The Blame Game.
I’ve made a realization over the past months that my biggest problem isn’t that I grew up with a Borderline Personality Disorder mother. Nope. It’s that I’ve latched on to blaming her and her BPD for all that is wrong and unsavory in my world.
A year ago, I finally found out why I could never have the relationship i yearned for with my parents. It was incredibly freeing. ”Thank God, I’m not the crazy one” But…I fixated on it. I devoured countless books on BPD and Adult Children of BPD Parents, plus many more general self-help titles.
I was weary from this forced transformation I was attempting. I wanted to be healed – right now. RIGHT NOW DAMNIT!
I wanted to get to a point that I could look back from and say, “whew, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with/think about that anymore.”
I will always be that little girl with a whacked out mom. I’m realizing that this journey of healing is so much like the recovering addict’s journey. Once an addict, always an addict. There is no magic pill, or mantra to clean your slate.
Letting go of the blame is part of the healing process for sure. And honestly, it’s one I could never imagine being able to do. I was happily loathing them from afar…wishing they would up and decide to move to Timbuktu.
I picked up SARK’s Transformation Soup a month or so ago. And the words nearly pierced through my heart. “Stop Blaming Your Mother.”
At first I scoffed, well you don’t know my mother. Then as I read on, it began to resonate with me. I was unwillingly for sure. I stopped reading the book midway through, pulled my bookmark and buried that book behind some old high school year books.
Those words haunted me in my dreams. In my dreams, my mom and dad were nurturing me, being the parents I have always wished for. In my dreams, my mom and dad apologized, and in my dreams, I forgave my mom and dad.
The dreams I had previously frequented — the ones where I was yelling and screaming at my parents to get away from me and my kids, the dreams that sometimes even escalated to violence — made sense to me. I was angry, hurt, confused and I wanted to keep my parents as far from me and my family as possible.
These new love-laced dreams were disturbing. What was my psyche trying to tell me?
“Heal, sweet Salem, just heal.”
I will never get an apology in real life. But it’s not relevant any more. I know who my parents are, and I can accept it {or at least working on accepting it}.
Forgiveness is not about forgetting the past. It’s about allowing yourself to stop blaming — yourself, your mother, your father…whoever.
