Here is something I have been wanting to talk about for some time. Like, eight months. I have waited so long because I had to be certain it was safe for me to discuss, and it took that long to get my shit together with the new site and password etc. So here it is:
How I feel about my sister-in-law’s pregnancy (and subsequent birth in November 2010). Let me clarify it is DH’s sister I am talking about, and not my brother’s wife. My brother’s wife had her second child in June 2010 and has not been a problem for me. Thank God!
Essentially, I feel outraged at the injustice that she can have a child and I (as yet) cannot. I know this is a normal response and we all go through it, but the degree of my reaction to this particular set of circumstances has been extreme to say the least. It is what prompted me to go back to counselling in October of last year, and it is only today that I have had a session that thoroughly dealt with these feelings and specifically focused on my relationship with her.
I don’t know if I have mentioned my relationship with SIL here in any detail before. If I am smart, I won’t have (in case she somehow found out), but I’m not always smart! The crux of it is, that we are both very similar in many ways, and probably competing, on some level, to “occupy the same psychological space” as the Psych we recently did surrogacy counselling with, would put it. We are both smart, driven, perfectionists, who like to be heard, like to be right and like to get their own way. I suspect that she saw me as a threat to her role/position in her family from day one and she has bullied me ever since I met DH. I get along well with the other family members, which she perhaps finds intimidating. She doesn’t seem to be able to cope with intimacy in her relationships, and I am happy to show and give love readily which may perhaps stoke some jealousy on her part. All of my conjecturing on what she feels is just that- conjecture- because she would never let someone in that close to divulge feelings, especially if they made her vulnerable.
So she puts on a coat of strong armour and bullies her way through interactions with people (including her long suffering hen pecked boyfriend), demanding that those around her meet her needs without her having to mention what they are, whether they are completely unreasonable or not, and declines to take a shred of responsibility for her behaviour, instead projecting her uncomfortable feelings on to those around her and making them out to be the perpetrator of violence towards her.
Difficult to deal with much?
Along comes me, who likes to resolve conflict and maintain healthy relationships, and gives it a go. And fails. Gets kicked in the teeth (metaphorically) and emotionally abused (literally) for fourteen years. And still tries. And still fails.
At some point in my counselling in 2009/early 2010 I come to realise that I am playing out the relationship I had as a small child, with my mother. In that she was emotionally not available for me, and I tried everything I could to gain her attention/love/acceptance and avoid her displeasure, and failed. She was a walking emotional timebomb which could go off at any minute, no matter what you did, but you still tried to minimise the impact by whatever means possible. From that relationship I developed a fragile sense of self that felt worthless unless I was perfect, which was quite harmful to my ‘child’ self, and led to behavioural problems that have impacted me throughout life and continue to do so (though, as you know, I’m working on them!)
No wonder my response to SIL is so strong, because the fear I have of her comes from my abandoned child.
And then she gets pregnant. And has never mentioned wanting a child, or that children might be in her future, or that she likes children in any way or would ever consider having one. Not. A. Word. Then bam, she hits DH’s inbox with a 20 week ultrasound. And accompanying paragraphs filled with her interesting morning sickness and who her obstetrician is, and would DH like a copy of the DVD of the ultrasound and so on and so forth, for about half a page. Somewhere in there are the words “I know this will be hard for you and S” but what she’s landed us with does not suggest in any way that she has actually taken into account that it will be hard for us. It feels like she is rubbing my nose in it. DH said I ought not to have looked at the email, as it was sent to him, and not me, and if I didn’t look I wouldn’t be upset. True enough, but if a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears it, does it still make a noise? i.e.: does it make the email any less thoughtful if I don’t see it? And who waits until 20 weeks to mention a pregnancy to their own family???
And my abandoned child is screaming to me: “How can you let HER be a mother?? You know how she will emotionally abuse that child, and how that child will suffer and what it will cost him to repair the damage when he grows up.” And my adult says “Fuck yeah, how come she gets a shot at motherhood and I don’t? Me, who is doing the work now to heal myself so that I don’t pass serious emotional abusive shit on to my children? How is that remotely fair???”
Anyhoo, it threw me, and I was the most rattled I have been since I felt like I got a handle on the jealousy aspect of infertility earlier in 2010. I felt like I was back to square one, and completely overwhelmed by feelings of injustice, anger and rage. Consumed by them. It felt like a real setback to me, and I felt disappointment with myself for having such a strong reaction. I spoke with my sister, and with a few close female friends at length, and with my (ex) UK counsellor friend. They pointed out the normality of my feelings given my situation, and it was great to vent – God knows I needed it, and wasn’t able to do it here safely.
But still I felt tainted by those feelings, and like I was the one losing if I continued to drag them around. And what would it be like once the baby was born? So I searched out another (local) therapist and saw him for about 8 sessions up til the end of 2010. Somehow we delved deeper into issues of my childhood, which I figured would probably be useful in the long run, but didn’t do much to address the issue with SIL.
Then in the New Year I began phone counselling with K, and today was session five, and out it all came. The intensity of those feelings was not as strong as 6 months ago, but still enormously powerful and I cried my way through the whole hour. And after what feels like the tenth time of going over that story and all the complexities, some real nuggets of gold registered. Much of this I had gone through a year before with my UK counsellor, but I couldn’t seem to really connect to it for some reason. But I think personal growth is like a spiral curriculum [A curriculum in which students repeat the study of a subject at different grade levels, each time at a higher level of difficulty and in greater depth.] and so it doesn’t surprise me that I have reached a point now where I feel more like I can DO this, I can get past these feelings. It is going to take some time, (and I don’t know how long!), but for the very first time I feel like I can do it. And here is how I will begin:
- Accept the way I feel towards her. Own the feelings, sit with them, allow them, but don’t give her any energy through them.
- Have some compassion for my threatened, scared ‘child’ ego state who feels no trust or safety in this relationship with SIL, and protect my ‘child’ from further harm by engaging with SIL as little as possible- pleasantly distant, non-confrontational. The more engagement I have, the more I try to ‘repair’ the conflict, the more pain I will suffer.
- Accept that SIL doesn’t want this relationship fixed. She likes it like this. If I am miserable, it justifies her own internal misery and she feeds on that. There is nothing I can do to fix this, only to avoid it.
- Accept there is nothing I can do except protect myself.
- Accept that a relationship with someone who behaves the way she does is not one I would choose. I have a relationship with her (such as it is) purely because she is my husband’s sister. I have not ‘failed’ at this relationship, because it is not one I would have ever taken on willingly if she was someone I happened to meet randomly.
- Realise that nothing depends on my having a good relationship with her. Not one thing. My relationship with my husband does not depend on it. My relationship with the other family members does not depend on it. When I was a child, the relationship I had with my mother was important because my survival depended on it. SIL is not my mother, and I do not depend on her for anything.
- If I can unhook my child ego state from the games SIL plays (she wins, I lose & get to feel bad) and unhook from putting the face of my early relationship with my mother onto the relationship I now have with SIL, then I can shelter my child and keep her safe.
- If my child can feel in a position of safety, and I can accept that I have not failed; I cannot fix this; she does not matter to me, then I think these painful feelings I have about her can start to diminish.
- Accept that I cannot rescue her son from her behaviour. That is not my job. I cannot rescue the world, and she would not allow an intimate relationship between me and her son anyway.
So, phew.
I had two people drop around (separately) for 1.5hr coffees today, re-made the guest beds from the weekend, shopped, picked lots of fruit in my orchard and now the neighbour is coming for dinner in ten minutes and I need a shower. Also, dinner is still a germ of an idea, and DH is out cycling. Gotta run! Thanks for listening……
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