Just last night I was talking with my upstairs neighbor, who told me her 24 year old daughter recently got abruptly "dumped" by her boyfriend. In the course of the conversation I said something about how it's still tough for young (and older, ahem) women out there, that while there are more opportunities for women nowadays, ours is still a pretty patriarchal society (and we won't even get into how much so most of the rest of the world is).
Well, so happens that today in Bradshaw's book I read where he talks about how we (Westerners, he's talking to, even presumably specifically Americans) grew up in a patriarchal society and how that affected the homes that we were raised in. He goes on to talk about what, in his view, that taught us about the idea of "love."
He writes about what he sees as some particularly damaging "rules" within a patriarchal system:
- "Blind obedience. You obey no mater what the content of the command because the act of obeying is itself virtuous. Blind obedience is the foundation upon which patriarchy stands. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Abraham takes his son to the mountain to kill him in order to obey God. In a pure patriarchy the act of obeying, even if it means killing one's own child, is virtuous. This is the crux of blind obedience. No ruler could ask for a more perfect system of subjugation or devise a better scheme for getting his subjects to conform to his rules. In the religious and parental contexts, individuals are encouraged to blindly obey the leaders' rules and authority. And one of the rules is never to question the rules. The mere questioning of a rule is considered disobedience.
- The repression of all emotions, except fear. The emotion of anger is especially reprehensible. Once we lose our ability to be angry, we become doormats and people pleasers. We become so nice that we no longer have passion to fight for the things we stand for.
- The destruction of individual willpower. Patriarchy hates willful and exuberant children. They are hard to control. The destruction of a child's will leaves the child with two choices: conforming or rebelling. This polarized state is the core issue for all adult children.
- The repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure's way of thinking."
The first time through, the revelatory "aha!" moment came with the last line, "The repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure's way of thinking." That pretty succinctly both describes and summarizes the relationship from which I extricated myself last year. He was the "authority figure" (on some strange level, even though he's not what you - or I - would probably envision on reading that statement) and he used various techniques from Day One to Day's End to try to repress or correct or change or ignore or overwrite and certainly overRUN my thinking - my thoughts, my emotions, and my actions - whenever they didn't conform to his will. Yikes.
With that "aha!" moment, I read back over the other three bullets to see whether they maybe applied, too. And yeah, they do. Walking backwards up through the bullet points as I did...
Definitely in 4-1/2 years I found my willpower threatened to near extinction. Hell, what finally saved me, or at least started my salvation and the (still ongoing) restoration process, was the waking up I did (started to do, anyway) while reading, "Loving Him Without Losing You" by Beverly Engel. I very nearly lost my whole self. Many days even now, I'm still looking around to find the bits and pieces; I lost - or gave up - way more than I ever realized. He definitely wanted conformation; in the end, I definitely rebelled. I think I have yet to find and reclaim the "willful and exuberant child" that I was, just a tiny bit in a very good, beautiful way, when we met. I miss her. Lots.
He definitely wanted to repress all emotions of mine that didn't conform to his, that didn't match his or serve his aims. I was definitely left with fear after all of his tactics and 4-1/2 years of having them used against me. Fear of abandonment. Fear of loss of everything I'd invested so much in. Fear of losing myself totally. Fear of being wrong or off my rocker. Fear of his next big pout-fest, or next big tantrum, or next big hours or days or weeks or months long campaign to work on the last two bullet points, destruction of my will and repression of any thinking or feeling that was different from what he wanted.
And blind obedience, oh my goodness, yes. He expected me to ignore his frequent double standards. And sadly, I did so very many times and for a very long time. And I definitely learned that I was to do what he wanted or I would be punished. And yeah, there was no space for questioning the rules. No space for open dialog like, oh, I don't know... between two equal partners? No space for negotiation or compromise. (Unless, of course, it was me doing the compromising.)
Ugh. It's just shameful to write all of this out. But it's good, too. I wanted to write it so it didn't just ping-pong around in my head briefly and wind up knocked out one ear so that I eventually forget about it. It's an "aha!" moment that I don't want to forget. Even if some would say I'm "beating a dead horse" or that I "think too much" or that I "should be over it already, it's been almost a year." This is my process.
I'm a work in progress. Progress, not perfection, as the wise saying goes. I was under a pretty thick cloud of F.O.G. (that's Fear, Obligation, and Guilt, for those of you who haven't read Susan Forward's fabulous book "Emotional Blackmail"). I wish that a new weather system had just come through and quickly blown all the fog away, but alas it hasn't been like that for me, I've had to wait (and work very hard) while the fog has very gradually and slowly lifted.
Everything is definitely looking a lot more clear these days.
There's a lot more I could write here, thoughts and other "aha!" moments that the Bradshaw quotes have brought to the fore. Like, for a while tonight, thinking how I'm not so sure whether or if my mom and dad fit the "patriarchal" style, that I need to think more on that. And then later, a big dumb "aha!" smack to my forehead realizing that my stepfather definitely fit the patriarchal model and that for sure all the preceding bullet points were true under his reign. And that I'm sure I could probably find some ties between my life under his rule and my 4-1/2 years in my ex-relationship, if I want to delve into all that. And then there's the whole other subject of the religious blind obedience, not asking questions, not questioning the rules, and so on that I was not only raised under but around which I formed my life for so many years and that I'm still struggling with. Patriarchal much, that? Um, yeah.
For now, I think I want to go back to reading about "Creating Love." Definitely I need that.
