{"id":5845,"date":"2018-09-30T09:13:25","date_gmt":"2018-09-30T13:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5845"},"modified":"2018-09-30T09:13:25","modified_gmt":"2018-09-30T13:13:25","slug":"the-colonial-dames-incident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5845","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cColonial Dames Incident.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not quite sure when this happened.\u00a0 <\/span>I think the late 80\u2019s because it was after my father had died.\u00a0 <\/span>I was down at the family summer house on the coast of Maine.\u00a0 <\/span>We were on the front porch, my mother, me, my sister Jo, and her friend Weezie.\u00a0 <\/span>Weezie was a member of the Colonial Dames<\/a>, one of those status organizations, and so was my mother.\u00a0 <\/span>They were talking about it with some enthusiasm.\u00a0 <\/span>I was glad for Mom that she had something that interested her.\u00a0 <\/span>Suddenly she turned to me and said, in a nasty tone of voice, \u201cOf course you<\/b> wouldn\u2019t care about the Colonial Dames.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I felt like she had launched a dagger right into my open heart.\u00a0 <\/span>I was happy for her and this was her response.\u00a0 <\/span>I tried to rewrite it as happening because I had a patronizing look on my face, to take some of the blame on myself.<\/p>\n

Later I thought I could have said \u201cIt\u2019s true I don\u2019t care about the Colonial Dames, but I am glad that you have something that interests you.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>But I knew that wouldn\u2019t have satisfied her.\u00a0 <\/span>Later, I found out why.\u00a0 <\/span>Mother believed, and taught me, that you didn\u2019t care about a person if you didn\u2019t care about what they cared about.\u00a0 <\/span>I bought this and continued to doubt my own caring for people, in fact even now I still doubt it, having deeply internalized\u00a0 <\/span>from Mother that I am not a caring person.\u00a0 <\/span>It wasn\u2019t until I got into a quarrel with my husband about this same issue and he said \u201cI do so<\/b> care about you, but I don\u2019t want to plant daffodils right now.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I realized that he was correct.<\/p>\n

Later still, on the porch in Maine (again) the grandchildren had left towels draped over the porch furniture.\u00a0 <\/span>Mother complained to me that they didn\u2019t clean up after themselves.\u00a0 <\/span>(They were under the age of 10.)\u00a0 <\/span>I said \u201cThey just got back from the beach, of course they don\u2019t care about the towels.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Mother said, angrily, \u201cThey don\u2019t care about me<\/b>.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the most important part of the story about the Colonial Dames was that I wrote about it right away in my journal.\u00a0 <\/span>The next morning I read what I had written and had trouble believing it.\u00a0 <\/span>I asked my sister if that had really happened, and she said yes.\u00a0 <\/span>I was stunned.\u00a0 <\/span>I immediately saw that I had been systematically disappearing all the cruel things Mother said to me from the earliest possible time.\u00a0 <\/span>That was why they always seemed to come out of left field.\u00a0 <\/span>I decided that I would never give her a target again.\u00a0 <\/span>And I didn\u2019t.\u00a0 <\/span>This is a beautiful example of how \u201cgaslighting\u201d works.<\/p>\n

From Ariel Leve’s TED talk:<\/a>
\nShe was told that someone who had known her as a child said: \u201cI always wondered how that little girl would survive.\u00a0 <\/span>I thought her only chances were suicide or murder.\u201d \u00a0 <\/span>\u201cOne of the most insidious things about gaslighting is the denial of reality. … being denied an experience you have had and you know is real.\u201d \u00a0 <\/span>\u201cI needed certainty in an uncertain world.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>\u201cIf the only options were suicide or murder, how did I survive?\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cThere is a third option: writing it down.\u201d \u00a0 <\/span>\u201cTelling my story was, and is, an act of redemption.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not quite sure when this happened.\u00a0 I think the late 80\u2019s because it was after my father had died.\u00a0 I was down at the family summer house on the coast of Maine.\u00a0 We were on the front porch, my mother, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-trauma","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}