All Humans Suffer

This post has been in draft form since July 8, 2005...

ORIGINAL:

Although Rachel might love me, she doesn’t like me. She doesn’t respect me. If I encounter people in my life who don’t like me or respect me, I may continue to love them, but I minimize activities such as contacting them, caring for them, helping them, or even thinking about them much. Today — July 8, 2005 — I will try to begin to do the same with respect to Rachel: to let go of my deepest bonds of love and concern for her. She doesn’t want to love me or be close to me.

Here are words that Rachel uses to describe me:

- unstable
- mean
- scary
- evil
- psychopath

- borderline
- manipulative
- selfish
- bitch

These loaded words are used carelessly, and accompany the lies Rachel tells to propagate her story, which begins: “Hello, I’m Rachel Grossman, and I hate my mother.” By doing this, she will please her paternal aunt and grandmother, and continue to operate in her psychological comfort zone (where she’s been trained to be part of a triangle of uncomfortable family relations, in which nearly all praise and attention was earned when she dishonored me — her mother, the one who provided consistent love, attention, care, and protection — the only one who always put Rachel first). No wonder she’s so negative, self-sabotaging, and depressed!

I’m not sure why I demean myself in response to Rachel’s treatment of me, but I don’t want to do it any more. All of my friends, including those most fond of Rachel, have advised me to stop doing anything for her, and to stop “sucking her ass.”

(perhaps these quotations are enlightening:

“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”
- Honore De Balzac, 1799-1850, French Novelist

“A mother who is really a mother is never free.”
- Honore De Balzac, 1799-1850, French Novelist)

UPDATE:

Reading this draft today, nineteen years later, I now exist on a plateau of detachment, nearly indifference. I do not think about Rachel very often (today is rare, and triggered by reports of someone reading nearly every post in this blog).

To my knowledge, Rachel continues to fortify her mendacious stories. I doubt that she is able to work out her own attachment issues — issues that will continue to plague her throughout her life, and will harm any and every one of her relationships. She has rewritten history (and amplified her rewrites with each retelling) such that her distorted and false memories of very specific situations and conditions are seared into her persona. The fundamental reasons for her feelings and behaviors continue to be unrecognized. Rachel has buried her early trauma — of neglect and subsequent abandonment by her birth mother — under a mendacious mountain of fallacious tales about me. From around age 18, new personality patterns emerged that were instigated and fueled by her Aunt Patty, and Rachel began reacting to discomfort with hysteria, disproportional anger, and irrational accusations. Before that time such reactions never occurred, but Patty’s and Nanny’s alienation efforts reignited the reactive attachment disorder that I had worked diligently with her to overcome. 

As Rachel approaches her fourth decade, her “mother issues” continue to be easily triggered. It is sad that she cannot recognize — and has never come to terms with — their actual source.

I have accepted that this will never change.