I guess.

They all have their issues in a way, but my mom seems to have carried the brunt of a lot of the abuse, at least psychologically and emotionally.

I know that my aunt doesn't seem to understand how my mom took things to heart so much more than she did, but I guess she's not really walking a mile in her shoes, so to speak.

Of course, I don't think that the "whys and hows" make any of it okay, right, acceptable, or even forgivable...but I suppose it's the person, not the actions that we're forgiving. The actions and behaviors will never be forgivable, but I've been fortunate to see the dysfunction of my parents' lives and be able to understand that they never wanted the childhoods that they got either.

But it's weird when things look so "normal and healthy" on the outside, and we can't figure out why a person would act the way that they do. I guess I always assume that I don't know the true family dynamic behind the closed doors of anyone's home life, as even things as subtle as preferential treatment or being made fun of in school, emotional unavailability, etc., can damage people.

But it does make it easier if we can see *something* to figure out why they were the way they were/are, so that we can muster up the compassion to forgive them. But I suppose if we can't figure that out, we just have to do it anyway, in our own time.

Again, many warm wishes to you as you try to sort it out.