Dear Juanita:

You are welcome and take your time, all the time that you need to sort out things and post again when you are ready.

anita

Dear Juanita:

“a full blown toddler-style tantrum” thrown by a potential business partner would lead me to not actualize a business partnership with her.

I read all your recent post, much of it a pleasure to read. I want to re-read it when I am more focused tomorrow morning and reply further the. For now, what comes to mind regarding the birds: anyone or anything that feeds them will do, no different than human babies: so dependent, so needy, anyone and anything will do. Those too weak don’t have the privilege to choose, and all babies, all young children with no exception are very weak and very needy.

As an adult, I felt as weak as I did when I was a young child and I  looked up to other adults from the point of view of a weak, needy child, as if they were.. adults and I was still and forever a child.

I hope you rest today, and I am looking forward to re-read and reply more to you in about 14 hours from now.

anita

Dear Juanita:

Thank you for your empathy and I apologize for not coming back to you earlier, like I said I would. I forgot to do so and I don’t know why (I am surprised that) I forgot, because I did look forward to be back to you yesterday!

This is further response to your previous post: I do think of you as a good person. The little birds, so needy, so  weak.. we really are responsible to take care of the weak and needy, ourselves and others. I think that you and I and many others are both: weak and needy and strong and resourceful, at different times, to different extents. But all of us humans, we all have an expiration date, we all have our limits.. we all get hurt, we all need help.

The lady you met, the one who runs the bird sanctuary, “living her vocation”, which filled you with aspiration, and you realized that this is what you are searching for: “work which really has meaning“- you can fill your life with meaning right now, every moment of the day, not strictly in the context of vocation. This reminds me of a poem I want to share with you, one that was introduced to me by my then therapist, back in 2011 (my first quality psychotherapy, which is what started me on my healing process). It is called Hokusai Says by Roger Keyes. You can google it online, here is part of it:

“Hokusai says look carefully* He says pay attention, notice* He says keep looking, stay curious* He says there is no end to seeing.

He says look forward to getting old* He says keep changing* You just get more who you really are*… He says every one of us is a child* Every one of us is ancient* .. He says every one of us is frightened* He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive-* Shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees*  Wood is live* Water is alive* Everything has its own life* Everything lives inside us* He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn’t matter if you draw, or write books* It doesn’t matter if you saw wood, or catch fish* It doesn’t matter if you sit at home,* and stare at the ants on your verandah or the shadows of the trees,* and grasses in your garden.*

It matters that you care* It matters that you feel* It matters that you notice* It matters that life lives through you…

He says don’t be afraid* Don’t be afraid* Look, feel, let life take you by the hand* Let life live though you”.

So it is not only in the context of a vocation that you can live a life of meaning and inspiration but in all contexts of life. It is a matter of attitude that we live a life of meaning.

You wrote: “meeting this lady confirmed to me that, for me personally, it is the right thing to search for my  fulfilment in areas which allow me to be living my vocation”- you said it yourself, living your vocation (what “matters is that life lives through you”, in the poem). And letting life live through you is something we can let be anytime. It is something available to us young or old, in any vocation or none at all.

You wrote: “I am starting to acknowledge just how much damage the fog which he continuously spews out did indeed really cause to my emotional and mental health”- the damage of that fog some people create in our lives, is that it disrupts that flow of life within us. We .. stop noticing that we are alive and that being alive and what it means, to be alive.

Regarding what you termed “controlling by chaos”, “his intention to control his mother by confusion (lying).. she was screaming hysterically at him.. there was always screaming going on in the house”- ongoing aggression in the home of origin is the number one source of our global human dysfunction and abuse. It starts there, children adjust there and then to that abuse and then, most often, perpetuate it.

anita

Dear Juanita:

I just wanted to let you know that it is taking me more time to reply to you, as I am finding particularly interesting things in my reading and re-reading of your posts of yesterday and today.

anita

Dear Juanita:

* Please take all the time you need to read this very long post before you reply.

You wrote to me yesterday: “I always loved what the Italians call ‘dolce far niente’ which translates as something like ‘sweet idleness’, but in the life I had before I had begun to feel like a bird in a golden cage and those moments became ever rarer”.

In a reply to another member today (I am extracting your life experience, best I can, from your reply to the member), you wrote: “feeling disempowered.. I reacted by becoming introverted when living at home.. the feeling of a caged animal.. If you have ever seen how magnificently powerful wild animals become totally apathetic when they are resigned and hopeless behind the bars at the zoo?..  need more freedom… fear that it is not okay to need more freedom, because it conflicts with parental and possibly social expectations”.

I will now look for your previous expressions regarding being a powerful wild animal in a cage. The following are quotes from what you shared with my comments in parentheses:

June 5: “I must let go of the hope that my mother will ever love me (caged in that hope), and I think this has set me up to end up being stuck for years now in a relationship which is not working (caged in a dysfunctional relationship with a man). In fact, my whole life is stuck. But letting go of that hope makes me feel really frightened (frightened to leave the cage). I know I absolutely have to get out of the stagnation (get out of the stagnation/ cage)… I’m letting these precious days pass by unlived (the experience of life in a cage, a severely compromised life, an unlived life)… I have somehow got stuck in a place of fear .. a kind of paralysis (caged in a hope, caged in fear)”.

June 6: “I do actually literally still feel visceral fear of my mother when I think of her.. my inner tension increased enormously since being with my husband… recently.. I became confused and depressed.. I realised I was stuck in the same loop with him as with my mother= still hoping. I was suffering so much (stuck/ caged in hope, experiencing fear and tension, confusion and depression)… I don’t feel angry towards him as I do with my mother (anger is in the mix of that caged-in experience), but I realised that hanging on to hope or anger is just messing my life”.

“I do have contact with ..mother.. but they don’t want to know about how I feel. It’s forbidden to speak your truth anyway (the famous saying comes to mind: the truth shall set you free, and it just occurred to me that you may still be obeying your mother’s rule that “It’s forbidden to speak your truth”, that you probably told her your truth but she responded as if you said nothing, or she attacked you for what you said, so in your mind, unless she hears you/ unless she accepts your truth, your truth doesn’t exist, it is not valid).

“I’ve been eternally hoping my mother is going to love me.. thinking about the way she treated me, and still does treat me (the fact that you are still in contact with her, enough contact where she is still treating you in ways she treated you before, means that the very contact with her is making your exit from the cage highly improbable, says I. You may be feeling anxious reading this, and if so, relax best you can: you don’t have to end contact with her just because I am suggesting it, of course).

“I had so far not connected the dots between my mother’s lying and the lying of partners (By tolerating your mother’s lying, you had a lot of practice in tolerating lies from other people as well).. And indeed there is a kind of unspoken law in my family that you are not allowed to ‘say it as it is’.. my mother, indeed the whole family, was lying all the time (the price of being a part of your family has been to lie and to tolerate lies).

“I was the scapegoat and was subjected to all kinds of unfair treatment, but it was always portrayed differently and I wasn’t allowed to ‘say it as it is.. I’m just learning to say, they were blatantly lying in my face!! (I am thinking of the comfort of family, and how scared a child is to be separated from her family, so much so, that she will pay any price to stay with her family/ to not be left alone)

“I do believe it must be less painful to live with the truth.. than living in this eternally painful place… I have already survived so much (survived life in the cage), I do believe I deserve to have a ‘happy ending’, even if it is in solitude (the happy ending is exiting the cage. In the poem I quoted from yesterday, it says every one of us is ancient, every one of us is a child: in your sixth decade of life, you are still the same child afraid to be left alone by her family).

“They (parents) mercilessly squashed my creativity. I still don’t quite dare to live it, though it’s like an ocean within me and I long to be creative (Your creativity is your magnificent, wild power you referred to today: “how magnificently powerful wild animals..”, and the merciless squashing of it is here: “..wild animals become totally apathetic when they are resigned and hopeless behind the bars at the zoo“).

June 7: “she (your mother) saw my creative talents as unacceptable competition (you want your mother on your side, so you remove the competition: see, mom? I am not creative, I am not a threat: please love me).

June 16: “I could never bring myself to feel motivated to climb any kind of worldly career ladder whatsoever (when you don’t have the experience of opening the door of the cage and taking the first step away from it,  and slamming the door shut behind you, so that you can’t step back in there- you can’t visualize taking steps way ahead of the one you didn’t yet take).

“Even in speaking to therapists or friends, no-one else has so far supported me to draw a solid line between myself and his (estranged husband) unacceptable behaviour (opening the door of the cage, stepping outside and slamming the door behind you is that “solid line”).

“inside I was adhering to my mother’s old rule of ‘never dare question me!’ ‘never dare speak the truth!’ Somehow that made me voiceless towards my husband (Her rules are the walls and bars that keep you in the cage. Got to break her rules so that you can exit that cage, and make your own rules as a free woman).

June 17: “I am very sensitive to other people’s energy generally.. I wished I could put a barrier between myself and that energy.. the energy I felt around/ from her (acquaintance) is the same as my husband’s. It is a person who has a lot of dynamic energy.. they sense that I don’t have that kind of openly dynamic energy and think they can ‘steam roller’ me (You are very sensitive to people’s energy, very empathetic. I  noticed it in your communication with me and in a reply to another member today, where you accurately sensed his energy  in his very short post, you sensed that he was upset with something that you wrote to him earlier. On the other hand, living in a cage does not allow you a free flow of energy, and in some major areas, your energy is blocked because of living in a cage. This blockage makes it difficult or impossible to accurately evaluate some situations and people.

You wrote that some other people think that they can steam roller you. An  online definition of a steam roller: “a crushing force especially when ruthlessly applied to overcome opposition”- I suppose that’s how your mother treated/ is treating you still to one extent or another: treating you like you were the opposition that needs to be crushed/ caged. Crushed and Caged).

“Actually, I do have a lot of powerful energy, but I learned to hide this due to it making me very unpopular with my parents and at school. I always seem to have the alternating dynamic of people either discovering I am powerful- then I am told I am TOO powerful, or thinking I am not powerful, so they think they can walk all over me (In the cage, you are not powerful. In the cage, you are Crushed and Caged. Maybe sometimes you are surprised when you experience that “magnificently powerful wild animals” power within you. Maybe others experience that power in you as well, at times. But this power has been generally restrained and therefore not available for you to use for the purpose of freeing yourself from the cage).

“being dominated by supposed ‘friends/family’.. is a repeat of my childhood role in my family. My sister.. always demanded to get her own way.. she’d go to my mother and I’d get a beating. It was ‘normal’ in my family that I’d be punished unfairly for things I hadn’t done. It was also ‘normal’ that I had to pay my way for everything whilst my sister had everything paid for (We take in the normal of  our childhood just like other animals do. Other animals don’t have the ability to create a new normal for themselves. If they aren’t trained for a new normal, they keep re-living the old normal. We humans have the option to initiate and create a new normal for ourselves, but it is very difficult because our animalistic instinct is to maintain the same old normal for the rest of our lives.

“So now I’m thinking it looks like I’m still playing out this role with other people.. but I want to stop  immediately!! I am wondering how do I do that? How do I at least begin taking steps to change this? Perhaps you have some ideas?”

My ideas for a beginning:

1. Develop tools and a plan to deal with the fear involved in exiting the old normal/ family role/ the cage.

2. End all unnecessary contact with family members who perpetuate the old normal/ family role/ the cage.

anita