Hello Anita,

So good to hear from you 🙂 I am well! How are you?? 

I have been in London for the last 1 month, mainly packing up my stuff and saying my goodbyes to this city. I spent half of my life here and now onto the next chapter 🙂

So interesting that you wrote right before my CBT started. You must have had some feeling for it. I had my first session with my therapist and she is a really nice woman. We are scheduled to start CBT from 20th of July. And at the moment I am on my way to a 10day meditation course.

How is life going for you?

Thanks for checking on me again 🙂

Dear TeaK and Anita,

I wanted to thank you both for writing to me and your very helpful and compassionate posts. I took a break from posting, as had a lot to “digest”.

My anxiety issues haven’t stopped, but interestingly enough, intrusive images have stopped…i have no idea why. Unfortunately, free therapy I signed up for still didn’t start, I’m still on their waitlist. Hopefully soon! 🙂

I have thought a lot about these issues we discussed, about my childhood, about any person’s childhood really and I realised this problem is extremely deep. It definitely doesn’t stop with our parents. Although we all acknowledge our parents were hurt in one way or another by their own parents and that’s why they were hurting us, I think we are still playing the blaming game. I realised this problem is so deep and goes so far back, that healing through loving an inner child and cutting out a parent that hurt that child is only a partial healing ….because our parents are not to blame, we are all to blame. We as humanity.

Whole families, generations, societies, cultures, whole humanity is to blame that we keep re-creating this suffering. I suffered at the hands of my parents, but I understand why they thought what they did was a good thing to do. I know very few parents actually purposefully hurt their children, they say even serious drug addicts say they love their children.

We need to cut out toxic people who want to harm us and end these relationships, but the way out of this darkness is somewhere else.  I don’t know where this journey takes me, but I’m exploring to see possibilities

Dear TeaK,

Thank you for your reply. I read recently 90% of the world’s population were beaten as kids.  I don’t know why it is so difficult to accept that we were abused as children, why instead of facing to what happened, we just accept it as love and keep reliving or reenacting what happened in the past, making others (next generations, our partners) or our health pay the price. Most likely, both.

I guess part of it is because we still want to cling to that love that all children really need to survive. We can’t let go of the illusion that we were not always loved or that we were not loved at all in extreme cases…

The reason why I knew the way I was treated wasn’t respectful or “right” is because I know it deep down, my whole being, every cell in my body knows what was wrong. And I promised to myself i would never hit my own children no matter what they do.

But mistreatments and abuse are way beyond and much more complicated than just physical harm caused to children. Silent treatments, emotional blackmail, power control, withdrawals, judgements, demands.. Why are children brought up this way? Why do we damage the most innocent beings in such cruel ways and they just turn a blind eye to everything and want to be loved by anyone…It is all very sad but also incredibly awakening for me as I am not a parent yet luckily and I absolutely understand the full moral responsibility of being one now. I know I must work out through my own traumas and issues, so I pass none of that onto my children. So I never live in the past. So I can respond to all challenges in life with my present needs and emotions, and not past reactions. so I don’t ever hurt another human being, because I have unresolved issues from my childhood/past/ early life conditioning and traumas.

I genuinely want to break free from my past. The work on myself is constant and part of me wishes there was a way to end all the problems in one go.

All emotions whether it is anger or forgiving a person (if it comes from a place of compassion and not self-illusion) have a place in our psyche and relationships. I guess the trick is to develop that emotional competence and foster it in our children.

Hello Anita,

Thanks for checking on me.  I am good! I hope you are well too 🙂 Sorry for late reply, I had language exams to prepare for.

Also, I have been looking into childhood traumas myself, I read Alice Miller’s “The body never lies” and was just trying to dig into my own childhood.

I think I understand better now what you were telling me about “how I felt as a child” by my parent’s actions or inactions and obviously how some of these feelings are now suppressed/repressed or I choose to disassociate myself from them because it is painful to look into, also painful to let of my illusions. I was definitely deluding myself thinking that the fact that my mother hit me when I was a teen was something that I came to terms with. Deluding myself thinking that her authoritarian upbringing is something which didn’t harm me that much. I thought a lot about the source of my anger and rebellious nature. And why this is the reaction I have to most uncomfortable situations/relationships in life. I am sure it was because my parents forced me to be the way they wanted me to be. To behave well, study hard, be a good kid, make them proud,  be clean, etc.etc. I was a very shy, timid and confused kid. They  drilled obedience into me.

Later, as a teen with hormonal changes in my body, I could no longer take these demands and expectations. I refused to eat. For one year, I stopped eating much. As a teen, I was convinced I wanted to lose weight to look better for boys, but now i know the reason why I stopped eating was because I could no longer take being forced to live up to my parents’ expectations and “culture”.  I was trapped and I had no way out.

It is very interesting how these feeling “trapped” is something that followed me throughout my life. Whenever I find myself in difficult situations now, I feel trapped and dying to escape and run away. Just like I felt back then when i was a kid who just wanted to leave her family. So because I had nowhere to go and could no longer accept the fact that nobody understands me or wants to listen to me, all I could do was rebel. This is when my mother starting beating me. When she would try to force feed me food “for my own good” and I wouldn’t eat. She thought by attacking me with a broom and hitting me, I will stop rebelling. She never understood how much I suffered from the lack of understanding, genuine contact and just human respect and what she did was unacceptable or damaged me further. I felt very humiliated and damaged. All I wanted was to escape. And I remember a few times I even ran away from home….

So what I am trying to say, you are right, things were not AT ALL rose-tinted, pretty and loving about my parents as I was presenting it to myself and to everyone else. I was a victim of my parents and their culture and mentality related expectations.

When I did leave my family home at 17 and started living alone, suddenly I was all free, and this seemed like what i always wanted. but i still couldn’t be happy. I was very depressed and sad and I hated myself. I started having serious acne problems. I am pretty sure it was my body showing my self-hatred on my skin. These problems only stopped after I became more or less happy being in a new country and having a new life. but it took 6 years minimum to adapt.

The lack of genuine communication and understanding is also something which I have been seeking my whole life. I am drawn to people who are misunderstood, mistreated and sad, be it artists, poets or just people I meet. I share their pain. And I no longer want to lie to myself that I had a happy childhood.

My teenage years including my first sexual experiences were an absolute disaster as well. The reason being nobody ever talked to me to explain the actual changes my body is going through, nobody explained to me anything and it really frustrated me. I had to obey my “culture and mentality” and be a good girl. i wasn’t even allowed to be seen with any boy at 17, let alone date any. It was absolutely insane, but my parents expected me to be a virgin when i get married. How is this ok? I always knew it was not ok, but I never looked into all the pain and conflict it caused in my psyche and body. Even though, luckily after many years, probably 10 years or so, I was able to break away from this “mentality”, and asserted my own feeling about the subject to my parents,  I still have certain feelings of “shame and guilt” feelings that were drilled into me to everything relating to sex.

I spent a long time adjusting myself in all of my relationships when I was misunderstood out of the fear of abandonment to the point where I no longer knew what it was that I actually wanted. Luckily this has changed. In my current relationship, I have a space to talk about my feelings and thoughts. Even though when I fell in love with the man I am with, I also liked the fact that my mother would approve of him, but I do not love him because of this reason now.

It is also interesting about my OCD, intrusive imagine I had before was violent in nature, and it was usually always the same image. Whoever was sitting very close to me, this image would pop in my head that there was a knife in their throat and they were bleeding. it bothered me very much. But now this image changed. Now I see myself being attacked and feel the actual fear. Either someone pushing me, or strangling me or hitting or killing me.  This is strange, but I feel like these intrusive image change signifies some kind of improvement and means i am approaching my fears closer.

I know these images are just symbols that mean something and I am no longer ashamed of them. I also know for a fact it is related to my childhood fears. Fear is something I am looking into now very deeply. It will probably be a long journey…I realised I have been running away from looking into my fears for a long time. Fear is like sorrow or pain. I am much more familiar with sorrow and pain than fear as I have actually been in life situations where there was no escape and I had to live with physical as well as mental pain. Then I saw it wasn’t as bad as I thought…and it changed me. But fear…i was never ready to face it. Now I am. And I think maybe when I get to the bottom of it, my OCDs might improve too. Unfortunately, at the moment i have to do all work by myself, as the therapy I signed up for is free of charge and i am still on their waitlist. If my therapist can’t help me, I am not too bothered. I know it is extremely difficult to find a reliable and open minded therapist these days who are not the victims to conventional morality and brainwashing themselves.

Dear Teak,

To be honest, sometimes I blame myself and obsess over it, other times, I just plainly obsess about the pleasant conversation i had with a friend etc. I think obsessive thinking is my reactions with regard to processing pleasure and pain/discomfort. If its something simple, i don’t obsess about it, the only connection i see is that i am chasing something with these thoughts. I am still at the early stages of getting comfortable with my own mind and not sure where it will take me, but I am ready 🙂

I am so happy to hear that you are healed from your biggest traumas and developed self-esteem and  self-worth. Do you have any residue of anger left towards your mother? Would you say you have forgiven her completely?

Hello Anita,

I was referring to psychological harm ofcourse, not physical. I know for a fact many times I am consciously not aware at the point when I use hurtful language towards my partner or my family. Maybe subconsciously i am aware, but i don’t see it at the point of doing it…

To be fair i don’t remember any of the personal problems of the girl i was, other than liking a certain food or not liking. I am not sure relying on my memories of what happened would be accurate in my case….

On a different note, I had a couple of insights into my OCD issues and would love to hear your thoughts on it.

-You wrote in another post about separation anxiety (Tony’s post) and it caught my attention because I can really relate to Tony’s fears as my deepest psychological fear is losing people I love too. I have actually gone very deeply into the nature of death and I think i understand death a bit more intimately now. I certainly experienced separation anxiety as well multiple times in my life. Firstly, it was when I left my home at 17 and moved to a foreign country. I was still a kid living unfiltered raw emotions and only much later in my life i got to understand i was actually quite depressed and sad. also very anxious. this makes sense why my OCD started or became apparent after 20. I think i had it as a kid but the separation anxiety just exacerbated it.

I also had a sudden realisation to my recent obsessive thinking patterns (about the girl at the retreat and then the other new friend), I think i was obsessively thinking about these problems to avoid dealing with the actual problem that is bothering me very very deeply at the moment-with my partner in my current relationship…so my question is-what is your experience-Could it be that obsessive thinking is actually an escape? Escape from dealing with the painful situation or the actual problem? So the mind finds other things to keep itself busy…

Hello Anita,

Thanks for your insights. About the Anger preceding aggression-of-course I know this. I am very familiar how violence happens as I know I am not delusional about my own violence inside me too and I know how many subtle forms it takes.

The only thing I am not sure about, and I say this from my observations of myself- at that very moment, when one is truly angry and then becomes violent, one is not usually aware of what is happening. I know this, because I have been fighting for a long time with my own anger. And I wish I knew I was causing damage when it is actually happening, and not afterwards when my brain processes or analyses what happened… Unfortunately, most people cause harm without being fully aware of it at the point they do it. It is true, they become aware later and acknowledge what happened…but why does this not stop one from repeating that pattern? I guess this is the art of life to master.

About childhood traumas, I know ofcourse as a child, what we experience in life is unfiltered, “raw” as you called it. Then the analytical mind slowly develops, and if there is a residue of a certain experience with its pain or pleasure,it becomes a lifelong reaction to what happens everyday.

So we don’t ever fully live the life as it is, but just react from those unprocessed, misunderstood experiences which are now our memories, which is now “me”.  We carry this residue with us our whole lives adding and extracting from it, thinking it is a change. My analytical mind understands this process, but analytical understanding is not enough.

I agree it is important to understand what happened in order to heal. You mentioned “there is a way to retrieve those emotions- I have and it’s been a result of an intentional and long healing process”. Could you elaborate a little bit on this please? Do you think everyone can retrieve these emotions?