A continuation from my entries regarding this thread. It's been a painful day. I have cried because it hurts deeply. It's not just the loss that hurts so badly, it's that the people I lost do not care nor are none the wiser to my pain. I cannot speak about my pain to those I lost. They are and always have been in a world of their own and there self absorbed nature's could not and would not allow them to see nor feel my pain. If anything they added to it by Judy being who they were. The realisation that I am not able to reach out to them has put me into a further stare of grief and unimaginable pain. They cannot see their own dysfunction and I loved them in that dysfunction for a very long time until I could no.longer love them in that dysfunction as it was causing me pain.

How they remember me I imagine is the pictures they painted of me but not who I was. They had an incredible innate ability to put the focus and blame on me of why it was acceptable to treat me badly, abuse me and hurt me. Yet, they never wanted to face any truths about themselves.

Their attitudes were and I imagine still are, is the world revolves around me and God help anyone who takes any attention away from me no matter how badly I have behaved in order to get the attention. God help anyone that points out my behaviour. How dare they make me look at me. I'll do whatever it takes to punish them. I tried for many years but one day I realised that I needed to stop trying. I realised that I wasn't helping at all and that I couldn't fix them. Refreshing some would say but in that lay as horrible choice for me and that was to leave them behind for my own wellbeing and safety.

It's never a decision that is made lightly. It was an incredibly painful decision. I left them all. I cut them all from my life. I often have doubted my choice. I grieve the relationships I wanted to have and couldn't. I realised that to have the relationships I wanted meant that they were going to have to face themselves and work on themselves to have a healthy relationship. I left to take myself out of the equation so they would no longer have their target to take their stuff out on.

For me, I'm still left in a world of pain and hurt from my life. For me, I'm not sure a d have many doubts of how to have healthy friendships let alone a relationship.

I have so many fears that I'm not going to see red flags. This is why I stay alone but in that I'm not benefitting from breaking out of my own isolation. It's like a double edged sword. I'm incredibly lonely but I also know that right now I'm incredibly vulnerable and to trust people around me is incredibly hard. I'm frightened most of the time.

Aside from everything I've been through, I see the incredible damage it had done to me and it's a constant where I need to reassure myself that it's ok to focus on me. In various ways and methods focusing on me was worthy of punishment. That is psychologically so damaging. I wasn't allowed to have a good time or feel good about anything. My birthday's were a source of them feeling good about them not necessarily about being my birthday.

There's just so much I cannot forgive. Their dramas and issues got in the way of everything they wanted and I always paid the price.

What crushed my heart millions of times over was the very fact that they just could not look at themselves and consider that it was them that had to decide to change. It was never my place to tell them that as that would have been ignored. I do not know if they will ever see that the need to change but for now my heartache and grief lies in the place of not being able to have anything to do with them because they haven't done any work on themselves and I can no longer be the target of their abuse. I did it for 36 years and could do it no more.