Friday, June 9
Jun. 9th, 2023 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
Feeling comfortable having over the phone counseling with a virtual stranger. It is a little weird to have such a personal discussion over the phone, but it was convenient, and he was easy to talk to.
None of what we talked about was ground-breaking stuff, all of my recent disappointment with TW's decision not to try to move away from her hoard, mostly, and about how it affected me.
Of course the conclusion is to release the need to feel like I have to do anything now, since if she doesn't want any help, I can't force anything on her.
A few things that came up that WERE a little bit of a different take on the situation:
I tend to think of TW as being "alone", and she sometimes makes it sound like she needs more help. I said as much to the counselor.
After we talked for a while, the counselor stopped me and said "so, she actually lives not far from a lot of your family, they talk all the time, she has three grown sons that talk with her, and all of those people are willing to help her, sometimes financially, sometimes by letting her stay with them to shower and do laundry, and she gets emotional support from them?"
I said yes. All of us have offered to help her move, we've helped her with things she needs, and if she ever needed more help someone would try to help her.
He was actually a little taken back, I think, by the amount of actual support she has.
I was too. I haven't given it much real thought, but how many people can really say that they have about ten people who would be ready to help you if they could?
So he says "maybe her situation is just exactly what she wants. It doesn't sound like she would have to be there if she didn't want to be there".
I have thought and said this to TW before. Her situation is a choice. I hadn't quite recognized that she truly does have a big group of people who care.
So here's the interesting thing I thought about afterwards; Trainwreck's woes are often that no one helps her the way that she WANTS, we try to help her the way that she NEEDS.
As in, none of us are willing to invest any more time helping her fruitlessly "go through" her shit anymore, or move it all for her, or go over there and try to clean her house for her.
What we would do, is to help her move to a safer place, and leave the shit behind.
We don't help her do things that would help her stay where she is, or make sure she has alcohol. We would always make sure she had food and other physical necessities.
Her situation is only as dire as she wants it to be. What she WANTS is to keep living in her hoard, and have all of us keep giving her money and help so she can stay there. To some degree she's getting that, isn't she?
So how dire is it? She could leave at any time, could get food if she needed it, shelter if she needed it, things like a new bed or clothes if she needed it. She WANTS to live in her hoard, and whenever she makes the situation sound AWFUL, it's not because she can't leave, she makes it sound AWFUL that she might HAVE to leave her shit behind. That's what she thinks is tragic.
Not her health issues. Not her safety. Not her being isolated and at risk. Not the filth and rats. She makes it sound bad, but the REAL fear she has is being made to leave it all behind. She is afraid of having to lose her hoard.
I got a visual of TW as a mime, acting out that it's leg was trapped in a bear trap, and all of us siblings standing around her sadly, wondering how long it's going to take her to realize that there is no bear trap, only her delusion that one even exists.
When the question of "why do you feel so personally responsible for her" came up, I do know the answer for that too.
Partly conditioning; a life time of all of us worrying about her, and that started when she was a young woman, and since she's never really become a mature person, it's easy to still think on some level that she "doesn't know better". Well, that's an untrue thought as well. As the counselor pointed out, she's over 60 years old now, and she's been crafty enough to survive all of those years and still live exactly the way she wanted to.
That one hit home for me. What seems like a teetering, precarious existence on the surface, must be something she knows how to create and maintain.
He suggested that it might not be as fragile as I think, and perhaps she's good at creating this image of fragility and need. Certainly she could still just die out there alone, but it would have been a situation she worked very hard to create.
All very good points to consider.
I also know that partly why I keep wanting to help her, is the guilt I feel for being "okay" when she presents as NOT being okay. Survivor's guilt.
All of this is food for thought.
This was a one-time session, but I can make another appointment as needed. I found it useful.
I went to see River, and it was so HOT today.
I hosed him down and washed his tail as the show at the barn is tomorrow. I don't need to get super fussy with the grooming, but a white tail looks yellow and grungy if you don't wash it sometimes.
Edit: the show is Sunday.
I put the zinc cream on his nose, and he kind of hates it as it is so thick and smells a bit, but his nose really burns and peels without it.
We worked on the obstacles, and that went pretty well.
I didn't want to over do the work since it was so hot, so then I practiced loading him in the trailer.
I loaded him four times (without tying him up or closing the divider) and he seemed pretty relaxed and was not trying to back out. He stayed in with me, and ate some of the hay in there, and when I asked him to back out he did so calmly.
Then I left it there, and spent some time letting him graze.
I went home, let everyone out into their bigger pastures for a while, and watered the garden.
I have been watering a lot using the well, which I don't like doing. I usually have a ton of water in our big rain collection tanks, but this year has been so dry we never really had any rain to collect.
Even though I've been watering in the evening, I go out the next day and the garden seems very dry.
I don't know if everything will germinate, or what kind of garden we'll have. You can't really water a garden and have success if all of the soil around the garden is bone dry, because it just sucks the water right out of where you watered.
Sigh.
My husband's job site was evacuated again from the threat of smoke and fire, so he's home now. He will work from home tomorrow, but he doesn't know how much value that will have. His job is mostly about progress tracking at the job site and material tracking. Not sure what he can do at home when no work is happening at the site.
After tomorrow, he might just be getting days off if they can't go back to work. We'll see.
I planted the rest of the bedding plants into big containers. They look pretty bedraggled, even though I had them in the shade and watered them. It's just been so hot. They should have been planted right after I got them.
I learned a bit about Diogenes, the philosopher who helped found the school of Cynicism. He's the guy who walked around with a lamp seeking a good man.
The further down you read, the more it seems like he had some serious mental health issues, as he was more or less a homeless dude who pooped in the market place publicly and slept in a big ceramic jar. How he still managed to ridicule King Philip (father of Alexander the Great) and be remembered two thousand years later is quite a feat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes
Feeling comfortable having over the phone counseling with a virtual stranger. It is a little weird to have such a personal discussion over the phone, but it was convenient, and he was easy to talk to.
None of what we talked about was ground-breaking stuff, all of my recent disappointment with TW's decision not to try to move away from her hoard, mostly, and about how it affected me.
Of course the conclusion is to release the need to feel like I have to do anything now, since if she doesn't want any help, I can't force anything on her.
A few things that came up that WERE a little bit of a different take on the situation:
I tend to think of TW as being "alone", and she sometimes makes it sound like she needs more help. I said as much to the counselor.
After we talked for a while, the counselor stopped me and said "so, she actually lives not far from a lot of your family, they talk all the time, she has three grown sons that talk with her, and all of those people are willing to help her, sometimes financially, sometimes by letting her stay with them to shower and do laundry, and she gets emotional support from them?"
I said yes. All of us have offered to help her move, we've helped her with things she needs, and if she ever needed more help someone would try to help her.
He was actually a little taken back, I think, by the amount of actual support she has.
I was too. I haven't given it much real thought, but how many people can really say that they have about ten people who would be ready to help you if they could?
So he says "maybe her situation is just exactly what she wants. It doesn't sound like she would have to be there if she didn't want to be there".
I have thought and said this to TW before. Her situation is a choice. I hadn't quite recognized that she truly does have a big group of people who care.
So here's the interesting thing I thought about afterwards; Trainwreck's woes are often that no one helps her the way that she WANTS, we try to help her the way that she NEEDS.
As in, none of us are willing to invest any more time helping her fruitlessly "go through" her shit anymore, or move it all for her, or go over there and try to clean her house for her.
What we would do, is to help her move to a safer place, and leave the shit behind.
We don't help her do things that would help her stay where she is, or make sure she has alcohol. We would always make sure she had food and other physical necessities.
Her situation is only as dire as she wants it to be. What she WANTS is to keep living in her hoard, and have all of us keep giving her money and help so she can stay there. To some degree she's getting that, isn't she?
So how dire is it? She could leave at any time, could get food if she needed it, shelter if she needed it, things like a new bed or clothes if she needed it. She WANTS to live in her hoard, and whenever she makes the situation sound AWFUL, it's not because she can't leave, she makes it sound AWFUL that she might HAVE to leave her shit behind. That's what she thinks is tragic.
Not her health issues. Not her safety. Not her being isolated and at risk. Not the filth and rats. She makes it sound bad, but the REAL fear she has is being made to leave it all behind. She is afraid of having to lose her hoard.
I got a visual of TW as a mime, acting out that it's leg was trapped in a bear trap, and all of us siblings standing around her sadly, wondering how long it's going to take her to realize that there is no bear trap, only her delusion that one even exists.
When the question of "why do you feel so personally responsible for her" came up, I do know the answer for that too.
Partly conditioning; a life time of all of us worrying about her, and that started when she was a young woman, and since she's never really become a mature person, it's easy to still think on some level that she "doesn't know better". Well, that's an untrue thought as well. As the counselor pointed out, she's over 60 years old now, and she's been crafty enough to survive all of those years and still live exactly the way she wanted to.
That one hit home for me. What seems like a teetering, precarious existence on the surface, must be something she knows how to create and maintain.
He suggested that it might not be as fragile as I think, and perhaps she's good at creating this image of fragility and need. Certainly she could still just die out there alone, but it would have been a situation she worked very hard to create.
All very good points to consider.
I also know that partly why I keep wanting to help her, is the guilt I feel for being "okay" when she presents as NOT being okay. Survivor's guilt.
All of this is food for thought.
This was a one-time session, but I can make another appointment as needed. I found it useful.
I went to see River, and it was so HOT today.
I hosed him down and washed his tail as the show at the barn is tomorrow. I don't need to get super fussy with the grooming, but a white tail looks yellow and grungy if you don't wash it sometimes.
Edit: the show is Sunday.
I put the zinc cream on his nose, and he kind of hates it as it is so thick and smells a bit, but his nose really burns and peels without it.
We worked on the obstacles, and that went pretty well.
I didn't want to over do the work since it was so hot, so then I practiced loading him in the trailer.
I loaded him four times (without tying him up or closing the divider) and he seemed pretty relaxed and was not trying to back out. He stayed in with me, and ate some of the hay in there, and when I asked him to back out he did so calmly.
Then I left it there, and spent some time letting him graze.
I went home, let everyone out into their bigger pastures for a while, and watered the garden.
I have been watering a lot using the well, which I don't like doing. I usually have a ton of water in our big rain collection tanks, but this year has been so dry we never really had any rain to collect.
Even though I've been watering in the evening, I go out the next day and the garden seems very dry.
I don't know if everything will germinate, or what kind of garden we'll have. You can't really water a garden and have success if all of the soil around the garden is bone dry, because it just sucks the water right out of where you watered.
Sigh.
My husband's job site was evacuated again from the threat of smoke and fire, so he's home now. He will work from home tomorrow, but he doesn't know how much value that will have. His job is mostly about progress tracking at the job site and material tracking. Not sure what he can do at home when no work is happening at the site.
After tomorrow, he might just be getting days off if they can't go back to work. We'll see.
I planted the rest of the bedding plants into big containers. They look pretty bedraggled, even though I had them in the shade and watered them. It's just been so hot. They should have been planted right after I got them.
I learned a bit about Diogenes, the philosopher who helped found the school of Cynicism. He's the guy who walked around with a lamp seeking a good man.
The further down you read, the more it seems like he had some serious mental health issues, as he was more or less a homeless dude who pooped in the market place publicly and slept in a big ceramic jar. How he still managed to ridicule King Philip (father of Alexander the Great) and be remembered two thousand years later is quite a feat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes
no subject
Date: 2023-06-10 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-28 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-29 09:11 am (UTC)What she WANTS is for us to keep supporting her to keep living in her current very dangerous, awful, hoarded up trailer in the middle of nowhere.
Whenever she is ready to do something to make her life better, the help is there.
In the meantime, I am DONE listening to her sob story, and I'm done feeling guilty for being healthier and more secure than she is. She could have lived differently too, and chooses over and over again not to do so.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-19 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-20 05:34 am (UTC)She somehow wants to have open spaces to live in, be clean, see her kids, and be safe, but not to actually have to DO anything to have that happen. To not have to give up any of her possessions, or to move.