Good morning!
It’s been a month since I began my journey out of Oz and here are some thoughts I would like to share with you.
This group has been very important to me. A few days ago I had a glitch with my mailbox and I really missed receiving the group’s posts. You are great people.
During this month I’ve been through all sorts of emotions. I’ve felt sadness, happiness, pride, uncertainty and hope. I’ve already found myself missing exbp a lot, but when that happens I’ve concentrated on the bad moments and have felt relief right after. Once, I read a post from this group suggesting it to be good to make a list of aggressions from the exbp. Though I do not physically consult the list that often, when I start feeling nostalgic about exbp, I start reviewing the list mentally. From time to time I do read the list to remember.
My path to recovery is one of self-discovery. I’ve been learning a lot about myself. I am still doing it alone, but I am seriously considering the help of a therapist in a few months when my financial situation allows. I’ve been breaking the bad thoughts about myself which exbp had so much worked on creating.
I’ve had a lot of nightmares. I did expect them after having read things about PTSD happening after the end of relationships with people with borderline personality disorder. It seems the rate of nightmares is dropping. Last week I had one per day. I do not remember this night’s dream, so I suppose it was not a nightmare.
Since about last week, I’ve been noticing a boost in my productivity at the work place.
I’ve been searching for the person I was before exbp. I think that she did not destroy my core and I will soon be more or less the person I was. I am also finding the good things about having had the relationship. And it did have one great thing. I’ve been finding that if exbp has a huge mental/personality disorder (not going into the discussion of mental vs. personality right now), I also have one major problem, very weak emotional boundaries. It is like having AIDS and exbp happened to be the pneumonia which would have ultimately killed me. My emotional immunological system is a deficient one. So I am starting to try to take advantage of the relationship as possibly the most important learning experience in my life. It’s like I am finally taking a course on boundaries.
I think I am stopping to see the world through exbp’s lens, with an Oz filter. However, I am putting in my own lens with a different filter, the emotional abuse filter. I’ve been finding some unexpected things. The first and most obvious one was that my family is not as functional as it seemed to me, as I had shared with you before. The second is related to my old friends. I’ve been recovering my friendships one by one. I’ve been finding that the people whose friendship I was throwing away, are generally great people. I am very happy for having them back and I still have some to recover. However my brand new emotional abuse filtered lenses have shown me that one of my friendships was not a truly healthy one and is not totally based on respect for each other, but too much on my friend’s own needs, mostly his need to be above everyone else. It struck me yesterday when I was talking to him and I was feeling put down by him because of the way he was disagreeing on some of my recent decisions (not exbp related). The problem was not his disagreement. We all have our points of view. The problem was that while he was disagreeing he was implying how smart he is and I am being an idiot, though everyone else supported me. Gee... do we have emotional AIDS, or what? The difference is that now hopefully I have become quite sensitive about those things and I think I am much more able to detect them. I just hope I have not become excessively sensitive. Anyhow, I will be investing much more on my other old friendships in lieu of that one.
I also found a funny coincidence. This is just a curiosity. Before starting to live with exbp, I flew airplanes and sailplanes. Flying sailplanes is a community based activity. It takes a team to put a sailplane in the air. The funny thing is that the friends whom nowadays I value most are precisely the friends I made from that community. They have been very supportive and not the least judgmental. I’ve also not found any emotional abuse from their part until now.
It was precisely one of those friends who once told me how bad relationships made him a much colder person. I remember thinking "I hope that never happens to me", but it did happen. I do not really think that my core has changed, but I find it too dangerous and expensive to be always so worried about everyone else to the point of neglecting my own self. I still happen to think that if everybody was like me (a Non), strong boundaries would not be that important, since we would simply respect each other without the need to enforce our own space, and that it would be a much more beautiful world. But, hey, real life is not like that and we do need boundaries and we do need to be cold sometimes.
For anyone who is having a troubled time dealing with guilt and consciousness, I can give you an analogy, one I failed to see myself when I was with exbp.
When I flew, one of my favorite activities was to tow sailplanes. As you know, a sailplane is simply an extremely lightweight airplane with very long and thin wings and no engine. Despite not having an engine, it shares the same aerodynamic principals of airplanes. Because of the absence of the engine, sailplane pilots find energy to keep flying in nature’s forces. The problem is that normal nature’s forces are only enough to keep them flying, not to help them begin their flight. Something more powerful is needed. Typically, an airplane will tow the sailplane from takeoff to a determined height. Both crafts are attached by a strong nylon chord and when the sailplane pilot thinks he has enough height to be able to follow on his own, he releases himself from the towplane. This activity has one very critical situation, takeoff. When something goes wrong on takeoff, the sailplane is not able to survive on its own. It will certainly fall. I did both activities, flying sailplanes and towing them, but I did a lot more of the latter. One of the most important rules I learned when I towed gliders was that under extreme emergency situations it is better to have only one dead person than two dead people. This means that when things go wrong, the towpilot has a yellow lever in the cockpit which he can pull to release himself from the sailplane and free himself from the extra drag and weight in order to survive through the critical situation.
Once this pilot filled her sailplane with water (pilots do that when they think that conditions are great for long distance flights and though the extra weight makes it harder to climb, it helps to keep the energy when doing cross-country). However, she put in too much water. Besides that, at the end of the runway there was a forest. Both towplane and sailplane started the takeoff run. When they reached the end, both were not able to climb over the tree tops. So, the towpilot pulled the yellow lever and released himself. He made it. The sailplane, however, went flying right into the forest and broke all into pieces. Had the towing pilot not release himself both would have been killed for sure. Because of his decision at least he survived. Even better, because of his decision the sailplane had less energy when it fell into the trees. Though the craft was destroyed, the pilot did survive, with only a few bruises and a big fright. So, the decision to release did not only grant the survival of the towpilot, but it also enabled the survival of the sailplane pilot.
My point is, being a Non, you are the towpilot with a BP sailplane attached to you and you are facing the trees. You have to decide whether you release yourself or not. You can risk it and try to pass the top of the trees with the sailplane attached. But remember that with so much weight, even if you pass the trees (very unlikely), your flight will be all extremely critical. To add to the complexity, you will find mountains in the area and even if you survived the trees, you will have to go through the same decision again and again and again. If that is your decision, my advice is to at least never take your hand off the yellow lever so you can release yourself immediately should you come to it. Odds are that the BP is so desperately focused grabbing onto you that she/he will not try to release the excessive water (baggage) she/he carries and you will eventually run out of fuel. From their point of view it is your fault your airplane is not powerful enough and not their issue that that they have too much weight (baggage). If you decide not to risk the tree tops, then you’ve made a good choice. Congratulations. You’ve saved at least yourself and you’ve given the BP the best chance for her/his survival. Even if the outcome is not favorable for the BP, you were not the one topping her sailplane with water and when you released, you simply did what you had to do. Even if it wasn't the BP overfilling the tanks, but someone else, like his/her parents, it is not your fault he/she is unable to free himself/herself from the overweight.
Have a nice day, my friends,
Rui