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Dear Linarra:
I did not read your recent 2 posts yet, and will reply to the 3 recent posts one by one, part by part with no editing.
“once I was angry at her dramatic attitude and called her ‘The misery goddess’… trying to impress people with the amount of misery surrounding her“-
– perfect term and description of histrionics. A Merriam Webster definition of histrionics: “1: theatrical performances, 2: deliberate display of emotion for effect“- key word here is “deliberate”, meaning that her displays and performances of misery are not natural and honest but false, purposeful and dishonest. The purpose: to create an effect on her audience. When her audience is her children who naturally feel great empathy for their mother, the effect she wants to create is having unspeakable power over her children, power to do to them as she pleases.
I wrote to you yesterday: “I WILL make a stop in France (it excites me to think of that!!!)”, and you replied:Ā “Your excitement makes me smile!“-
-My excitement yesterday was not “for effect”, for example, thinking something like: I will tell Linarra that I am excited about seeing her so that she will feel more attached to me, so that she will care more. I was excited and I shared it, that’s all that it was. But that’s not what happens when the histrionic mother expresses her emotions: she has an effect in mind, something she wants to accomplish.
This is not easy to understand, this is why as I type this I want to develop the idea and hope you are following me patiently here: the histrionic mother has emotions just like anyone else, but often she expresses her emotions not naturally, spontaneously and honestly, but .. well, like an actress on a stage with the goal of making her audience feel this or that and behave in certain ways (feel sad or happy or scared.. cry or laugh, buy tickets for future performances).
The histrionic mother displays Misery to her empathetic children for the following effect: that they will never leave her NO MATTER WHAT SHE DOES TO THEM. Being a Misery Goddess, she gets to OWN her children’s empathy and control them-Ā because her children’s empathy is not for themselves.. but for her alone.
“I wondered if you still felt unease with me not feeling too strongly about the bad woman casual abuse. For me itās still a regular thing so itās difficult to feel strongly about that, especially since I had worse times beforeā¦“- I feel hate for her, hate as in strong anger. I hate it that she succeeded in … habituating you to abuse.
“I figured, since part of healing is being able to talk about the painful things, and since our talk could benefit silent readers, that I can share about some of the worse moments I went through during the last few years… Soā¦ These are shameful things… This woman, she has been very pressuring about the bills related to water for very long.. and she was next to the bathroom, which have very thin walls… it was very painful to have a shower with her nearbyā¦ so I sacrificed my personal hygiene… I was ashamed that my solution to try to appease the monster was to stop shower instead of getting a job and paying the bills myself… It was after university, I was above 21, I wasnāt a child I should have been able to do something else”-
– You were ashamed for reacting to the Monster one way instead of another way. Think of the tree imagery: it sheds its branches and leaves and blossoms and remain just a trunk when it doesn’t get enough water or nutrients or sunshine. The tree doesn’t grow more branches, more leaves.. it sheds them. Similarly, when the Monster shamed you and terrorized you in regard to the water.. you didn’t go looking for a job (that would be like growing new branches, new leaves, blossoms). Instead, you withdrew, shed the extras (showers), being a trunk of a tree. Expecting yourself to expand because of abuse is an unreasonable expectation because NATURE’S WAY is to withdraw, not to expand when .. abused by the weather= lack of rain for too long.
“Similarly, related to money issues and water, the system that was heating the water was partly broken around that time, I believe it lasted two years, almost three.. Several times a day I had to get outside to restart the system so we wouldnāt be entirely freezing in our rooms.. For my personal hygiene, I fixed my irregular teeth brushing habits despite the difficulty of it after it backfired on my health (it was 2 years ago, maybe?). And the showering I started to fix it more recently”-
– congratulations for regularly brushing your teeth and showering! Did I mention that I hate this woman, that woman who does not deserve the title Mother.. but Monster? Did you notice that the two words are similar: Mother/ Monster?
“after I came back from university… my siblings suggested less conventional was to make moneyā¦ among them, prostitution was the one they got the most insistent about… I was humiliated that I was seen as incapable that prostitution was seen as one of my few possibilities and somehow even that I wouldnāt do it”-
-I will share something similar: my mother (yes, I am using this word here) cleaned homes and offices, she was a hard worker and she did provide the best materially to my sister and I- I appreciate this about her, that’s why I use the word Mother here. But she daydreamed about being rich… when watching shows like Dallas and Dynasty, now old, but at the time- very popular soap operas about the rich. One theme in those movies was how women use sex to advance themselves, causing rich men to marry them, and my mother so it seems admired these women, referred to them as Smart.. She was okay with them having sex as long as it was for the purpose of becoming rich and powerful and.. as long as they didn’t enjoy the sex itself. Fast forward, I thought: I better do what’s smart and earn my mother’s admiration, plus make HER rich. Well, I was too ashamed of my body and too uncomfortable about sex to actually become a prostitute but my efforts in that direction: to attract a rich man so to get his money were PITIFUL, and further humiliating.. as I too felt “incapable.. even that I wouldnāt do”, couldn’t more like it, incapable of doing what my mother needed me to do, so it seemed to me.
‘I have grown a tiny bit stronger”- tiny bit stronger on tiny buddha (I like this play with words)
“I was in my bed, relaxed, sleeping. Until I heard the monsterās voice coming nearby. She was talking on the phone, going towards my room. I jumped from my sleep and managed to make her understand she had to back off with signs. Thankfully she listened and left me alone. But Iām not relaxed anymore. My progresses arenāt good enough. Even if Iām able to calm myself down, itās still feeling unsafe. It will be for as long as I live with her, for as long sheās in my lifeā¦ She terrorized me… She hurt me so bad, and I didnāt protect myself well enough. I donāt know how I can still let it happen. I donāt know how I can manage to save myself… She always ruins anything that is good. I donāt know what Iām diggingā¦ A hole in my prison, or my own grave. I donāt know. I hope Iāll be able to come up with somethingā¦”-
– this reminds me of The Beautiful Story of the Chained Elephant (exploring your mind. com), about a boy who went to the circus in town for the first time in his life:
“..The boy was so fascinated that, at the end of the show, he..Ā walked with his parents to the back of the circus and he saw that the animals were in cages. The elephant, however, was outdoors. The boy approached the elephant and saw that someone had chained one of its legs to a stake in the dirt. The animal wasnāt moving at all. ..He was free but tied down at the same time. Although the chain was thick, the boy could tell that the elephant could remove the stake from the ground if it wanted to. After all, it was a gigantic animal. The boy asked his parents why the circus people had chained the elephant. They replied, ‘So he doesnāt run away’
“‘So he doesnāt run away? He could run away if he wanted to!’ replied the boy. For the boy, the chain and stake werenāt obstacles for the elephant. The boy then asked his parents, ‘Why doesnāt he run away then?’ His parents shrugged their shoulders and couldnāt give him an answer. The boy continued with his questions and overall restlessness. The next day, he asked his science teacher the same question. She gave him a blunt response, ‘He doesnāt run away because heās trained‘. The science teacher then explained how trainers train their animals. The child in the story of the chained elephant understood that although the animal was quite big now, it was once very small. When it was small, someone tied one of its legs to a chain and a small stake. The boy imagined how much the baby elephant probably fought to release the chain without getting hurt or getting into trouble.
“The boy understood that the elephant didnāt realize how big and strong it was when it grew up. The elephant only remembered being a small elephant fighting against a chain and stake that wouldnāt budge. This is why, although it could now free itself, it no longer tried. To the elephant, the memory of that impossibility in the past was stronger than the real possibility of the present. The story of the chained elephant resembles many peopleās stories, people who remain tied to bad past experiences”.
This is not only a story, this really is how circus elephants are trained. From elsewhere online: “Chaining an elephant isnāt as simple as just putting a chain around its leg ā an adult elephant would snap that chain without even noticing the effort. The way to chain an elephant is to start when itās a baby. You donāt even need a chain ā a strong rope will do. The baby elephant will struggle, but eventually it will realize that it canāt break the rope, and even worse, continuing to struggle creates a painful burn on its leg. The baby elephant learns not to struggle ā it accepts that the limit imposed by the rope or chain is permanent, and there is no use struggling against it. Sure, the elephant grows up, and becomes the most powerful land mammal on the face of the earth. But the chains in its mind remain, and so the chains on its leg are never broken”.
anita
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This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by
Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 