Home→Forums→Emotional Mastery→Fear, Anxiety and Healing
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anita.
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March 29, 2024 at 9:29 am #430326
anitaParticipant* Please see March 28, 2024 Special Message on page 2. Thank you.
anita
March 30, 2024 at 1:41 pm #430364anitaParticipantContinued:
In a response to a member today, I came across a quote from health line/ betrayal trauma theory: “A parent bringing a child into the world has a responsibility to protect and care for that child. This responsibility forms an unspoken agreement between parent and child“-
– what happens when the person you look up to the most in the world, the person you, as a child, need most in the whole wide world.. what happens when that person betrays you, again and again and again.. never to correct?
How devastating.. it’s not supposed to be like that. You, a child, looking up to the sky, you protest: it’s not supposed to be this way! But nothing happens. The sky remains the same, no god appearing in the sky to help you. Nothing changes, day in and day out. How darker each night becomes when nothing changes day after day after day.
You get stuck in No-Change (Anxiety), and you have to adapt to it by.. not changing yourself, not growing, not learning, not experiencing life as it could be. The past is the present and the present is the past.
A child betrayed, is it the biggest tragedy of all, or .. the beginning of all tragedies?
The broken heart of a child.
– to be continued.
anita
March 31, 2024 at 5:47 pm #430401anitaParticipantContinued:
This morning, I read a 6- page communication I had with a member back in 2020. In this post, I want to paste all that I wrote to the member that applies to me, changing the pronouns from you and your to I, me and my, and some other minor editing:
When my mother threatened to leave me, I was very, very sad and scared for a long time, so depressed that I lost the spirit to live. That darkest time is still there, not gone, not erased. Often how I feel is not a reaction to what is happening now, but a repeat-reaction to what happened then, the resurfacing of the emotional- cognitive experience of childhood. What we feel intensely as children, we keep feeling as adults.
When a mother leaves, or otherwise betrays her young daughter, she leaves behind a hole in her daughter’s heart. For a child, her mother is Everything, and when that Everything goes away, it feels like you lost everything indeed, and the emptiness in the child’s heart is massive, a whole lot of aching emptiness.
That need of long ago is a person-sensitive need: I needed that one person- my mother. It is a time-sensitive need- I needed her when I was a young child, back in those years in the past. It is a place-sensitive need, I needed my mother back then and there, in that home were I lived as a child.
No man, no woman can take me back to the there-and-then and be the mother I needed.
Better deal with that emptiness inside me, the emptiness born in childhood. My original pain will lessen once I express it, once I let it exit me, some, through words and tears, if they come. When my original pain lessens, so will my projection of it into people and circumstances here and now.
That original pain was so intense that I pushed it down. But that pain is not gone- it awakens in context of the present. The old pain that is still alive in me, it wakes up and takes over.
Being loyal to my mother, I showed her that I hated the people she hated, together in her hate for others. I wanted more than anything to be in the same team as my mother, me and her together against the hostile others. I was loyal to her, but she betrayed my loyalty: she hated me. When she was angry, she said very hurtful words to me, words that caused me pain. I couldn’t trust her, I couldn’t trust anyone.
To be continued,
anita
April 2, 2024 at 7:22 pm #430500anitaParticipantContinued:
I realized lately that expressing my pain in regard to my mother was never enough because when I shared about it/ her, the intensity of it was suppressed or repressed. I shared from a dissociated state. So, it’s been like having a puss-filled wound, and you let only a bit of it out.. the wound is still full of pus.
Talking about my mother and pus… a mother.. and pus? That’s not pretty. Warning, trigger alert: not pretty!
I want to get the pus out of me, and with it the anxiety, more of it gone, peace instead. So, here it is (facilitated by red wine):
The truth is my mother loved ___ me. The missing part is: my mother loved to hate me. I was her place to project her rage at the people who hurt her. I was that place. She needed me for that purpose and she used me for that purpose.
Scared, scared little girl, scared big girl, scared.. there I am, there she is in front of me RAGING. Oh, how unexpected, poor little girl.. oh, the fuming mother-monster-creature, a wild animal about to kill.
You know about wars, wars raging these days.. that was my war, my mother raging. I was so scared, I had nowhere to run to, nowhere but there. Oh.. no!.. me, prey, about to be killed, she’s predator. Danger. Murder.
Strange how I forget the fear of death, the real-and-present danger of that time, it was nothing less than the fear of imminent death.
“I WILL KILL YOU!”, she announced and I believed her, no reason not to, and she hit me, didn’t kill me (I am alive to be telling about it), but there she was about to kill me, I didn’t know the result.
In those times, it wasn’t a daughter-mother situation, it was a prey-predator situation.
I think that I’ve been holding my breath ever since.
Looking back, I see the predator was my mother.. oh, what does it mean? How can it be that one’s mother would be one’s predator? Here come the explanations, but they don’t change the predator-prey trauma, that is, the prey kept alive to re-experience the not-yet finalized death.
I am alive, but I didn’t yet fully exhale, still holding my breath, the predator still there somewhere. Danger ongoing, anxiety.
May I exhale, knowing she is no longer my danger. It’s still hard to overcome the Betrayal, the fact that my predator was my mother, that my mother was my predator. A mother should never threaten to kill her child, yet this threat was something I lived with, and died with, so to speak, day in and day out.
I don’t want to be dying anymore. I don’t want to see her as a mother of any kind.
I didn’t have a mother.
anita
April 4, 2024 at 5:30 pm #430608anitaParticipantContinued:
I didn’t have a mother.
A mother is a special love- connection, a warm connection, a belonging, a good feeling, a peace of mind and heart. I do not have a single memory of a moment when I felt this way with the person I was born to.
There is healing in the knowing of this, in the real, complete understanding of this truth.
anita
April 4, 2024 at 6:32 pm #430609anitaParticipantContinued:
It’s a shift from the mindset of having had a bad mother to having had no mother. The first mindset has been about complaining about the bad mother, being stuck in a war with her, war for her love; the second does not consist of complaining, of fighting, of resisting reality.
It’s about redefining a mother, from that of a person to that of a quality of connection. This is a way, way more accurate definition of a mother.
Can’t really move on from the first mindset, can move on from the second. Let it sink into me. It’s not that I had a bad mother (I had a bad person to whom I was born), it’s that I had no mother.
And I never will have a mother. This means I can let go of the bad person, the one I was born to.
The absence of a mother, that is, of a connection, has led to a disconnected, disassociated life. Without knowing it, I have longed for that person for decades of adulthood, waiting for her to become a mother, somehow. Trying to earn her approval, even by the way I think, as if she can read my thinking, loyal to her still in how I think, in how I feel.
Goodbye, the person to whom I was born.
anita
April 5, 2024 at 1:12 pm #430634anitaParticipantContinued:
To express what’s been repressed for decades, more than half a century of repression:
I am still afraid of the woman I was born through.
Oopsie.. I was born to that one woman…
Expressing that repressed expression (“oopsie”) would be saying something like: NO, GET ME OUT OF HERE, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Facing a predator day in and day out and nowhere to escape.
Scared, heart beating fast, cold skin, cold sweat.. dizzy, about to faint, oh no, oh no, help me, someone, HELP ME.
I used to pray to the stars in the night sky: help me, HELP me, help me.
Day in and day out, night after night.. and here’s another morning with hope dashed, another day.
In photographs, in the photo album, her head was missing, torn off. She cut her head off in photos.
I tried to tell her: don’t cut your head off, you are beautiful! And she said, in so many words, no, I am ugly, and you are ugly too!
anita: I want to help you..!
Predator: I will kill you, I will murder you!
That’s the word she used, “murder”, “I will murder you!“. She said these words like a victim, as if I hurt her so badly, that she had no choice but to murder me, to cut my head off.
Nowhere to go, no safe place. At night, I listened to her breathing and found some relief when it was steady, meaning she was really asleep. She can’t murder me when asleep.
In her times of wakeful rage, there she was rushing, running toward me, only a few meters/ feet, but still running, her breathing fast and loud, full of rage, ready for the kill.
This one time she told me: you think I am stupid? I will not break your bones, I will not leave bruises, I’ll get into trouble if I do. I know how to hit you and not leave a sign!
She was thinking that I was trying to trick her into getting her into trouble with the police or something. She was thinking that I was trying to trick her into breaking my bones so to get her into trouble.
If this is a mother, then all words have no meaning.
I feel sorry for her still. Clearly, a very sick person. But I am not feeling sorry for my mother. I didn’t have a mother. I feel sorry for that person.
And I feel sorry for another person, little girl anita. She didn’t know. She didn’t know what was happening. Oh God, she prayed to no god in particular, please help me, please..!
Decades later, the world is filled with predators, some in very powerful places world-wide, but in my personal experience, this one person scared me more than any other, this predator in my life, my personal predator, a freakish distortion of the word mother.
anita
April 5, 2024 at 9:54 pm #430649
SadSoulParticipant🥹💙🫂
I have no words
April 7, 2024 at 1:52 pm #430727anitaParticipantContinued:
Grieving not having what I needed so desperately, a mother. No longer trying to get that which didn’t get in all the covert ways I tried. No longer trying to get that person to be my mother by rearranging my thoughts so to avoid her rage (as if I was speaking my thoughts out loud and she could hear me).
No longer being drawn to people like that person: people who are angry or about to get angry at any time, dominating, rude people, and trying to please them (submitting, going belly up, so to speak), so to win the approval of that person by proxy of other, similar people.
anita
April 7, 2024 at 2:49 pm #430730SadSoulParticipantMy mother used to tell me she was being punished by God for leaving my father, so she couldn’t leave her current husband, for fear of more punishment. She used to say, ‘He won’t live long though because he puts so much salt and butter on his food, and he already has deadly high blood pressure. He’ll die and ill be freed from this.’
Over 30 years later and he’s still alive. Just a little bit of funny to add to your day. Totally aside from the humour I see in that, I felt like a spectator watching a horrific crime and doing nothing about it, when I was young listening to the hours of her speaking like this. I felt so guilty and churned up, but those hours were the only hours I felt like I meant something to her, guilty evil hours where my mother was focused on someone else.
I turned myself inside out trying to tick all her boxes so she’d love me, or even approve of me, or at the very least not yell and degrade me. I made mistakes in my life obeying her instructions on what I was failing in; mistakes that so far I’ve failed to fix. But not many people believe who she is because she’s very different with others who don’t fall into the inner most later if the onion.
April 8, 2024 at 5:18 pm #431442anitaParticipantContinued:
I remember very well that person‘s (formerly referred to as my mother) tirades about other people. I heard them when she was talking to me, or when she was talking to others, a lot of it done on the phone. I hated the almost constant, ongoing negative judgements of people. I hated hearing her talk and talk and talk.
Her tirades against others cemented, within me, a deep distrust in people.
I tried at times, to get that person‘s approval by siding with her and talking negatively about the people she complained and gossiped about, but alas, she rejected even these efforts. She denied me any sense of togetherness with her. There was just no way that she allowed for me to be with her.
I can’t say that I ever felt like I meant something to her, other than someone (some thing, more precisely) to vent to, some thing to direct her rage at, and some thing to brag about- in regard to just one thing- me being an excellent student in elementary school, only she greatly exaggerated my supposed success, I was only a C+ student, even though I worked very hard to get (better grades).
I am not trying to let go of my old, unmet need to have a mother’s love, but of the need to have that person‘s love.
anita
April 9, 2024 at 10:56 am #431467anitaParticipant* This is a note not related to the topic of this thread. It’s a note to a member with whom I communicated for years, a member who had her thread deleted yesterday. Because the thread has been deleted, I have no way to message her. Therefore, in case you are reading this, z., here is my message:
I was out and about yesterday, so I wasn’t able to read your emotional messages. If I did, I would have answered immediately. When I was finally back to the computer, your messages were still there (at that point, you deactivated your account, and appeared as anonymous). Having read your messages, I prepared a reply to you. When I clicked “submit”, it didn’t go through because your thread was deleted while I was typing my reply.
z, if you are reading this, please know that I did not ignore you, or your distress. I wasn’t here, at the computer, couldn’t have known about it, and did not anticipate it. If you would like to return to the forums (using a different account than the one you deactivated), please do. I will be delighted to read from you again.
anita
-End of Message.
April 9, 2024 at 4:32 pm #431494anitaParticipantContinued:
I am not trying to let go of my old, unmet need to have a mother’s love, but of the need to have that person‘s love.
I accept her inability to love people. I don’t accept her willingness to hurt people: (1) her forming the intent to punch (with hands or with words), followed by (2) a plan to deliver the verbal punch (choosing the most hurtful words possible, tailored to hurt the individual person), then (3) delivering the punch, and (4) looking at (me) intently, with anticipation, waiting for the effect of her words to take hold, and when the effect was detected (the shame, the pain on my face visible), there it was: that little smile on her face, the corners of her mouth going up ever so slightly.
I accept her inability to love, her lack of education, her lack of intelligence; I have all the empathy in the world for the pain she suffered growing up, the terrible abuses she suffered, and I would have done everything in my power, if I existed back then, to save the girl that she was.
But I can’t accept the woman she became, her intent to hurt me, planning it, executing it and finding pleasure in a job well-done.
Going back to the title of this thread, there is ongoing Fear aka Anxiety when one grows up (more accurately, grow-in) with someone who finds pleasure in seeing pain on my face. And there’s no one to help me, to shield me; no mother for me.
No Mother for Me– this could be a title for a book.
But there is Healing for me, not complete healing of course, but enough to make life interesting and significantly less painful.
It helps me a lot to redefine “mother” from the person => the experience of mutual affection and ongoing trust with the person.
anita
April 10, 2024 at 7:44 pm #431564anitaParticipantContinued:
Goodbye person, I loved- could have loved you forevermore, so much love in me for you, if you only let me in, if you only allowed me to be with you, with you, together, if you only let me be with you, so that I was not alone, and so that… But you didn’t value me. For you, I was a nobody, a no-one.
I was a nobody for the person I loved the most.
This is the broken heart of a child, no matter my age, still a broken hearted child.
anita
April 11, 2024 at 8:03 pm #431610anitaParticipantContinued:
The broken heart of a child, the broken heart in all of us… A collective broken heart, the broken heart of humanity.
Imagine, all get together to heal, to mend, to correct the wrongs inflicted upon us for too long, a human tragedy healed.. what a refreshing thought, a hope.. too late? Or just the right time.
anita
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