This Is My Family and What They Mean To Me: Part Two

This is Part Two of three articles.  For Part One, click the link at the bottom.

Fast forward to the age of 31.  My attempt to find a way to be happy and make something of my dreams, go somewhere meaningful with my lust for life, had failed.  I was a broken young woman living in Italy, and I came home, not to Zimbabwe, but to South Africa where I was born and where my family had all moved.   I was broke, emotionally wiped out and I looked as though I was dying.  I sure felt as if I was.  31 and I thought my life was over.

I was accepted back into my family but I didn’t fit, not in my own head.  It seemed to me that everybody else had a role of some kind of importance except for me.  I began to realize how painful it was.  I knew what everybody else was doing, but I didn’t realize what I was doing or that that was really where the problem lay for me.  I knew nothing of psychology or projection or dissociation.  I knew I was in pain but I didn’t understand anything about its origins.

It felt to me as if the message was “don’t bring your shit back here, we don’t want to hear it”  and the pressure to “be okay and just get my life together” was immense.  Back then I thought the message came from my siblings, but now I realize that that was what I believed and I projected it.   I was filled with a shame I’d carried around since childhood, and for having made such a mess of my life, so my projection made sense to me!  I was, unawares, the one putting the pressure on myself to bury my past and just be normal.  So I tried.

And succeeded for a while, but my foundation was so rocky that everything fell apart.  With lousy self-esteem and entitlement, fear of people and life in general, total ignorance of how the world worked, how could it not?  I ended up with nothing for a second time.  By then I’d walked away from my family, angry and hurt that I’d had to, as I saw it, so adapt myself to fit in.  I still didn’t realize how much of that requirement to adapt came from within me.  By then my father had died and I had begun to get in touch with my emotions in a real way through therapy.  Every time anybody talked about how important family is I’d get angry and say if family is where you learned you’re worthless then it’s important that you leave.

I had still to learn that my sense of my own worthlessness came from not getting enough love and protection in childhood.  I internalized that to a belief that everybody despised me, as all children do.  It wasn’t the truth.  But my own pain was so all-encompassing that I was incapable of understanding it, or even of how much I wanted  each of my siblings to be parents to me, to be wise and mature - and not have been affected by our childhood.  I couldn’t see that each of us in our own way was wrestling with the aftermath of that time when we were children.

In a way, having a narcissistic parent, especially when there’s drug addiction, creates such insecurity in the children that they are forced into a kind of narcissism in order to survive.  None of us had the capacity to be there for each other in any real way.  I didn’t see it then though, and if you’d asked me what my family meant to me I would have said angrily “they’re bullies” and that I hated everybody.  It still wouldn’t have been the truth.

For Part One of this series, click here