While reading about trust, I found the piece of the puzzle that always puzzled me.
My passion and interest has been the complex nature of abuse and its generational clutches. How it seems this cycle is so damn hard to break. How families are locked tightly together loyally no matter the abuse.
The opposing and conflicting dynamics has kept me engaged for so many years as I tried to unravel the mystery and legacy of abuse.
It seems at first blush, that we would avoid people who hurt us.
That who in their right mind would remain loyal to abusers?
And, why would we, as adult children of abuse, pass this on to our children and/or become unable to end abuse?
Families where abuse happens, are often just the latest generation to experience abuse; it isn't a new family tradition - but tradition.
Once I awoke to the insanity of my dysfunctional family. I was/am obsessed by the ways families pass this on like a family secret recipe.
This morning I read this in "Trust" by Iyanla Vanzant
"Hope versus Trust"
"Learning to trust others means that you not only have an awareness of your own unmet needs, you also possess a consciousness of how desperate you are to get those needs met. When you are desperate to meet a need, you can be easily swayed by the promise of something better than what you have previously experienced. When you are unaware of the need, its origin, or how it motivates your choices and behavior, you are no longer working with trust. You are holding on to hope."
"Hoping that someone will meet your needs and trusting his capacity to do so are very two different things. When you are hoping, you ignore, dismiss or diminish all of the physical and logical signs that are presented to indicate whether or not you can or should trust the other person. You downplay or reject the signs that suggest that what you want and the other person's capacity to give it to you are as separate as oil in water. When you are hoping to get your needs met with someone, more often than not you know it will not happen with this person, but you hope you are wrong. When, on the other hand, you trust, you see clear evidence that what you need is possible and that person you are involved with is willing and able to fulfill that need."
"Remember trust requires knowing that you are involved with a good person and that they have your best interests at heart. You trust yourself enough to be vulnerable, and you trust that the person enough to believe they will not take advantage of you..." Iyanla
Sadly, the more needy you are, the less you will see clearly...and the more hopeful you have to be. You can't trust, for you can't even see who they truly are.
This blind need is overwhelmingly prevalent in dysfunctional homes.
I just re-watched Brene Brown speak of the Parent Manifesto. It speaks of children being seen, heard and valued.
It is the complete opposite of what happens in an abusive home.
Abuse and incest raise very needy children who are literally blind to the actions of their abusers BY the sheer NEED for love; to be seen, heard and valued.
I wondered what made the blindness. I thought it was their love for a parent/sibling.
It isn't love.
It is complete and utter need.
What I am just learning is that this hungry need will block clear sight.
This need will overshadow everything.
They keep going back to the original source to get the love they think is still there.
I am not sure I can articulate this in the way my whole body knows this to be true.
But, this need, this deep deep hunger, eclipses all else.
It is wholly personal to each person.
Each individual has this unmet need.
In my experience with my family of origin, this is so very true.
There literally wasn't anything I could have said or done to change the volume of need inside of them. The hungrier the need; the blinder they become.
What freedom this brings me; and peace.
I didn't make them hungry and I can't fill them up.
Need, the unmet need, steers their world.
I have felt helpless and incapable of being understood or heard. What I never knew, was that it wasn't me that they couldn't see...but that their unmet NEED was bigger than me.
It is the unmovable wall between us.
At times today, this overwhelmed me with sadness.
For the very thing they hunger for is inside of them.
A self who is waiting to be seen, heard and valued BY you.
You are the one you are waiting for...
