Dear lada:

I think your brain, your body is telling you to make a change, a big change. Something is very wrong about your life as it is. I believe what is wrong is you living with your mother. The reason I think this is that her ongoing negative criticism of you throughout your young life harmed you and keeps harming you. In other words, your mother is harming you.

Freedom from your mother/ the criticism is what you need. Who doesn’t need freedom from ongoing negative criticism? Anyone and everyone exposed to such needs freedom from it.

It is scary, isn’t it, to move out? Funny, in an un-funny way that it is scary for you to move out. Because the danger is in you staying, way, way… way more than in you leaving.

It is just that you are used to misery and you are not used to living away. So you stay in what is more familiar, no matter how bad it is.

The “lazy part” of you, it is not lazy, it is burdened with negative criticism. It is tired of it. It is definitely not motivated or energized by it. It is tired, exhausted, not lazy.

anita

Dear Lada:

I don’t think you will be running from yourself. Please notice what I say, Lada: there is nothing wrong with you; there is nothing about you to run away from.

The beliefs that there is something wrong with you is a result of you being negatively criticized all these years. All that negative criticism reached a climax of sorts in the last few months where you can hardly take it anymore.

There is nothing wrong with you. I know you don’t believe me. I too thought there was something very wrong with me. I too believed it. Now I know it was not true all along. And so, it is not true in your case either.

When you are a child, you believe EVERYTHING your mother says. So when she tells you that there is something wrong with you, something wrong in so many of the things you do, or not do, think or not think- you believe it.

It is natural and normal to believe what your mother tells you when you are a child.

It is hard to believe your own mother would inflict such harm on her own daughter. It is even hard to believe your own mother can be wrong.

But reality is: she was wrong; she is wrong and she has been inflicting harm on you for a long time.

Maybe running away with a tent and a sleeping bag is not a bad idea. Could it be worse than staying?

Or maybe you can come up with a plan that has the most chances to work out, a plan where you will be reasonably safe AND away from your mother. Start a new life where you are no longer wrong, no longer a mistake.

What a concept, isn’t it?

anita