Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: gaslighting

Lying is a form of truth-telling (part seven)

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I’m back with even more musing about lying. Here’s yesterday’s post on the subject, and about a sprinkling about other things, too.

I talked to my mother earlier tonight, and I was hyper-aware of how she was lying to herself. My father has dementia. My mother knows this and tries to get my father to accept it. That’s good! On the other hand, though, she still holds out hope that my father will get better. Many things she does to/for my father (like massaging his head) are with the intent of making him better.

I’m not guessing this, by the way. She’s flat out stated it. She told me about recent meds that seem promising for reversing dementia. The problem is that they only seem to work with people in the early stages of dementia, and they are very recent. we can’t really know how effective they will turn out to be in the end.

I tried to keep my mouth shut, but I am constitutionally unable to not give my opinion if pressed hard enough, apparently. Not that my mother was asking for my opinion, but she would not stop talking about this miracle drug.

Here’s the thing. I learned, from her, ironically, that giving up false hope can bring you great peace. In my case, it was truly laying down the rope (the hope?)  between us. I spend so many decades hoping against hope that there was some way to have a relationship with her. Not even a good one, but one at all.

At some point after my medical crisis, I realized this was never going to happen. Not that it was impossible to happen (in theory), but taht my mother was not ever going to be capable of it.

Side note: She thanked me several times tonight for listening to her. She’s called me her therapist, which I do not like at all. And she’s talked about all these friends of hers who suddenly stopped talking to her. She has no idea why! Which is her lying to herself, but it’s not something I can point out to her.

I also didn’t feel like I could snap back that I really had no choice but to listen to her. Well, I did, but it was a drastic choice. It would mean not talking to her at all. One thing about my mother is that she will push her way until she gets it, and I am not made of strong stuff.

I feel compassion for her as an older person who is on the last leg of her journey here on earth. I feel sorry for her because she has a really rough road ahead of her. I would not wish it on anyone to be the caretaker of someone with dementia. I wish she had gotten into therapy much earlier because maybe these later years would have been easier for her. Not easy because of the dementia thing, but easier.


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The lies I tell myself (part six)

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I have one more post in me about lying, telling the truth, and how the twain shall never meet. This was my last post on the subject, in which I just meandered all over the place.

In this post, I want to talk about how I don’t knowingly lie to myself, but how my anxiety tells me things that aren’t true. For example, when I’m feeling particularly anxious, my brain will tell me that nobody loves me; I might as well be dead; and that no one will care if I’m gone.

Back when I was a kid/teen/in my twenties, I believed this with all my heart. I believed that I was toxic to the world, and that I made it an actively worse place every day I was alive. I believed that I started each day in the hole as far as my impact on it, and I had to dig my way out.

Why? Because I was told every day by my parents (implicitly) that I was a piece of shit who did not deserve to be alive. I’m sure they did not intend for that to be their message, but that was what their message was, indeed.

Or to be even more precise about it, my father’s message was that my brother and I were irritants to him and should not exist. It took me way too long to figure out that my father didn’t really want children; he just assumed he was supposed to have them.

He was big on saving/losing face and he was always worried about looking bad in the community. Ironically, that did not stop him from having flagrant affairs in said community, but I’m sure he managed to rationalize that in his mind somehow.

He was rarely home as he ‘worked’ from early morning to midnight. In truth, he was carrying out his extramarital affairs after work. Everybody knew it, but nobody talked about it. Even when my mother complained to me for hours about her issues with my father, she never explicitly said he was having affairs. At least until MUCH later (like decades later).

She would talk around it, and it was clear that we both knew what she was talking about, but she would not acutally say it. Which was very frustrating, but there was nothing I could really do about it.

My mother, on the other hand, always wanted children, but it was because as she once actually said out loud to me, she wanted someone to love her. And she expected me to be a clone of her. Well, not of her, but of what she thought the ideal woman should be (even though she was not like that herself). It’s the bitter irony of my family’s dysfunction that the matriarchs preached femininity, taking care of your man, and having children, while not actually liking/wanting to do any of those.


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I hold these truths to be self-evident (part five)

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I’m back to talk more about honesty, lying, having a bad memory, and how I deal with it. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talk about why I hammer out what I remember all the time.

I did it before my medical crisis because of how everyone else in my family deep-sixed experiences left and right. After my medical crisis, I accepted that my memory was markedly worse than it had been before my medical crisis. It was a trade-off I was more than wililng to make because I got more life out of it.

I don’t know if it’s just that or if it’s that and getting older, but my memory keeps getting worse. Fortunately, I can now do simple math in my head again (I could not do it for about a year after my medical crisis), and I no longer forget random words except extremely rarely. But I will completely forget things I would never have forgotten in the past. I have to make notes to myself that I would not have had to make in the past. I don’t like it, but I’ve resigned myself to it.

One thing that really jolted me, though, was when my brother and I had a shared Nelson Mandela moment. We both remembered doing something, and doing it in a very specific way. It turned out to not be true (we had irrefutable proof), and it made me realize that my memory was shakier than ever.

That’s part of the reason that I hold on to my truths as tightly as I can. I know that I’m losing a lot every day, but there are things that I need to keep myself centered.

No matter how much I lie to other people (either directly or by omission), I remain true to myself. I read something once about emotional honesty, which is different than actual honesty. Not to say that you can freely lie whenever you want as long as you can justify it to yourself, but that if a little lie or omission can smooth things out, why not?

I rarely outright lie about things, but I will dance around it. I mentioned in previous posts that I will not rarely speak up when people call me ‘she’ because it doesn’t really matter to me, but I will not call myself ‘she’. I have done it on accident, but I try to avoid personal pronouns for myself as much as possible.

I don’t mind being called ‘them’, but I don’t identify with it. So if someone uses it for me, and they have, I won’t respond. It’s like when I tried to go by a shortened version of my middle name as a kid beaause I did not like my first name growing up. My fifth grade teacher was a prince among men, so he would call me by it–and I would not respond because I had forgotten I had switched my name.


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More about gaslighting in my family

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In my last post, I was talking about my mother and how she lies/deep-sixes uncomfortable/bad memories. The biggest example I have is from the last time she was here, and it has stuck in my mind as to how it brightly highlighted how my mother’s mind worked.

I was in the living room on my laptop when my mather came racing in the room, crying. My father was hot on her heels and screaming at her. He was accusing her of stealing his money, which was one of his recurring themes in his dementia. He lived in poverty when he was a kid, and my parents didn’t have much money when they f irst married. Like, really scrimping and saving, in addition to them sending money back home to my father’s family (but not my mother’s for sexist reasons).

Side note: my father has been weird about his money all his life. For the most part, he was stingy as he pinched a penny hard. It’s understandable, but he took it to extremes. And in very disaparate, disconnected ways. I have mused about it before, but he was very penny wise, pound foolish. He would gripe about two kiwis costing a dollar when he came to visit (apparently, it’s cheaper in Taiwan), but then he will spend a hundred dollars on a water pick for his teeth (this was decades ago).

Which, I get. We all have the things we will splurge on. For me, it was my last desktop (the computer I’m writing on right now). But at least I’m aware of my weak points. My father isn’t and never has.

Now that he’s in his dementia, I have to pretty much let it go. Let what go? The resentment, the expectations (as minimal as they were to begin with), and  any hope for an authentic relationship. I mean, to be honest, I did not have the last at all with my father–ever. At least since I was in my twenties. Instead, I have to practice taking my father as he is, which is where Taiji really helps out. It teaches me to be in the moment and just be.

Anyway. The fight. My father was shouting at my mother, and I unwisely put myself between them. Literally and metamophorically. Sometime in my thirties or forties, I looked at my father and realized that he could not hurt me physically. Emotionally, yes, but not physically. That helped psychologically in a way I can’t completely explain.

I stood between my father and my mother, and outshouted my father. I’m not proud of it, but it is, as the kids say, what it is. Sometimes you have to outbully a bully, and in that moment, he was bullying my mom. Again, it was about money and how she was stealing from him. Or maybe it was about his driver’s license and how we refused to give it to him. That latter was true, by the way. There was no way he should be driving, but he was very stubborn about it. My mother allowed him to beat her down (metaphorically) until she let him drive to Cubs for instance. She argued that it was so close, but it really doesn’t matter. That’s a spurious argument, but she could not say no to him.


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More family dysfunction and the truth

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I am back to talk more about my family. Here is yesterday’s post about my father’s problems with his memory. I have saved my mother for last because as usual, it’s the most complicated and entangled relationship. My brother and I get along great, and I don’t worry about annoying/hurting/bothering him because he’ll never remember it if I am. My father is my father, and it was pretty clear from when I was a kid that he was self-absorbed narcissist who would never care about anyone but himself. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he didn’t even love himself. That’s why he kept grasping for anything to fill the empty hole in his soul. Deep gaping maw.

Because he was so badly broken, it was easy to say, “This is a him problem, not a me problem.” It was different with my mother. Why? Because she can act like an actual human being. A deeply flawed one, yes, but one with ties to this actual world. Yes, that’s a dig on my father, and not even a subtle one.

This is where societal norms come in. I am from two cultures that venerate parents to an unhealthy degree, albeit in very different ways. In America, we give such lip service to family and how pro-family we are. We are not, which is probably not a shocker to anyone, but it’s a great sound bite. Mothers are special! Mothers love their children without restraint and will do anything for them!

On the other hand, Taiwanese culture is (or was, at least) about venerating your elders to a ridiculous degree (yes, I’m saying that with an American bias). You call your relatives different names based on their status in the family. What I mean is big brother has a different title than younger brother, for example. There is a very complicated heiarchy as to who is venerated the ost. Grandparents, then father, then mother, then sons…wait. Sons may go before mother. Girls are really treated like shit. Or at least they were. My knowledge is decades old because my parents have not evolved at all since the sixties.

Both of these fucked with my head because the underlying message was that there was no bad parents. Again, for different reasons. In America, it aligned with the toxic positivity that is so prevalent in this country. Parents are the best! Parents are all good and only want good for their children! (But, again, we will not do anything to support parents. Shhhhhh!)


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The keeper of my family’s truth

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I’m still musing about my dysfunctional family, and today I want to focus on the fact that everyone in my family has a bad memory, but for different reasons. In yesterday’s post, I talked about my truth and how important it is to me. Today, I’m going to talk about how difficult it is to hold onto my truth when my family doesn’t support that. At all.

Side note: One thing I learned about having autism is that people with autism can be easier to manipulate because they just assume that other people are right and they’re wrong (because they’re told so often, implicitly and explicitly that they are wrong). And because it doesn’t really occur to them that someone would deliberately lie to them. I have difficulty with sarcasm for that reason. The deadpan kind, I mean–when it’s out of the blue. I’m very used to reading people intently for clues as to how to react to them, but deadpan gets to me. My brother is really good at deadpan, which means I miss his jokes more often than I would with other people.

It took me a long time to realize that everyone in my family (including me now, to a certain extent) are really bad at remembering things–but for completely different reasons.

With my brother, he just has a bad memory. Could it be related to ihs neuroatypicalness? Maybe. Could it be related to his face blindness? Maybe. Could it just be a very bad memory? Maybe. But it’s something I’ve come to accept about him.

Here’s a recent example. About a year ago, I had an issue with Xfinity and my internet.

Side note (yes, again. Deal with it!): I fucking hate monopolies. It’s so fucking hard to get customer service at Xfinity unless you have a billing issues (which I just had–this week. Got a person then, right away. Funny, that), that it makes me actively angry.

Anywaay. It had to do with my data usage. One of the issues turned out to be my modem. I bought a new one and had my brother come over to hook it up for me. He spoke to the representative for forty-five minutes before we drove to the nearest store and talked to them there (that did it).

A month or so later, I mentioned to him that it had worked as a hack (not completely, but good enough), and my brother said, “Oh, you bought the new modem?” I was gobsmacked into silence. Several seconds later, I said, “You installed it for me. You talked to the rep for forty-five minutes.”

He remembered when I mentioned it, but he had completely forgotten it before that. And it had been at most a month earlier. As hard as it is for me to grasp, he truly forgets things soon after they happen. Not all things, but many things.

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Bagua is life

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I had a private lesson today. Bagua, not Taiji. There is so much I want to leran; it’s hard to focus on just one thing. There are All. The. Weapons. But, for now, I have been captivated by the Swimming Dragon Form (Bagua), and I have asked my teacher to teach me. Before we got to that, though, we talked about her teaching style. One thing I really appreciate about her is that she tailors the way she teaches to each student.

For instance, she knows that I am going to question everything she tells me and instinctively push back when she asks me to try something new. At least that’s the way it was in the first five years of my study. I had aa deep distrust of…well, everything. She slowly won me over by being frank and honest with me.

Here’s the thing. I can tell when people are lying to me–even the slightest. Or skirting around the truth. I have written about how it’s because my mother gaslit me my entire life. Not on purprose and not deliberately, but she did. And still does. I don’t trust her to tell me thet rtuth. I am the unofficial keeper of the family lore. My brother and my father are also unreliable to a certain extent. My fathre because he’s…just a whole nother issue altogether. My brother because he has a terrible memory and forgets what happened a week ago, let alone what happened in our childhood.

Because of this, I am persnickety about the truth. I am as precise as possible because my brain is not happy with untruths. It’s one reason I over-explain myself. I want to make sure that others know I’m being as truthful as possible. Unfortunately, I have a hard time explaining myself for several reasons. One, I am a freak. I was talking about this with my teacher because she grew up as a freak, too.

One positive thing about being a freak is that I can see things from many different angles. This is also the negative about being a freak, by the way. Some things don’t need to be seen from a different angle. In addition, I can get lost in the weeds sometimes. Seeing things that aren’t there or things that aren’t explicitly stated. Was I right? More often than not, yes. This is not a humblebrag or even a stairght-out brag.


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Saying the unspoken parts out loud

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It’s interesting thet things that get left unsaid. When I talk about my medical crisis, for example, I have no problems saying taht I was in a coma for a week, but I don’t like to mention what actually happened. Why? Because it seems…almost like bragging? I’m not sure exactly why. It’s partly because, and I don’t mean this to sound dismissive, but it really hasn’t affected my life in the day-to-day. I don’t have issues because of it except for some very minor ones. Like my periphery is worse and I have a few memory issues. Oh, and my reaction time is much worse as based on how I react to flashing button prompts in games.

None of that is life-thretaning or even something I really need to be concerned about. The fact that I can’t do simple math in my head? So what? I can pull up a calculator at any moment. I don’t remember a word? I can look it up or just keep searching my memory bank until it finally pops up.

It doesn’t hinder me, is what I’m trying to say. So it seems like I shouldn’t bring it up. A month or so after I left the hospital, I was telling K that it was weird to bring it up because it was such a conversation-stopper and seemed to be a ploy for grabbing attention. She said, “Minna, it’s part of your story. You don’t have to bring it up if you don’t want, but you shouldn’t feel like you can’t, eeither.”

But I do. I feel like I have to keep it to myself. it’s not something other people have pressured me about, but it’s just something that I feel self-conscious about. In part, it’s beacuse I know how incredibly lucky I am and how it truly is a miracle I’m alive. And I feel like I’m wasting it. In addition, there is just no way to slide that into a conversation casually.

“How about them Vikings?”

“Yeah, they’re doing great, man.”

“How you doing?”

“Great! I’m alive, which is a miracle after surviving walking non-COVID-related pneumonia, two ccardiac arrests, and a stroke.”

It feels like the more time that passes, the less I’m able to bring it up. Again, this is completely on me. It’s not like anyone is saying, “SHUT UP, MINNA! NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR STUPID MEDICAL HISTORY!” But it just feels weird. There’s someone in the RKG Discord who is in the hospital for unknown reasons, and I want to relate some of my experience, but I have been very careful not to mention my own medical crisis. In part because it’s not about me. But I did ask if he got the pure ox because that was the best. Oxygen for the uninitiated.


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Manipulative and sincere

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When K was here, we were talking about family. We are both middle-aged, which means our parents are definitely old. I was talking about how my mother would react any time anything didn’t go her way. For example, for her and my father’s 50th anniversary, she wanted us all (including my brother’s family) to go on a cruise. She had made it known for up to a year ahead of time that this was her dearest wish.

Now. Let me be clear. This is my idea of hell. I do not like crowds, being ‘locked’ in, doing activities I have no interest in (such as wall-climbing and nerf gun battles), and I have many food intolerances. My brother said that the cruise had a ton of different food choices, but, and I put this as kindly as I can, I don’t necessarily believe him. Not that he would lie intentionally, but people who don’t have food intolerances/allergies, truly don’t understand that certain things are everywhere. I don’t blame them! Why should they know when they don’t have to think about it? I have an intolerance to gluten and dairy, and I have to be very careful with cauliflower, onions, and garlic. I’m NOT vegetarian/vegan, though, which is oftentimes confused with dairy-free.

I also get motion sickness and the idea of spending ten days on a cruise with 4,000 people almost made me break out in hives. In short, it is everything I hate, turnt up to a hundo. As the kids say. I made it quite clear that I would not be going.

You would think my mother would accept this and come up with an alternate plan, yes? Or just go without me and call it a day. Hahahhahahaha. You underestimate the tenacity of my mother! She whined and moaned about it, not letting it go. She had tears in her eyes and a tremble in her voice when she said that it was her dearest wish.

I had had enough. I said to her, “You want me to go, knowing I’ll be miserable and hating it, wishing I were anywhere but there? Is that really what you want me to do?” She had no response to that,  but I’m sure that she wanted me to go no matter what.

Why do I say that? Because she has pushed me over and over again to do what she wanted, regardless if I wanted it or not. A big example was when she wanted my brother and I to go back to Taiwan (with my niece). This was a decade ago, and I remember it as starkly as if it were yesterday. I didn’t want to go. I can deal with my mother when it’s on my terms (more or less), which means me in Minnesota and her in Taiwan. But when it’s in here territory? No.

During that request, she cried because of course she did. K mentioned that my mother used crying to get her way, and she (K) is completely right. My mother has weaponized tears to a high degree. That plus relentless pushing means she’ll get her way more often than not because it’s easier to say yes to shut her up than to keep pushing back.


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A question of trust

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I’m the keeper of bad familial memories, which is not a pleasant role. My brother and mother both tend to forget the bad times. My brother said someone was asking him about his bad realtor experiences and he couldn’t name any. My mom will flat-out deny the negative things she’s said to me in the past. My brother and I were recently talking about our family and he said he hadn’t remembered most of the things I commented about (from our childhood) until I brought them up. So in his case, it’s self-defense and a way of protecting himself from the unpleasantness. It’s also self-protection for my mother, but in a different way. For my brother, it’s protection from bad things around him. In my mother’s case, there’s some of that, but it’s also a way for her to shield herself from the bad things about HER. none of us like to think badly about ourselves, but she takes it to an extreme–in part because my father is so critical of her.

The one example I always give is when I graduated from college. I graduated magna cum laude, for which I was pretty proud. My mom said after the ceremony that if I hadn’t gotten a B in Intro Psych, I might have graduated summa (not true). I was pretty crushed when she said it because I had worked semi-hard to get the magna. Years later, when I confronted her about it, she denied saying it. Then she added, “If I did say it, I must have meant it as a way for you not to feel bad about not getting summa.” Which, again, I didn’t!  I didn’t feel bad until she said what she said. The thing is, though, I believe her when she says she doesn’t remember saying it. Or rather, I believe that she’s vested in not remembering things she’s said or done that make her look bad.

It’s not gaslighting because she truly doesn’t remember it–just as my brother truly doesn’t remember the negative things that happen to him. It’s a defense mechanism and now that I understand what’s happening, I don’t have to think I’m crazy because I remember things my brother and mother don’t.

It makes family dysfunction even harder to deal with, though, when I’m the only one who remembers what happened. Before my medical trauma, I was low-contact with my parents. We talked on the phone maybe once a month and emailed sporadically. That was really about all I could deal with. When I woke up in the hospital  and saw my mother, my heart sank. Even all drugged up, I knew it was going to be a problem being near them 24/7.

And, boy, was it. It was terrible and I’m still scarred from it. I told my brother that the medical scare didn’t really affect me that much (which was being a bit facile), but being around my parents did. He said I didn’t complain at all about being in the hospital or any of the medical stuff–my only complaints were about our parents. In the last month of their visit, I had a running count of all the times they annoyed me. I was donating a dollar a time to Planned Parenthood and sent a nice amount after my parents left. I was going to make it double every time my father said something sexist, but I’m not made of money.


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