"THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE"<\/p>\n
After seeing the movie, The History of Violence, and, of course, relating it to the issue of estrangements, I thought, "Some estrangements are better left alone. Why would anyone in their right mind want to get back together with that guy unless he wanted to get back together with you? You’d just leave him the heck alone!"<\/p>\n
I can’t tell you any more or I’ll spoil the movie for you if you haven’t seen it.<\/p>\n
"PROOF": THE ISSUES OF PROOFS<\/p>\n
Then there is the movie Proof with Gwyneth Paltrow playing the daughter to the genius mathematician father played by Anthony Hopkins. A central issue is the fear of insanity having been passed down from father to daughter, a fear that is reinforced by the suspicions of the controlling straitlaced buttondowned sister. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Long ago I worried that I might have inherited the mental illnesses
\nof my mother and grandmother. But the boogeyman of that serious a
\nmental illness never materialized. I have suffered and been treated for
\nclinical depression which is practically the common cold of mental
\nillnesses. <\/p>\n
Once upon a time in my twenties I voluntarily went for an
\nappointment with one of my mother’s psychiatrists. Because I wasn’t as
\nclose to her as she wanted me to be, she was telling me that I was
\ncrazy. I was so fed up with her calling me crazy that I offered to go
\nto her psychiatrist to see what the doctor thought. After interviewing
\nme her doctor assured me that I was not crazy. I told my mother her
\ndoc’s verdict and my mother said, "Oh, I knew it all along!" She is a
\nstrange woman.<\/p>\n
I"m sure that I’m obsessive compulsive but at the low end of the
\nrange. Not sufficiently obsessive compulsive to take medication. <\/p>\n
I know that my daughter has wondered if she has inherited something.
\nShe tends to exaggerate things. She has said things like, "Everyone on
\none side of my family is mentally ill going back for generations! No
\none has been treated!" Gasp, gasp!! Oh, the Horror!<\/p>\n
The truth is that the two people in my family who had serious mental
\nhealth issues are my grandmother and my mother but each had a different
\ndisorder. Both received treatment, my mother having received treatment
\nfor over 50 years. The only common thread between their conditions
\nmight be symptoms of depression but it’s hard to say what my
\ngrandmother really had as she was so withdrawn that no one would know
\nif she was depressed or what. I never had an actual conversation with
\nher if you’d define a conversation as two people exchanging more than a
\nhandful of words. From the description of her behavior I could guess
\nthat she might have been Schizoid. She was institutionalized for a
\nwhile but no one in the family knows what her official diagnosis was.<\/p>\n
My mother has Borderline Personality Disorder which means that she
\nrages and worries, rages, gets depressed, does self destructive things,
\nsees everything in black and white terms and alternately demonizes and
\nidealizes people, especially me. My grandmother was withdrawn. My
\nmother was emotionally all over the place. Other than my mother and
\ngrandmother the only people who have been diagnosed and treated for
\nmental illnesses are a couple of cousins who have Bipolar Disorder and
\ntheir father who suffered from clinical depression. <\/p>\n
I’ve asked relatives in Finland if there were others in the family
\nwho had had something seriously wrong mentally but they had no reports
\nof others who had a problem. <\/p>\n
Perhaps my daughter has experienced something personally that makes
\nher wonder if she has inherited what she sees as the "Family Curse"
\nalthough there isn’t any Family Curse. Most of my relatives are
\nproductive, successful. creative people, even those who have been
\ntreated for Bipolar Disorder and clinical depression.<\/p>\n
A friend gave me a good quote that she heard years ago when she took
\nPsychology 101: "We are all abnormal on a continuum of abnormality."
\nMakes sense to me! From what I’ve seen of people I believe that we all
\nat one time or another in our lives experience a little bit of
\ncraziness. <\/p>\n
In the movie Proof, the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow is
\nalmost convinced by her sister that she has inherited the "Family
\nCurse" but finally she realizes that this is something that her sister
\nneeds to believe. It is not her own problem.<\/p>\n
People can be like that, like the sister in Proof. They want to
\nbelieve that someone else who is creative, intelligent, living a life
\nthat is different than theirs … there must be something wrong with
\nthem. As though lifestyles are created in just one mold and any other
\nmold is a flawed mold. A factory second.<\/p>\n
Funny … or not really funny … but I thought recently that my
\ndaughter is like that sister in the movie Proof. She must be
\ndisappointed that I have never been self destructive as she predicted
\nthat I would be eight years ago. You might think she’d be relieved that
\nI have never done anything harmful to myself or ever threatened doing
\nanything harmful to myself. Even now when she makes a point of telling
\nme that she doesn’t love me and will never end our estrangement, if I
\nhad a truly suicidal bone in my body I’d be thinking of something along
\nthe lines of self destruction but I’m not. No way!<\/p>\n
It might be that she hates to be wrong. She’d rather be right and
\nhave me being suicidal? Then she’d have been proved right in her
\nprediction that I was going to be just like my mother. This would have
\nmade my daughter happy. She’s like the sister in Proof who wanted to
\nbelieve that her creative smart mathematician sister was ill just like
\ntheir creative smart mentally ill mathematician father.<\/p>\n
The Proof in the title of the movie was a mathematical proof and the
\nproof of Paltrow’s sanity. The only people in my life who would like to
\nbelieve that I am crazy are my mentally ill mother, my bitter
\nex-husband, and my estranged daughter. All three undoubtedly suspect
\nthat each other is crazy too.<\/p>\n
In the movie I began to wonder if the sister was the one with the
\nproblem. At the least she had a control issue. She wanted to control
\nGwyneth. Controlling Gwyneth seemed to be something that she was
\ncomfortable trying to do. Convincing Gwyneth that she was sick and
\nneeded looking after was her mission. I have to wonder what kind of
\nrelationship the sisters would have after Gwyneth took off on her own
\nand took charge of her own life.<\/p>\n
Why would someone be happy if someone was mentally ill but unhappy
\nif the person turned out to be sane? Obstinately sane? Is sanity
\ndangerous? Some kind of threat? Why would someone need to believe that
\nanother person is mentally ill when they aren’t? The rest of the world
\nthat knows me on a day to day basis has no need to make me prove my
\nsanity.<\/p>\n
Snicks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
"THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE" After seeing the movie, The History of Violence, and, of course, relating it to the issue of estrangements, I thought, "Some estrangements are better left alone. Why would anyone in their right mind want to get back together with that guy unless he wanted to get back together with you? You’d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-weblogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}