I never chose to deconstruct anything. What I chose was to love God more whole-heartedly and to do what was necessary to become more whole so that I could love God, myself and others more authentically. What I did not expect was that I had to be undone first before I could become whole, and that the process of becoming undone by God would turn out to be deconstruction.
Deconstruction for me did not start with my Catholic faith. It started with everything I had believed and took for granted about family. It started with questioning everything I had ever believed about family once I began to realise how much trauma I carried from my family of origin.
I remember the year I began to feel rage, something I had never ever felt before. It was a rage that would bubble up spontaneously beyond my control. It was red hot in my chest and face and for the first time in my life I felt hatred directed at my extended family. The intensity of the rage and hatred shocked me because I had never felt this way before with such purity. I also knew why I felt this rage and hatred because there had been a precipitating incident in the larger family unit which was so clearly unjust and wrong but which was accepted as normal by the family that something inside me snapped. I remembered thinking,"This isn't normal. This isn't right. And it isn't ok to pretend that it is normal and that everything is alright."
It was as if I had suddenly woken up from a deep slumber because it was the first time in my life after being alive for thirty-eight years that I could recognise and name that something was extremely dysfunctional and harmful in my extended family of origin. But I was the only one who saw it, and I could feel the entire family system collude to gaslight my awakening and make me doubt that what I saw was real.
At first I tried to ignore these waves of anger that came and I tried to go on with my life. But very soon, I realised that my interior journey of healing could not continue to progress unless I faced whatever this was head-on. That was when I decided I needed psychotherapy to look into the deeper systematic roots of the wounds I bore from my family. So I signed up for counselling with a focus on family systems and began excavating the "diseased" foundations of my ability to love and be loved.
During this season of healing I quickly realised that I had no ability to love another person without abandoning myself because that was what had been modelled to me as "love" my entire life. I learned about family enmeshment trauma and realised that I had mistaken enmeshment for love my entire life. It explained why I always had problems with boundaries - I never knew when I ended and someone else began.
When I loved another person, I would always unknowingly overstep my boundaries and feel that it was my right to do so because I loved them. I also assumed that if they loved me, they must abandon themselves for me and be as involved in my life as I am in theirs. Rescuing others and longing to be rescued was an ongoing relational fantasy of mine. And that extended to my relationship with God too - I was always expecting God to rescue me from myself even as I believed I had to abandon myself in order to love God.
As I began to unpack the patterns in my family system that had led to my lack of stability in any sense of who I was, I began to question all the values that had been instilled in me from my childhood. After all, if this family system has harmed me (and others) so gravely, what can I trust about what it values? How do I know which part of what this family believes in and practices is part of the toxicity which has become the family norm? Thus began the excruciating process of my differentiation from my enmeshed family system - yes, at the ripe age of thirty-eight.
Through this process I started to recognise how individual agency was never actually respected in this system unless it happened to align with what the family system wanted. I began to see how an individual's "no" is bypassed, ignored or just walked over as if it had never been spoken because the family system's agenda was always paramount. To have no desire except that which also aligned with what the rest have agreed upon as desirable is the way to experience belonging. Gossip and criticism behind people's backs was constant and part of the system's way of keeping everyone in line.
I grew up as a "golden girl" within the systems I knew. I was a golden girl in my family of origin (including the extended family that is enmeshed) because I excelled at knowing what was expected of me and fulfilling it. I was always a sensitive child and highly vigilant about conflict and tension - I would use whatever gifts I had to pre-emptively diffuse tension when possible or to fix problems so as to alleviate the anxiety that existed within the system. Part of making the system "happy" was making the others proud of me by excelling at what the family valued and by helping to reinforce the preservation of those values in others.
The role I learned to play in my family system became the role I also played in my school system. The enmeshed "golden girl" persona who had no Self except what her family / system needed her to be became who I believed I WAS, and I carried that role into my identity as a Roman Catholic too. The script that "ran" me on auto-pilot was to learn what the system valued highly and then meet that standard as best as I could because if I could remain the "golden girl", then I would be SAFE.
In order to differentiate from my family system and figure out who I was, I had to dismantle (deconstruct) everything I had been taught by my family about what family meant, how to be in the family, what counted as love, what counted as being a responsible member of the unit and even what it meant to be a good person. It went to the very foundations of my being because I had learned all these things in the context of trauma and dysfunction. I was realising for the first time that if I wanted to be emotionally healthy and learn what authentic love actually was, I had to unlearn what had been ingrained in me and start from scratch.
(I shared about the specific retreat in which God communicated to me the need for us to undo what I had painstakingly built up in my life and to rebuild again from the foundation up in this newsletter post: The Grace that Undid Me.)
There is a principle given by St. Thomas Aquinas which I have found to be a great descriptor of my integration journey: Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur - Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver. As I - the receiver - underwent massive deconstruction in the foundations of my capacity to relate to myself and others, slowly everything else that had been previously received in my life also had to undergo deconstruction. During this process I felt unmoored from everything that had previously given me a sense of security because I no longer identified myself by the role I had played in the systems I was part of.
I was no longer who I had always believed I was, but I did not yet know who I am. I could only be who I am becoming in this process. As I let go of the only version of the "role-self" I had ever known in order to discover who I was becoming as I became more whole, I began to have a more secure and authentic sense of Self. I developed a new capacity to recognise and name dysfuction for what it is and a new intolerance for what diminished my own and others' dignity.
It was this new sense of Self and the accompanying refusal to ignore or bypass dysfunction and injustice that diminished people's dignity that prepared me - unknowingly - for the eventual deconstruction of the Catholic faith I had known my entire life.
(To be continued in Part 9 of Being Catholic After Deconstruction)
Journeying with you,
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