I caught the end of Oprah today, an episode about families struggling through the difficulties of raising a child with mental illness.
To a mother she was interviewing, Oprah mentioned something, a paraphrase from someone else I think, that went roughly like this:
"There is no 'black sheep' in a family. The person who is considered the 'black sheep' is usually the most sensitive person in the family and they take on all of the negative energy from everyone else in the family."
Wow, how right is that? Speaking as the 'black sheep' in my family. And speaking as one who has generally been a sponge for the negative energy of others around me. (I will never forget the moment when I realized this with clarity and certainty for the first time.) And speaking as one who has often wound up in the "scapegoat" position in dysfunctional situations.
I searched via Google, hoping to find the source of Oprah's profundity. It looks like maybe it's something from Eckhart Tolle's "The New Earth," which I have not read. But maybe I should read it. Tolle seems to talk about something called a "pain body" that feeds on pain.
Mostly this post is just about the mini revelation I had while listening to Oprah quote Tolle. I ran for my journal so I could capture the phrase before I forgot it.
Having been the "black sheep" of my family (still am, really) I definitely came out of childhood and adolescence as a giant "pain body" and have been struggling to rid myself of that pain ever since. It makes a little more sense to me, my little "aha!" moment just now, why I've had so little resilience around the happenings in my life the last two years or so in what was the most significant relationship of my life (save relationship to my parents when I was a child, which set me up for this whole mess).
It's been like someone took my pain-absorption vacuum and turned it up to high-speed or something.
I need to find a way to pull the plug out of the outlet. And throw out the container bag. And then dismantle the motor on the damn machine.
