Hi Anita,

Yes, that was helpful. Especially

“There is no point where the eating disorder stops and your life begins, not in my experience.”

Thank you for sharing your own experience and the helpful words.

Thanks Brandy, I think that is a wise plan to move forward.

Anita, yes, healing from those issues has been extremely challenging for me. Do you have any ideas on how to break out of that pattern of trigger-getting stuck-being on the lookout?

Yeah, it’s a strange question to ask if that is not important to him.  Maybe he was asking the question without much weight to it.  Or, maybe he is superficial.  His follow up responses made it seem like he wasn’t superficial.  But again, I don’t know why that question needed to be asked to begin with if he is not.  Which might not be healthy for me to continue given my issues with body sensitivity.

What I’m reading is that fully embracing, acknowledging and sinking into the trauma of not receiving empathy from my mother as a child could free me from it.

Thanks, again for your insights

My issue is that I associate love with putting other people’s feelings before myself. My dysfunctional belief is that love = putting others over myself, getting their needs met over getting my own needs met. I associate love with giving what I think the other person needs, not what I need. I give them what I think they need to maintain the connection, I can see that I’ve been trying to give my mother empathy to keep our connection going, but it’s only intellectual. The attention is on the other person, not me. My mom can’t have empathy for me to process my feelings because she doesn’t have it for herself.

I can have intellectual empathy for the victimizer (my mom) but not the victim (me), which is not true, heartfelt empathy. True empathy comes as a byproduct for having empathy for myself. A deep seated part of me thinks that I don’t deserve my own or anyone else’s empathy because I’m “bad”. I have patterns of putting others needs before my own as a means to maintain the connection because I don’t have empathy for myself and getting my own needs met.

I think if we don’t give ourselves empathy, we will consciously or subconsciously play our lives out selfishly because we aren’t giving ourselves what we need, and we are looking for it in the wrong places.

Anita,

Thank you for the throrough analysis of my previous posts and connecting some dots.  I do know that my mothers lies, that I lie, that we all lie at times. In my experience as a human, it hurts to be lied to, but holding on to the actions of other people traps me in the victim-victimizer mindset. I think that an important step in my healing is to not obsess over my own, or other people’s behaviors (lying), but rather try to understand why the behavior might be happening on a deeper level. My mother is a habitual liar because she believes she needs to protect other people’s feelings, and protect herself. I do the same thing, for the same reason. My greatest relationship (boyfriend-girlfriend dynamic) trauma happened in 2011 with a boyfriend who slept with two other people, and lied to me when I had asked if he had slept with anyone else since the last time we saw each other (it was a long distance relationship, and our relationship had been on and off). He lied, and I believed him. I can justify lying when it is intended to protect other people’s feelings. In my human mind, I can’t justify lying when it is done for selfish reasons, and I believe that he lied to me for selfish reasons, because he probably figured I would not have sex with him if I knew that he had slept with other people.  I would not have slept with him had I known he had been with two other people since we last saw each other.  I would have been hurt and not wanted to see him during the week that he was home (He was home from college for a week when this occurred, and off to China for a study abroad).  We had sex and I trusted him.  During that week, we got into a car accident.  He was driving, rolled through a stop sign and I was in the passenger seat.  We were T-boned by a car going 55-60 miles per hour on my side of the car.  I was unconscious for about 20 minutes and sustained a concussion.  He didn’t sustain any injuries.  At the time, I wasn’t mad at him for getting us into a car accident.  It was an accident, after all.  While he was in China, he suffered severe anxiety attacks (probably from the guilt of lying and getting us into a car accident).  When he came home, everything just felt very off, as it had that whole summer.  We broke up.  That winter, about 3 or 4 months after we broke up when he returned from China, he sent me an email disclosing that he had lied to me about sleeping with two other people before we saw each other that May.  He probably did this because the guilt was eating away at him.  At first, I was in denial about my anger and tried to forgive him immediately.  I didn’t feel angry until a few weeks later.  I think I have felt angry ever since.  If he would not have lied to me, I wouldn’t have wanted to see him, we wouldn’t have gotten into the car accident, I might not have spent that whole summer waiting around for him to get back from China. I might have moved on with my life.  These thoughts are not productive and I try not to feed into them anymore.  Acknowledging the anger and feelings are most important.  What makes me the most angry is that on a deep level, I think I knew that he lied to me before we saw each other.  I was and am angry at myself for not listening to my inner guidance of lie detection.  I wanted to trust him, and I tried to.  I think there is still residual trauma in my body from the car accident, as well as trauma for being lied to.  Me and him have been broken up since March of 2014, he is married now to a girl who slightly resembles me. He still shows up in my dreams quite often, so I know there is still unprocessed trauma in my relationship with him that I need to address.

It is not my job as a human to justify lying behaviors of other people. Lying is a behavior that happens for underlying reasons.  It has been exhausting trying to justify how he could lie to me for such selfish reasons.  I don’t think that he was trying to protect my feelings, I think he lied in order to ensure that he would see me and we would have sex when he was home for a week in between college and China.  I cannot wrap my head around this type of lie, and the more angry I feel at him for having lied to me so selfishly, the more I hold myself and my vibration in the victim-victimizer programming.  This is part of my story, and there was a lesson to be learned from all of it.  The lesson is to trust myself above anyone else, and trust my inner guidance.  My inner guidance had been warped from a young age due to being lied to by my mother, and probably my father. I wanted to trust them above anything else.  They were my nurturers and care takers.  They were my “gods”.  I didn’t want to believe that they could lie to me.  But they are humans too.  The problem was that I trusted them over my own intuition.  They would lie, and I might feel like something was off, but I ignored that little voice inside me telling me that something was off because I wanted to believe them.  This created a disconnection.  The lesson here is to learn how to rebuild trust in myself.

Thank you, again for your insights. I am grateful.

Hi Anita,

I’m not sure if the comment from the woman at the retreat and what my mom said to me when I was 17 are related. They could be. Once I got past the feeling of shame that the note the woman left me, I think I was more intrigued by what a black heart could mean if it wasn’t intended to be negative.

My mom never apologized, and in fact denied a memory that I described to her. I gave up hope that my mom will ever apologize, and I’m learning to be okay with who she is as an individual. It is a long process of letting go of my belief that justice should be served with an apology. She is who she is and she doesn’t want to unblind herself to how she shamed her children.

Hi Anita,

I always appreciate your thoughtful replies. Thank You.

She didn’t seem like a mean or cruel person – she did seem quite mentally unstable in terms of how our society operates. I think a part of what she said resonated with me in a way, which is why I’m still thinking about it months later. Your advice to not put any value into what she said is wise, but I do want to explore why it resonated with me.