In healthy, healing, loving family systems…

Ok, I have no experience within those kind of systems. My lived family experience falls well outside any of the categories of healthy, healing, loving.

How I remember my mother and my family treating me: The message, from mye arliest days, was consistent and I believe began with my mother and was readily adopted by her brother, mother and my older female sibling. It flowed through the rest of the genetic links and affiliations. “Because I regard you as lacking, it is fine to diminish, degrade, and alienate you.  I invite others to “see you as I do” so they may join or at least not judge anything but you.”

… because I think that little of you and that much of me

… because you are patently unlovable– a suboptimal human

I was robbed of any sense of self, purpose (outside of -JUST “become different already”), and peace. AND while that is undeniable. Only in a perfect world would it matter.

My observable and undenaibel unease/discomfort and sensitivity triggered the fragility of those possessed by a lethal preference for feeling in charge — responsible for only the things which make them feel elevated and revered.

I knowingly married a person eerily similar because I believed validation via proxy to a psychologically, emotionally and morally similar man could elevate my worth and potential for relating to them.

And my hope that these harmful things might not be so readily allowed to continue, drives the urgency to share about them. IN My very OWN space – I get to state the truth of what it has been like for me…. what it continues to be like, navigating and recovering from betrayals of the highest order. I do not consent to the erasure of me or my lived experience. While the details of my experience may qualify as inadmissable in my family of origin– they are admissable right here. Jilan Catherine Ghoneim Whitney Catherine G Whitney