Continued:

I wrote above, “stuck in the absence of a mother“. It’s synonymous with saying stuck in the absence of love. Love for a person is like water for a plant. Without water, a plant withers; without love, a child withers.

In the absence of love, a vacuum is created, a vacuum that quickly gets filled with Anxiety. Here is a proposed definition: anxiety= the condition of being stuck in the absence of love.

I wrote that my mother was not a mother but a monster. It is interesting how similar these two words are.

I say monster because of all the people in the world, it is this one person who took it upon herself to personally and directly inflict massive pain on me. It was just me and her alone in the small apartment when she did that: the family members who abused here weren’t there, politicians and criminals who created wars and crime that harmed her.. these people weren’t there. It was just me and her alone. And so, in my life, she is the monster.

Notice I used the present tense: she is the monster, not she was the monster. When I write about her elsewhere I automatically use the present tense. Sometimes I go back and correct it to the past tense, but what comes out of me first, is the present tense. And that is because Anxiety prolongs the past, extending it into the present. The present and the past are one for the Anxious person.

About the massive pain that she inflicted on me personally and directly: whenever I told about it in the past, I told about it from a minimally-feeling, maximally- dissociated state of mind. As I now try to tell about it from a feeling/ associated state of mind, I feel an unbearable distress and a sense of panic. And so, I am scared to go there. But I will say, it feels like an internal collapse, a death approaching… if I re-experience it the way I experienced it then.

This is what I felt back then when alone with her, at 5, at 15, at 25 (and in-between), she told me with great emotion and theatrics that she was going to kill herself.. and that she was going to kill herself because I hurt her so much, because of words I said or didn’t say, acts I did or didn’t do, expressions on my face she said meant to hurt her, thoughts she said I had when I was silent.

You see, my monster suffered from a combo of Paranoid, Borderline and Histrionic Personality Disorders, which meant that she repeatedly suspected that I (as well as other people, practically everyone, at one time or another) was actively trying to hurt her feelings, and feeling victimized by me, she ragefully attacked me repeatedly, at length, and creatively, theatrically. In her mind, she was defending herself from me.

I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t the case (can you imagine a child trying to hurt a monster and bring rage-attacks against oneself?). Her response was always to argue against my claims of innocence by listing “evidence”: my past behaviors over months and longer that were aimed- so she claimed- at hurting her, and in so doing, prolonging the rage attack.

Her attacks and abuse included, but were not limited to the following: (1) shaming words and messages, going out of her way to deliver a shaming message in all ways possible, from every angle available, drilling it in thoroughly, for a long time per shaming session, (2) heavy-duty, at length guilt-tripping, (3) feasting on my empathy for her by describing in great detail, during long sessions, how hurt she felt by me and by other people, while insisting that I was a lucky girl with no valid hurt feelings, (4) using a loud, high-pressured voice, yelling, crying, never-ending theatrical expressions of her misery, (5) threats to commit suicide, (6) slapping my face with her open hand, and/ or kicking my body with her foot.

My Healing is about accepting that all the above happened, that it hurt a whole lot, that the damage she inflicted on me was real and severe (to no longer minimize it, as I have done). To give my feelings, my experience the validity that she took away from me.

To accept and acknowledge the severity of the abuse I went through, and to clear the present time from the abuse of the past: to no longer project her into other people (expecting them to do what she did).. to remove her from people in my life now.

To not accept the severity of what happened causes what happened to keep knocking on my door, so to speak, insisting to be fully seen and heard. The knocking is not just about what happened but about it re-happening in new forms, new contexts, new people. For example, as a teenager, I never worried about my knees failing me and not being ale to walk (I worried about other things, of course); as an older woman, the Anxiety took over a new area due to aging: my knees.

Anxiety is like glue that is keeping shame, hurt, and guilt in my life in the present time. Healing is about removing the anxiety from these feelings/ emotional-mental experiences, so to allow them to move to the past and stay there.

To be continued.

anita

Continued:

The coyote scared me, but he (or she) did not hurt me. He considered it.. but it didn’t happen. I vividly remember him looking at me up and down, assessing me as potential prey. I’ll never forget it.. it was clear, in his eyes, that it was strictly business, the business of nature, nothing personal. But he didn’t prey on me. Following the two encounters, on two different days, I resumed my walks, there was no pain and injury left over from the encounters.

On the other hand, my mother- my emotional predator- did hurt me. And it was very personal. There was pain and injury carried on from one day to the next, and to the next. It was emotional pain (hurt, shame, guilt, loneliness, despair), and it was physical pain and distress: there were occasional beatings, but mostly the physical pain I am referring to involves a whole lot of physical discomfort and distress aka anxiety which is my experience almost every moment of every day, when I am awake. Like right now (right shoulder twitching and in pain, being sore from the tics, breathing interrupted, unnatural).

My mother was my monster, not a mother. She or it.. was not for me; it was against me. She didn’t kill me, but it would’ve been less painful to me if she did. And throughout it all, I craved- deep inside- to one day make her a mother. This craving, this hope kept me close to the monster, forevermore craving her absent love… stuck in a vacuum of love, stuck in the absence of a mother.

To be continued.

anita

Continued:

When I was confronted by the coyote less than 3 years ago, it felt like time stopped. But Time resumed on that same afternoon, some time after the confrontation was over (the coyote ran away and into the brush). I haven’t been significantly afraid of being confronted by that coyote or by any other coyote since, and resumed my regular walk- including walking through the same stretch of road-  a couple of days after the confrontation (although with some weapon in my hand, pepper spray or a stick). It all seems so far away now, a memory that is secure in the past.

On the other hand, even though I didn’t see my mother (who lives in another country) in close to 13 years and didn’t talk with her for 11 years (my choice), I am still significantly afraid of her. I’d be afraid to be in the country were she resides in fear that I will find myself in her presence, accidentally. My memories of her are far from being secure in the past. Time has stopped in this context, past is one with the present. I indeed lived in the past for too long.

Fear stops Time for a little while; Anxiety stops Times for decades; too often, it stops Time for a lifetime.

It is beginning to get dark as I am typing this, sitting in bed, looking at the stillness of the outside through the window, alone. Whenever alone, at this time of the evening, I feel anxious, fearing that my mother will die. Not because she is old now, but because when she was 25, and I was 5, she said (in a very emotional, convincing way) that she was going to kill herself. I am re-living now what happened decades ago. In my mind, I am still that 5-year-old, afraid that mother will die.

Anxiety extends the past into the present, and the two are one. Healing is about securing these memories in the past; removing these painful/ scary memories from the Now, and seeing a Now that doesn’t have her in it.

anita