the visit

[Guest guest]

Later this month, I will be making my annual visit to BPD mom and the childhood

home. This is always hard. It will be especially hard this time because she is

in a particularly bad state mentally and physically.

No matter how much I tell myself I can handle it this time, no matter how much I

tell myself that all my hard work has paid off and now I'm mature enough,

recovered enough, and have become a person with an actual identity, no matter

how much I know that my great husband will be there to help ... no matter how

much I believe these things, when the date actually draws nearer I start to feel

(a) a sick gnawing in my gut that just goes on and on and ( crazy again.

Suddenly the fleas are all back: the hypochondria, the fears, the

self-recriminations, the loss of identity, the pointless gloom, the dread, the

obsession with death -- the things that tormented me half a lifetime ago, in my

twenties, when I'd first left home and first realized that my family was weird.

These crazinesses all swamped me when I first tried to escape them and grow up

-- and for a long time the crazinesses won.

As I'm sure many of you know from experience, realizing at age 22 that my family

had nearly killed my soul did not lead to an instant " cure. " In fact, it led to

years of craziness, because the very act of becoming aware betrayed the

brainwash and the brainwash would not let " me " win.

I spent years in therapy, years thinking and talking about these issues, years

in recovery, years years years.

Now it's suddenly like, whoops, I feel defenseless, infested with fleas I

thought I'd killed.