Chapter 23

Synchronicity III ‘Cantognake’

It’s been 2 months since I last posted and 100 plus days since my son moved in before leaving for Canada. So much has gone on and at times fear has returned and prevented me from writing the next few definitive chapters.

I lost the Magic. I lost Great Spirit. I lost a friend. But everything is for a reason.

It’s a special kind of hell seeing your son traumatised, psychologically and emotionally whilst being re-traumatised yourself as you let back into your consciousness the family that contributed to it. It has taken every ounce of my energy holding him, educating and challenging him about his own narcissistic traits, helping him find authentic self, developing and lauding his spiritual instinct and encouraging self-knowledge through research so that he was in a safer place before his Canada trip. He was suicidal. His addict head was very much shouting at him. His head was fucked. And it still is. But he’s in a safer place and about to begin the long road of psychological therapies.

I’ll never forget the look on my son’s face when he came round on that fateful day in March and told my Story. It had never been so important for someone to get it. Not for me (which made a change), but for him and hopefully one day, my daughter and grandson. He experienced a horrific, sudden and life changing paradigm shift that I’ve had the ‘luxury’ of months to. I have never seen anyone physically and psychologically jolt so much in my life. Despite that, my overwhelming feeling was relief.

A week or so later, he was to tell his mom he was moving out.

She had scapegoated my son for a long time so there was no loving enquiry. No trying to understand her son’s pain. Just dark contempt within the silences.

‘Mind the walls when you do!’ was her austere reply. ‘Austere’ is a far cry from how the family and outside world experience my ex.

An hour or so later, having arrived at mine around March 31st, my son asked me the most haunting question of my life,

‘Do you think Mom will listen if I tell her I’m suicidal?’

I stood up and held him so tight whilst tears ran down my face.

‘Can you see how wrong that question is? How it should never get to that stage?’

‘Yeah’ he mumbled as he held on tight.

I had learnt long ago that they never listen.

The ring, pictured above, is engraved with the word ‘cantognake’, meaning love in the Lakota language and a hummingbird symbolising infinite devotion. It arrived one April morning, weeks after ordering it from a beautiful Etsy seller in Israel. I knew she was the right one to make such an important gift. It was to my son for him to take on his year-long trip. He wore it around his neck for the very first time the next day. He was out for a walk in his lunchtime break from work (April 29th) when we exchanged texts pictured below.

Source reminded him in that second that he is loved beyond words.

Don’t you think that’s one of best synchronicities yet?

He was learning to believe his Spirit. He had been fast-tracked in ways that would have caused many to fall. But he was to show himself to be strong and brave. I’m so proud of how he dealt with my barrage of challenges about his toxic behaviours sat at the kitchen table. We dissected each one as they arose and his ability to own that dark shit put my decades of being in that cesspit to shame. I spent hours ensuring he understood I was equally to blame. That I was so sorry. That I was here for him now.

This hasn’t been the case with my beautiful daughter, where my attempts were only to solidify her views of me, fed by her mother’s toxicity. It is not her fault. She is 5 years younger and has been groomed over many years to be her mother’s Golden Child and Flying Monkey whilst painfully scapegoating her brother by reading from her procured darkly woven ancestral script.

After having had 35 years of direct narcissistic abuse , both as a child and then as the enabling husband, you could say I’m well-versed in the tactics of narcissists. There’s one thing more definite than taxes and that’s the wrath of a narcissist following an injury to their fragile ego and loss of control. It is in this situation that their text book tactics come out to play and if covert, will expose themselves. It is this that solidified my son’s acceptance of what is. I was able to explain what was to come and with this prediction comes trust in me and himself as it plays out right before his eyes.

The last chapter was published on the marking of the day we left his mother’s house with his furniture following a threat to dispose of it by his sister (but from her mother’s instruction). My son was terrified. We had my best friend there (my soul brother who has taught me unconditional love) as we arrived at the allotted time ‘slot’.

His mother wasn’t there. I wasn’t surprised. But instead, her latest enabler opened the door and greeted my son with the words ‘I need your key back’.

Following a few strained words of niceties, we began to empty his bedroom but under her partner’s watchful eye.

‘You need to stop watching us!’ I said firmly.

‘I know why you are doing it. I know my ex-wife very well. I know she has asked you and I know why. This is her son. He is nervous enough. Ok?’

He sheepishly withdrew. He was there to make sure we didn’t mark the walls of her finely manicured home.

He’s a kind man doing something he wasn’t comfortable doing. But I could see he’s a classic codependent. Moving from lover to lover with no things of his own, other than a few pictures which my ex-wife wouldn’t let him hang.

He was described as ‘different to the others’ to my son recently by his mother. He sure is. He’s a dutiful enabler who doesn’t question her instruction. He doesn’t outburst in anger. He doesn’t object. He calls my children disrespectful highlighting her cause. He’s pretty loaded and materialistic and provide’s her with the lifestyle she deserves. The one I strived to give her once too.

When I could eventually See, I told my son that I had hoped for a situation where we would all be sat around a table, his mother included. That some miracle would happen where my ex would also See and help facilitate the healing of our beautiful children. But narcs rarely have the courage to change, despite all the evidence of around them. Even when it’s their children. Hence ‘generational trauma’.

But the Bear in my Shamanic Journey was right. I can only help 3 and recent events have set that in concrete.

Over the next few chapters (and the last for a while whilst I concentrate on my own therapy and healing), I’ll be opening the door to the covert narcissistic abuse my son experienced as he became Scapegoat II in the family recently, my sickening role as enabler to my children’s mother, the behaviours I experienced from my ex-wife that took place behind laced curtains, and finally a chapter to my daughter who I love so so much.

My brothers and their families recently failed my son. They not only continue to enable but actually disbelieve his life experience and fall farther into my exe’s contrived pity pit and place him in the box named ‘scapegoat’. I have never been as angry and ashamed of them as I am right now.

I am fifty-percent responsible for the harm caused to my children.

But I am now one hundred percent responsible towards facilitating their healing. To try (and that’s all I can do through this blog) to get my daughter to See. To finally put to rest our generational narcissism.