One More Perspective

It’s taken 50 some years, four expired marriages and three wonderful Children who are now healthy enough to leave me behind, for me to figure out what’s been happening within my core.  It recalibrates everything I’ve ever known and professed.  I am recording it here because I don’t ever want to forget this.

The Source Breach and Primary Corruption
– The Data: Between toddlerhood and age six, my physical body was repeatedly sexually breached by my Brother (nine years older).  I also had a pedophile Uncle whom my Mother allowed to photograph me alone and with my Cousin, both naked.  Those images exist to this day.
– The Secondary Injury: My Parents failed to act or discipline the perpetrators, and ultimately my Mother shifted the blame onto me for ever talking about the fact that these violations happened and for pointing out the hypocrisy around it.
– The Resulting Code: This erasure cultivated in me a zero-tolerance for falsehoods regarding my own lived experience, and when I loudly defended my reality, I was punished for my continuing need to bring up these unacknowledged, inconvenient truths.  I was programmed to subconsciously believe that my needs are optional, truth is dangerous, and home is a place of gaslighting, of systemic erasure and negligence.  I was actively punished when I spoke my truth about my childhood, including the years my Mother lived a continent apart from me.  To counter my fight for my truth, my Mother labeled me crazy and a Nazi, and routinely weaponized my plight due to my Octopus tone and delivery. 

The Relational Loop (The Turtle Strategy)
– The Pattern: For three marriages, I selected Turtles (Minimizers) because their withdrawal, passive-aggresion and stonewalling subconsciously felt familiar, felt like home.  I was essentially reenacting my childhood. 
– The Affection/Integrity Paradox: I maintained a high need for authenticity, connection, affection, and a zero-tolerance for falsehoods.  In each subsequent environment I had to fight against erasure by rejecting the Magical Reset my Turtles demanded, that I ignore their invisible stonewalling and snap to a happy marriage facade when they had had enough of ignoring me.  I accepted their crums of attention and affection when they felt I had behaved well enough to earn it; it fueled my false hope of change, of repair. For a Turtle, peace is the absence of conflict, but for an Octopus with my history, peace is the presence of truth. When my Spouses demanded a happy marriage facade, they were asking me to participate in my own erasure, the very thing that happened to me throughout my early childhood.
– The Pandemic Trap: In my most recent marriage, working from home collapsed my Professional Firewall, trapping me in a 24/7 hyper-vigilant loop that sustained my old programming for years longer than necessary.  It even clouded my ability to think independently regarding my Children, which is devastating and unforgivable. 

The Family Mask (The Dungatar Effect; see The Dressmaker)
– The Mother: My Mother demands a strict insta-perfect accounting of her life and remains the enforcer of my Family’s masking policy.
– The Recruitment Strategy: I realize that when I speak my truth, my Family recruits my victims (including my Children and former Spouses) into a club of people I have been horrible to.  This club ultimately absolves my Mother of her responsibilities and cements me as everything she says I am.

The Reset
The Baseline: Radical Cognitive Empathy over False Harmony
In the past, I accepted peace as the absence of noise. Moving forward, the only acceptable peace is one built on shared reality. Future connections must demonstrate an ability to hold space for uncomfortable truths without retreating into a shell or weaponizing my Octopus delivery as a diversion from the data.

The Interface: Bidirectional Accountability
I am a Maximizer (Octopus) who processes through connection and verbalization. A viable friend or partner must be a functional Turtle or a fellow Octopus who:
– Abandons the Bunker: Recognizes that silence is not a neutral act; it is a withdrawal of resources.
– Negotiates the Space: Instead of a Magical Reset, we engage in Repair Cycles. If a breach occurs, the connection is not restored until the breach is acknowledged, analyzed, and a patch is applied.
The Metric: Emotional Autonomy
I will no longer accept the Manager role.
Self-Regulation: I require a partner who manages their own emotional state. I will provide support, but I will not provide a Life Support System for someone unwilling to do their own internal work.
The Connection/Safety Ratio: Connection must never come at the expense of my safety or my truth. If the cost of being loved is the erasure of my lived experience, the price is too high. The system will automatically disconnect.

Restorative Parenting (The Grace Protocol)
While I consider my past inability to protect my children as unforgivable, my future requires a pivot from self-judgment to restorative action.
Modeling the Recalibration: The greatest gift I can give my adult Children now is the suppotive presence of a Mother who has stopped being a victim of her own history.
Opening the Channel: I will provide them with the Currency of Truth I was denied. I will own my Code and my Corruption without defensive turtling, allowing them the space to define their own reality of me and to exercise their choice in their relationship with me.