Dear Janine:

You wrote that you became a child not easy to deal with. I want to explain to you my view of Cause and Effect. You being difficult to deal with is the Effect, not the Cause. The Cause is: your parents mistreating you. The effect is: the behaviors you developed as a result of being abused by your parents.

Please notice I used the word abused. You were and are abused by your parents, both of them. And as a result of this abuse, you are suffering. Your suffering is none of your fault, none of your responsibility and all your parents’ fault and their responsibility.

Unfortunately, although they are fully responsible for your troubles in thinking, feeling and behaving, they will not correct the damage they already caused you. The solution is not in reaching out or waiting for your parents to fix you.

Your parents are the Problem, not the Solution.

I strongly believe you will need to live away from that house, away from your abusive mother and father and attend psychotherapy with a competent, caring psychotherapist so to heal from the damage caused by your parents.

I know you doubt your thoughts and your feelings, being confused about cause and effect, believing wrongly, often enough, that you are the problem, from birth or soon after, a bad child. Sometimes you see the truth, as part of you knows the truth but often enough another part of you believes you caused this. In psychotherapy, if it is competent therapy, your thinking will become clearer and clearer over time until you see the truth and believe in it, consistently: “Oh, I see”- you will tell yourself; “oh, I see now: I am good. I was always good. There is nothing wrong with me after all!” And there will be great relief and lifting off a heavy burden that you are carrying.

Life can be good for you, outside that place where you live, following a difficult but totally worth is healing process. Please do post here anytime and I will respond to you every time, for as long as you are willing.

anita

Dear Janine:

It may be your 18 birthday today, one of these very days you have turned or are just about to turn 18. I have a gift for you. My gift for you, in potential, can save you decades of life with much distress. It is the following: part of you and a whole lots and lots of people want to deny the reality that is painful to see as is. This denial may feel pretty good at times, postpone unwanted pain for a little while, but pain there will be until reality is confronted and injuries healed.

People (and part of you) will tell you, again and again: you, Janine were not abused, not mistreated, no way! Your mother (and father) had the best intentions for you. They did their best. They are only humans. They make mistakes. No one is mistake-free. So forgive them and move on. Be happy! After all, you have lots of reasons to be happy: you are young, you have all the material things you need, you can have any kind of life that you want.

I am taking on correcting these messages for you right now:
1. First about being abused: in my experience, abuse is very common and is not limited to physical abuse, or blood and gore/ starvation abuse. At least half of all children are abused, at the very least. And most of the children abused- through adulthood- don’t fully believe it. But if you check the numbers of how many people are under psychiatric care for anxiety and depression alone, the numbers are staggering. I don’t want you to be in that statistic.
2. If you are coming out of your childhood, now 18, as a mentally healthy individual, feeling love for your mother, no anger (other than temporary and resolved incidents); if you feel safe enough to get out into the world as an adult, then your parents were good enough. Then it would be true to say that they made mistakes. As is true, all people make mistakes. But if you come out of your childhood feeling unloved, scared, “afraid to be me” as your title indicated; troubled, then your parents were not good enough and their “mistakes” with you are expressions and acts of cruelty against you, lack of empathy, seeing you hurt and continuing to hurt you, never trying to change their behavior so to help you. This is cruelty, abuse, not mistakes.
3. Once you are significantly injured in childhood, as you have been, you can’t just move on, not before you heal. There is healing work to be done. I highly recommend you attending psychotherapy with a competent, caring, hard working psychotherapist that will be on your side, take on your self interest (not your parents’). You wrote that your parents are well off, well, they can pay for such therapy for you, but without being involved in it, just you one on one with the therapist.

Here are my evidence that you were abused, all quotes from your original post: “Over my lifetime, I have collected a lot of unconscious anger towards my mother, which has eaten away at me. I do not feel love for my mother and cannot recall ever feeling secure around her…Being around her makes me tense and fearful…I feel no interest in receiving her love or being in any form of relationship with her…Underneath my anger there is a core feeling of emptiness. Trying to interact with her leaves me feeling extremely defensive…instantly I feel attacked by her, and then I go into fight mode. The dynamic gets complicated when my dad enters the picture .. he starts doing all he can to hurt my feelings…So she grabbed both of my arms and started yanking me towards the stairs. And then my dad joined her.”

You asked a question in your original post: “Why would a child reject a source of unconditional love, if it is truly a warm embrace?” My answer is: you didn’t reject a source of unconditional love. You didn’t reject any kind of love. A child does not reject love- it is impossible. A child rejects abuse. You were not loved; you were attacked and that is why you are defensive, why you are ready to fight- you fight an attacker, not a lover.

Please take my post here for you, this whole thread if you want to print it, and take it to a competent therapist and start working on healing from the abuse you suffered as a victim, abuse by both parents.

Please do not accommodate your own denial and the denial others will so generously hand to you. See reality for what it is- through therapy and heal. Post anytime.

Make your birthday special with this resolution, and so Happy Birthday!

anita

Dear Janine:

I am so glad you are seeing a therapist who did point out to you that you were indeed, abused.

As to your questions:

1. “What is the importance of going through the healing process?” The importance is to have a good quality of life in the present and in the future, improved over time, finding your life meaningful, interesting, satisfying, looking forward to the next day; being able to make good choices for yourself, from who you interact with to what profession to choose, where to live, to how to take care of yourself when you are distressed, how to not automatically react to distress, etc. engage in and enjoy healthy win-win interactions and relationships, love and being loved in return. And if you choose to bring children into the world, bringing up healthy children.

2. “What are the consequences if you do not go through it?” Hundreds of mental disorders such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, psychosis, anorexia, binge eating, many anxiety disorders, mood disorders, personality disorders; obesity, suicide, violence, crime, child abuse, bullying, drug abuse, alcoholism, many syndromes, such as some of the chronic fatigue syndromes cases, and many, many physical illnesses ending in dysfunction, handicap and earlier death, increased accidents due to destructive behavior such as drinking and driving, lack of attention caused accidents, and more. And there is that situation where no matter what you do, how hard you try, and following short periods of time of feeling better, you…always find yourself back in pain. Again and again.

3. You wrote: ” I feel like many of the people who were abused go on living seemingly unaware of it.. What happens then?” The thing is, when we are not aware of the truth, or when we are only a little aware of the truth (like you are- you are aware of your abuse intellectually but you are not aware of it emotionally), what happens is the truth of your injuries is not going away just because we are not aware. Oh, no. The pain of the injuries will keep hurting you until you hear it, see it, become emotionally and intellectually aware of it and then tend to it. You will hear people in denial all the time. I was and you are. Truth will not accommodate denial. You will see people who were abused who seem to have it together but if that is so, it is only for a short time.

I assure you, if you don’t heal, you will have breaks from misery, you will have periods of time of feeling good, but they will not last. The misery you already experienced in your young life- that misery will come back. It is not going anywhere until you heal.

4. You wrote: “I feel sometimes I cannot access my pain. Intellectualizing it and talking about it has become a method for me to avoid feeling it.” I did that too, of course. What happens is when you are a child so dependent and so loving of the people who are actively hurting you, keeping in awareness that you are in danger of being hurt day in and day out, is too much to bear. So you split your emotions, you dissociate. The brain does its best to not be overwhelmed by not being emotionally aware of what is going on. It doesn’t do a perfect job as you are still miserable, just not as badly as if you were completely aware. So you grow up dissociated.

5. “What does the healing process look like?” For one thing, a process of re-integration takes place, integrating the dissociated emotions to the intellect. Now you know what happened in a dry intellectual way. When healing you will know what happened in a … wet (as in crying and sweating) way, you will know what happened as your heart races and you feel like vomiting and you feel dizzy… this is why it should be done in therapy with a competent, caring therapist. She/ he has to be there with you as you get to know emotionally what happened, as you put the emotions together with the intellect.

You will grow empathy toward yourself. You will find out that you were a victim, that you are not guilty. You will discover- emotionally- that you loved your mother completely and that it was her who rejected you, not the other way around. You will find out how hurt you were. You will come back to yourself.

This healing process will take time, I would say a couple of years, a wild guess on my part. I mean a couple of years of therapy. Wild guess, again. But the process will continue for a long time after. There is no happily-ever-after existence “after” healing; there is no second childhood- that is lost forever. You wake up to reality and it is like earthquakes in the brain, every time you find out something new, so different than what you thought before. You apply relaxation and calming techniques so to withstand, endure the distress of changing core beliefs about who you are, who your parents are, and what life is about. You let the changes settle and you continue, day in and day out, persistent.

I started this process at 51. I did only (!) two years of therapy and three years of full time work myself, using the insight and most important the skills I learned in therapy.

I can tell you more, but enough for now. We can communicate further, if you’d like, for as long as you wish. I am willing to share more as long as it may be helpful. The thing is, this kind of work, healing, is highly personal. You have to FEEL it, to integrate your emotional side with the intellectual side… and that cannot be done intellectually. That is why few people are persistent in this kind of work. No one wants to feel pain, so they drop out.

Post anytime.

anita