not to get all emo on your asses again, but a combination of things I've read this week, conversations I've had both recently and in the past, and (to quote Saffy from AbFab) "that car crash of emotions (I) call (my) life" have ganged up in my head and made me want to write about this briefly.
In massage school we had this class called Skills and Dynamics of Therapeutic Relationships. Three long semesters of it, actually. We learned all kinds of fascinating and non-fascinating things about boundaries and assertiveness and blah blah blah, but since our instructor was also a psychotherapist, it also felt like a big forced group therapy session at times. One day we were talking about how our families of origin influenced who we are as caregivers. At the end of class, after telling us the many, many ways in which our parents probably fucked us up about this issue, our teacher made us go around and say one positive thing we got or learned from our birth families. (Yeah, it was that kind of class.) Though, obviously, we had no time to prepare for this or think about what we might want to say, when it was my turn, I said without hesitation "taught me to give and to receive love."
And it's absolutely true. This may sound semi-ridiculous coming from me, the poster child for born-again spinsterhood as well as Ms. Keep-those-walls-up!, but I can and do love, and I can and do accept love, and I am forever grateful that whatever dysfunctional circus I grew up in, it was one in which I knew beyond a doubt that I was loved.
It makes a difference.
xoxo
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