Further thoughts after having received the reply as detailed in my last posting.

Date:   3/30/2005 3:40:58 AM ( 19 y ago)

Further thoughts after having received the reply as detailed in my last posting.

The way I see it now is in very simple terms:
1.) I made a written offer (to share my feelings).
2.) That offer was replied to and completely refused. (There was no acceptance of any of the feelings that I had offered.)
3.) A counter-offer was included in the reply (with the condition that I perform in a certain acceptable manner).
4.) I accept the refusal that I received regarding my initial offer and ignore the “counter-offer” that was proposed in the reply.

Further elaboration re: #3.): What I’m calling the “counter-offer” was an attempt that "mom" made in her letter at what I believe can be called an armistice. An armistice is not peace! Armistice is all about negotiated, conditional, inter-social behavior and Vs the Peace that comes from inner/self-fulfillment. My whole letter was a declaration that I’m not willing to act under any kind of an armistice anymore (even though I never used that term). The same armistice-like elements were identified in my letter including the reference to my entire past behavior that attempted to accommodate the “family” dynamic. I said that I’m not willing to do that any more. End of story and that something I am willing to negotiate. My old manner of relating is like a dead body to me and I don’t want it resurrected. So when the reply came asking that I become "rational" (OR in other words that I stop expressing myself as I had in the letter) there was nothing in those terms that I wanted to agree to and then abide by. And if agreeing to some one's terms of limited acceptable behavior/expression/honesty are the only basis for my relating to someone, to the exclusion of my passionate truth-telling then I'm not interested in that kind of a relationship.

I said what I needed in the letter: to be honest with my feelings and especially to tell the truth about them, knowing that if expressing my feelings doesn’t work for "the family" then obviously I don’t belong to that "family". I eluded to that by saying that “blood ties” alone are not sufficient for me to assume close relations with others regardless of whom those “ties” are with. Of course when I originally wrote that I didn’t actually have present time feelings of any family-type connection (with "mom") and that statement would have indicated that I was already feeling outside of the family and not leaving the determination of “in” or “out” to someone else. So my letter was mostly a declaration that the “gig” is up. The end of “pretending” that I’m in something that I’m really not accepted into. Yet, I was leaving the possibility for the start of a new manner of relating, at least in my own mind. (I felt my ability and willingness to relate on a level of new honesty as I have been practicing over the previous months with my truth-telling group.) And maybe the new manner of relating with “mom” is still a possibility in the future. As I wrote in the letter, I don’t know what the future holds ... and I still don’t now other than I love the freedom I have through radical truth telling!


 

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