Dear Maria:

You feel anger at your mother. Good thing. You feel anger at your mother and you express it here. Very good thing. Even better, you left, no longer living with her, it gets better and better.

It in natural to feel anger at a person who hurts you. Other animals do, this is our nature. The biological reason for anger is to motivate animals to protect themselves from abuse.

Regarding “other authority figures in my life, who I thought knew what they were doing, said ‘Being a mother is hard.. cut her  some slack’ when everything was clearly f*&^ abuse”-

It used to be that it was legal for parents to kill their children, and for any reason (no questions asked, no eyebrows raised, so I understand). It has been illegal for quite some time. Then it was legal for parents to beat their children, even to beat them hard, mercilessly. Then it became illegal so parents avoid doing that in public for fear of being arrested. Nowadays it is legal for a parent to abuse a child otherwise, that is, to keep them alive, to not draw blood or break bones, but to break their hearts. That is still legal. Not okay, but legal.

And so, those “other authority figures”, they are the descendants of the authority figures that believed it was  okay for a parent to kill her children. No questions asked.

Your anger doesn’t make you a bad person. It means you are a person, that is all it means.

anita

Hi Maria

You appear to be very self aware as you already know that you need to deal with your anger. Believe it or not that is a big step. The clinginess and childishness that you experience as a negative is likely linked to the anger.

Something that struck me in your post was your relationship to the concepts of forgiveness and patience. Reading between the lines it seems to me that you are making the mistake of attaching your idea of forgiveness and patience to your mother. Forgiveness does not require you to repair or engage in a relationship with the person that hurt you. Sometime ‘Love’ requires a relationship to end.

Foremost forgiveness is about and for the person who was hurt and may not even require the evolvement of the person who hurt us. Following this path of forgiveness allows us to let go and detach ourselves from the experience and find patience for ourselves. You are not your experiences, you are not your memories, you are not your past….

It is very important to note that detachment is not the same as indifference. What happened to you happened, it hurt and has influenced your experiences, you are not indifferent, and you do not have to forget. (though you may want to practice ‘forgetting’ as in not dwelling which is different’) Detachment is part of the practice of detaching the sense of self, ego, identity from our experiences and or memories. You may experience the emotion of sadness or anger when a memory pops up but ‘You’ are not your emotions. You experience emotions, you are not the emotion and in this way the emotions flow through you vice getting dammed up to a point everything burst forth in a fit of anger. Does any of that make sense?

Heal your relationship to forgiveness and you will heal yourself.