Dear Reader:

Fear in my childhood accumulated and turned into severe anxiety, and by severe, I mean, I got caught in OCD and Tourette’s Syndrome from an early age, sometime in the middle of my first decade of life. By my mid-thirties, I managed to resist the OCD compulsions and I no longer fit the OCD diagnosis. That’s Healing. There are other mental health diagnoses that I received but no longer fit (Healing there!).. but the anxiety and the tics persist. No Healing in this category, and every tic is associated with anxiety. These tics (vocal, sounds of loud breathing, shoulder/ face twitching) are my anxiety physically vibrating through my body, twitching it. Every day.

I want Healing in this area of anxiety vibrating through my body (right shoulder is hurting right now, from twitching it), and I will work on it in this thread.

anita

Continued:

From urban child institute. org: “In contrast to tolerable stress, toxic stress refers to persistent, unhealthy amounts of stress caused by chronically stressful conditions without the protective benefits of healthy caregiving… babies are affected by stress even in the protective environment of the womb. Since maternal cortisol levels affect the developing fetus, a mother’s level of stress is directly related to the well-being of her baby. Positive and tolerable stress levels are safe, but toxic stress increases the risk of preterm delivery, low birth weight and other complications. It is also associated with impaired mental, behavioral and motor development in infancy”.

From Psychology today: “Newer research on this topic has involved scanning fetuses’ brains through their mothers’ pregnant bellies to examine the neurobiological consequences of chronic stress. In general, this research has shown that… stressed-out mothers had fetuses with decreased functional brain activity when compared to mothers who were less stressed. Importantly, infants of the stressed mothers were also born sooner, consistent with previous research linking prenatal stress to birth complications”.

From NIH National library of Medicine: “When faced with an acute stressor, the brain initiates behavioral and physiological adaptations to protect the body and prepares for a fight-or-flight response. These physiological adaptations are referred to as allostasis… In the short term, allostasis is adaptive, and physiological systems return to baseline in the absence of threat. However, repeated or chronic exposure to stressors can lead to allostatic load or overload, in which prolonged release of primary mediators (glucocorticoids, catecholamines, and cytokines) disrupts development and functioning of the brain and neuroendocrine, immune, metabolic, cardiovascular, and respiratory systems. These physiological disruptions, referred to as secondary outcomes of the stress response, can lead to diseased and disordered tertiary end points that affect mental and physical health across the life span…

“For the purposes of this article, I define chronic stress as the process by which any stressor leads to a prolonged release of primary mediators and places children at risk of secondary outcomes and tertiary end points associated with allostatic load and overload. This concept is distinct from that of acute stress, which includes a temporary allostatic response with a return to homeostasis after the resolution of a single psychologically or physically threatening event. In childhood and adolescence, chronic stressors may include extreme experiences, such as abuse, neglect, or institutionalization, as well as more prevalent stressors such as exposure to poverty, food insecurity, interpersonal violence, parental mental illness, racism, discrimination, unstable foster care placement, or unsafe neighborhoods and community violence”.

These quotes give me a better understanding of the effects of my mother’s high stress levels on me when she was pregnant with me (leading to birth complication/breech birth, and low birth weight), and the effects of growing up with her expressed high stress level, and with her abuse of me, leading to a variety of my disorders: a quite severe ADD and other cognitive deficits, as well as OCD, Tourette’s Syndrome (TS), and emotion regulation deficit.

I have no doubt that my Healing, as I continue to heal, cannot be complete, given the nature of the damage. My future healing, journaled here, will be guided by the principle outlined in The Serenity Prayer: “god, grant me the serenity to accept the tings I cannot change (the damage that can’t be undone), the courage to change the things I can (to undo/ lessen the damage that can be undone/ lessened.. neuroplasticity and such), and the wisdom to know the difference“.

– To be continued…

anita

Continued, this is my new understanding:

Fear is helpful and necessary when facing real-and-present danger. There is a real positive association between fear and survival. Fear makes a person strong and capable. When a person is Anxious, he/ she is suffering from fear-gone-haywire, a diseased-fear, if you will. Anxiety makes a person weak and incapable.

The anxious person believes- without necessarily being aware of the belief- that anxiety (like fear) is helpful, that there is a real, positive association between anxiety and survival. Therefore, the anxious person worries and ruminates on and on and on.. sort of, extending the anxiety, thinking that the extended anxiety will pay off.

Fear promotes survival, fear is helpful;  anxiety is never helpful, it never promotes survival. While anxious, the person is less likely to do what needs to be done to survive/ improve his or her situation. It is very important for the anxious person to distinguish between fear and diseased-fear, aka anxiety, and to remove the deep, false belief that anxiety is helpful.

anita

Continued:

When I was confronted by the coyote less than 3 years ago, it felt like time stopped. But Time resumed on that same afternoon, some time after the confrontation was over (the coyote ran away and into the brush). I haven’t been significantly afraid of being confronted by that coyote or by any other coyote since, and resumed my regular walk- including walking through the same stretch of road-  a couple of days after the confrontation (although with some weapon in my hand, pepper spray or a stick). It all seems so far away now, a memory that is secure in the past.

On the other hand, even though I didn’t see my mother (who lives in another country) in close to 13 years and didn’t talk with her for 11 years (my choice), I am still significantly afraid of her. I’d be afraid to be in the country were she resides in fear that I will find myself in her presence, accidentally. My memories of her are far from being secure in the past. Time has stopped in this context, past is one with the present. I indeed lived in the past for too long.

Fear stops Time for a little while; Anxiety stops Times for decades; too often, it stops Time for a lifetime.

It is beginning to get dark as I am typing this, sitting in bed, looking at the stillness of the outside through the window, alone. Whenever alone, at this time of the evening, I feel anxious, fearing that my mother will die. Not because she is old now, but because when she was 25, and I was 5, she said (in a very emotional, convincing way) that she was going to kill herself. I am re-living now what happened decades ago. In my mind, I am still that 5-year-old, afraid that mother will die.

Anxiety extends the past into the present, and the two are one. Healing is about securing these memories in the past; removing these painful/ scary memories from the Now, and seeing a Now that doesn’t have her in it.

anita

Continued:

I slept well and shortly after I woke up, I noticed an elated feeling (I still feel it now, 20 minutes or so later) that I don’t remember feeling in the longest time, for decades. It may be, this youthful elation (a mild elation but oh, so very pleasant), what I felt at times (rarely) in my 20s… when I felt hopeful. This may be what Happy means, a mildly happy feeling.

Still in bed, before getting up, I thought: is this the day after? As in, the day after the decades of my life frozen in time? Did I leave the past in the past and woke up to.. the day after the past?

I definitely don’t want to be carried away with this and expect what wouldn’t be realistic to expect (any happily-ever-after kind of expectation), but it’s nice, and I am definitely motivated to continue my work here.

anita

Continued:

I wrote above, “stuck in the absence of a mother“. It’s synonymous with saying stuck in the absence of love. Love for a person is like water for a plant. Without water, a plant withers; without love, a child withers.

In the absence of love, a vacuum is created, a vacuum that quickly gets filled with Anxiety. Here is a proposed definition: anxiety= the condition of being stuck in the absence of love.

I wrote that my mother was not a mother but a monster. It is interesting how similar these two words are.

I say monster because of all the people in the world, it is this one person who took it upon herself to personally and directly inflict massive pain on me. It was just me and her alone in the small apartment when she did that: the family members who abused here weren’t there, politicians and criminals who created wars and crime that harmed her.. these people weren’t there. It was just me and her alone. And so, in my life, she is the monster.

Notice I used the present tense: she is the monster, not she was the monster. When I write about her elsewhere I automatically use the present tense. Sometimes I go back and correct it to the past tense, but what comes out of me first, is the present tense. And that is because Anxiety prolongs the past, extending it into the present. The present and the past are one for the Anxious person.

About the massive pain that she inflicted on me personally and directly: whenever I told about it in the past, I told about it from a minimally-feeling, maximally- dissociated state of mind. As I now try to tell about it from a feeling/ associated state of mind, I feel an unbearable distress and a sense of panic. And so, I am scared to go there. But I will say, it feels like an internal collapse, a death approaching… if I re-experience it the way I experienced it then.

This is what I felt back then when alone with her, at 5, at 15, at 25 (and in-between), she told me with great emotion and theatrics that she was going to kill herself.. and that she was going to kill herself because I hurt her so much, because of words I said or didn’t say, acts I did or didn’t do, expressions on my face she said meant to hurt her, thoughts she said I had when I was silent.

You see, my monster suffered from a combo of Paranoid, Borderline and Histrionic Personality Disorders, which meant that she repeatedly suspected that I (as well as other people, practically everyone, at one time or another) was actively trying to hurt her feelings, and feeling victimized by me, she ragefully attacked me repeatedly, at length, and creatively, theatrically. In her mind, she was defending herself from me.

I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t the case (can you imagine a child trying to hurt a monster and bring rage-attacks against oneself?). Her response was always to argue against my claims of innocence by listing “evidence”: my past behaviors over months and longer that were aimed- so she claimed- at hurting her, and in so doing, prolonging the rage attack.

Her attacks and abuse included, but were not limited to the following: (1) shaming words and messages, going out of her way to deliver a shaming message in all ways possible, from every angle available, drilling it in thoroughly, for a long time per shaming session, (2) heavy-duty, at length guilt-tripping, (3) feasting on my empathy for her by describing in great detail, during long sessions, how hurt she felt by me and by other people, while insisting that I was a lucky girl with no valid hurt feelings, (4) using a loud, high-pressured voice, yelling, crying, never-ending theatrical expressions of her misery, (5) threats to commit suicide, (6) slapping my face with her open hand, and/ or kicking my body with her foot.

My Healing is about accepting that all the above happened, that it hurt a whole lot, that the damage she inflicted on me was real and severe (to no longer minimize it, as I have done). To give my feelings, my experience the validity that she took away from me.

To accept and acknowledge the severity of the abuse I went through, and to clear the present time from the abuse of the past: to no longer project her into other people (expecting them to do what she did).. to remove her from people in my life now.

To not accept the severity of what happened causes what happened to keep knocking on my door, so to speak, insisting to be fully seen and heard. The knocking is not just about what happened but about it re-happening in new forms, new contexts, new people. For example, as a teenager, I never worried about my knees failing me and not being ale to walk (I worried about other things, of course); as an older woman, the Anxiety took over a new area due to aging: my knees.

Anxiety is like glue that is keeping shame, hurt, and guilt in my life in the present time. Healing is about removing the anxiety from these feelings/ emotional-mental experiences, so to allow them to move to the past and stay there.

To be continued.

anita

Continued (warning stated after typing the below): reading what follows may be upsetting to some readers):

“I need to place the intense, original fears of my childhood in a designated area: the past” (right above in yesterday’s post)- fear that she will die, that she will kill herself (she said she will), that I will be alone without her,

and fear of being with her, fear that she will kill me (she said she will)-

– it did not and will never happen: she will not kill herself, simply because for 40 years she threatened, but didn’t. She will not kill me because I am not there in her presence, therefore, she can’t, it’s not something that’s possible for her to do: I am not there with her!

There is a sense of victory right there, in the above: I made it impossible for her to kill me, I have this much power, here and now!

“I will murder you!”, she said, she promised; no, mother-monster, you won’t, because you can’t. I am not there with you!!!

I can hear her in my mind’s ear right now saying that I am crazy to believe those long-gone words of hers, that “everyone says words they don’t mean when angry” (she had said that which I just quoted). But oh, mother-monster, you said those words: “I will murder you!” with a voice, an emotion, an alarm that sounded like you were about to do it!

I would distill my original Fear to this one fear: that my mother-monster will viciously kill me, murder me.

Oh, mother… please don’t.. please don’t!?

Oh, mother.. please..

When the person you need most is a monster.

Oh, mother, please be a mother to me, take me in gentle arms, tell me in a gentle voice, tell me I am safe with you, I’d do anything…

I hear her in my mind’s ear saying: you stupid thing, you bad thing: “you know that no one means when they say things out of anger”, you make something out of nothing!

But oh, mother-monster, how many people were murders every day ever since you said those words to me, for the first time.. how many people said “I’ll murder you!” and then did the deed..

I am trying to talk sense to her (to my mother-monster) right now.. still trying to make her understand, trying to make the monster-mother be a mother.

Oh, how much I need, how much I still need a mother.. where can I find a mother for me?

There isn’t any.

And with all due respect, my “inner mother” cannot parent my “inner child”, not any way close to what I needed then, and still need from a real mother: a person outside of me to hold me dearly and take care of me gently, so that I can be.

I hear her still: you coward, she says, you terrible creature you are, to vilify me…

Oh, mother-monster, we will never have a meeting-of-the-minds, will we?

To TRY to reach out to the monster-mother for so long, make her hear me, gently, so gently ask her to hear me… with absolutely zero chance for success. To keep chasing her, pleading: hear me, hear me, be my mother..?!

To be continued.

anita