Quick Update

I was going to continue with the whole "Stop Walking on Egg Shells" thing.  After some consideration, I've come to the conclusion that it is only half way helpful.  The first half of the book gives some good stuff on Personality Disorders.  It goes into the emotional and psychological aspects of what this Disorder is.  My take away: people with Personality Disorders are great, big children.  Children have to learn to self-soothe.  When people are infants, they rely on parents to soothe them.  As they grow up, they have to be taught that their feelings cannot define their reality; they learn to self-soothe.  People with Personality Disorders, somehow, never learn that their feelings are not their reality.  Like a child, they rely upon someone else to soothe them.  Exhausting.

In the second half of the book, we read that we have to modify our behavior to live with these people.  My take away: it had to do more with appeasement rather than setting some sort of boundary.  The receiver had to keep in my mind that the PD person has issues and modify our behavior.  That becomes exhausting.  In the long run, I'm not sure it is realistic.  It seems like the best way to encourage a bully is to appease him/her.

I don't really have the answer.  My best guess goes back to setting and enforcing boundaries.  Since my personality runs more to a laid back way of living, boundaries are a new concept.  I've had lines I did not cross in my life.  I guess I have morals, ethics.  These were things I put in place on myself.  I never really put them in place for someone else.  Live an let live kind of thing.  This was a huge mistake and has cost me a great deal of emotional and psychological pain.  That is the one thing I try to tell my boys (the daughter already has that figured out it seems).  Setting and enforcing boundaries is for my protection.  I quit being the sponge of whatever emotional tempest that Sybil has.  I have to be kind of an a$$hole.  Sadly, a little bit of love dies.

Or, I divorce Sybil.  That is always an option.  I took that option off of the table.  Sybil has put it on the table of the years.  She even Googled, printed, and signed a divorce document, which is uploaded on this blog.  That is emotional blackmail.  When someone wants to really divorce someone, I don't think they do that.  I'm pretty sure they divorce.  They kick the other person out and get a lawyer.  The proceedings start.  Anyway, Sybil uses that as a cudgel to bash me over the head.  How does someone defuse that situation?