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| Know Yourself and Love Yourself and the Whole World will be Different |
Still, we find our own heart and soul longing to reach a loved one in some way.
I'm not really the one to give advice on this part of relationship conflict, since I tried for 50 years to reach family members with only limited rays of hope for someday maybe succeeding. After 50 years you really have to ask yourself how much longer there is to enjoy the ones who are in your life, and who do love you, and who do not require so much effort to elicit the most miniscule, token response.
I succeeded with my father, though, and for all the effort and all the years, he was worth it. He is as you all know deceased now, but when he was alive, he was a Borderline. That alone made reaching him and holding onto him difficult enough, but he married the NM who totally threw a monkey wrench into any progress every single step of the way. Had he not married the NM, I wouldn't be here though so. Yeah, there it is. She's my birth 'mother', and he loved her so much. Like Borderlines tend to do - over the top love that cycled from love to hate to disgust to protection to love to hate.
On his deathbed Dad realized, finally, every rotten thing about her and her lifetime of lies about their children, her health, his money, religion, you name it. He figured it out. Finally. By the time he was taking his last breath and she was screaming so loudly that my brother was a liar for turning her into authorities for withholding his morphine, Dad was done with her. He died in the throws of just another Narcissistic tantrum of confusion, thinking to himself "Yes, I've had enough." His final cycle in the Borderline cycling of emotions was apathy for that monster. And she exposed herself to him all by herself.
The fact is, my Borderline dad couldn't ever succeed in any relationship with any depth of intimacy because he never learned to know himself - who he really was, beneath the abuse he suffered as a child. And to Love himself. It mattered not the degree to which I loved him because he didn't love himself.
Dad chose another abusive person like his own mother to love - the NM. That's what he knew - what was familiar to him - what felt normal. But he longed to feel real love, and I knew it - I never gave up on him. Not ever. It was so difficult with all the NM did to him and to me over the years for pursuing our relationship. So painful were all her lies and manipulations that she nearly killed us both by the time of his death. She nearly did. We were both weary. Both sick. Both finished. We did get to say goodbye and in the end when he finally figured her out, I think he did really feel my love, and it dawned on him the degree to which I compromised my own health even to love him. He held my hand the whole time I was there - not wanting to ever let that love go. He knew when I left, the darkness would return and he was so brave about being ready to face it.
His actual death was way easier than dealing with the impending darkness of his Narcissistic wife, Covert Narcissistic daughter, and Borderline son with his Narcissistic wife, all of whom would be with him after I left Florida for Pennsylvania, agian. I had no choice but to go.
First, I was just out of the hospital, myself, with bilateral pulmonary emboli and under doctors' care, and secondly, the NM had already kicked me out the year before - I wasn't welcome. My poor dad was brave facing that bitch in his weakest moment. So brave when he told me "You go home. Take care of that family." He always loved my family. He told me there on his deathbed that my husband, Khaled, was the best man he ever knew in his whole life. I was so touched, and I knew then, that he got it, finally. He was telling me what real love is and telling me to hold onto it and nurture it and to be it. To leave that evil place - the place of "my family" of origin, and not to ever look back. I know for sure that is what he was saying with the limited breath he had as he lay dying with Interstitial Lung Disease.
We don't have to wait until we are lying in a hospital bed, taking our last breaths to get this folks!! It is possible to learn to know and to love ourselves NOW. If we are not intimate with ourselves, how can we be so with anyone else?
It is impossible to know who we are without going as far back as it all began, to where our selves were being formed. We must lift those layers and SEE who we really are beneath all the child abuse and false selves we created in order to survive and 'grow'. We don't have to relive the abuse. We will see that we no longer need those false selves. Who we really are is just fine and even better. Shedding who we aren't is easy once we know ourselves and love ourselves.
I survived infancy with the love and cuddling I got from my Daddy and my Grandpa, so my real self for me was left off around the age of five. That's how far back I went to learn to love myself - to first love that little girl and protect her and bring her up to the present day.
The NM always said I was the perfect baby because I only ate and slept, and I think that's how I survived her non love. My dad loved me and my grandpa also loved me very much, and I still remember those loving feelings, and how I'd run to either of them for that feeling of belonging and love. My grandfather died when I was just three years old and I was left with only my father who worked as many jobs as he could to support us - besides satisfying the NM, rebuilding her homes one after the other until finally building her a new home from the foundation up. Nm was never satisfied, but again, I digress.
Others can only offer us the depth of intimacy that they have with themselves surely says it all. In this case, the obligatory response is in it's own way more meaningful.
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