Dear Nar:

You bring up such interesting things in your posts that I like to read your posts part by part, respond to the first part before reading the second part, etc:

“My mother has this saying about upbringing- ‘up to 3 years old, treat your child as a king, up to 16 as your slave and then as your friend’- it is quite sadistic to lift a person to the status of a king and then drop the person to the status of a slave, it’s a longer and more painful Fall,  an Extreme Fall. It makes a former king extremely angry and rebellious (“my mom hit me a couple of times too when I was 13-14. I was an extremely rebellious child”)

“.. and then as your friend”- so the mother (1) picks up her child to the height of kingship, (2) drops her child to the lows of slavery, and )3) stands looking down at her wounded child with a smile, saying: it’s time to be friends!

“I started fearing her excessively from 10 years old maybe, because she was presenting herself as a figure of authority who we should respect and listen to”- a slave owner ensures a slave’s respect by instilling fear in the slave, severely punishing the slave for the smallest disobedient, shackling the slave with fear.

If your mother wanted to be your friend later, it wasn’t wise of her to first establish herself as your enemy.

“Do I understand correctly you think the origin of all  our human fears are related to our mothers?”- the newborn cries when expelled from the comfort and familiarity of the womb, I am guessing that’s the original fear. If the mother then frequently holds her baby close to her chest, so that the baby can again hear her mother’s beating heart and feel the warmth of her body, the baby calms down. The baby understand, in an instinctual way, that the mother is still there.

When the mother drops her young child from her protective arms, and when she does so repeatedly, she betrays the child’s trust that the mother is still there to protect her. The child becomes fearful of the mother she still needs but can no longer trust.

“Fear just takes many forms obviously, but what I want to know is the origin of it. Or look at it as a whole”- fear is like fire: once it starts and is not quickly contained, it spreads and spreads. You contain it in one area to soon find out it is burning in another.

There is no way to eliminate fear. Fear is meant to be our most intense emotion because of its survival purpose: a most intense emotion is needed for an animal to run or fight immediately and with greatest speed and/ or force. Excessive fear in a child can be prevented. As adults, all we can do is regulate fear: it takes a lot of time and practice to do that.

Mothers (most often the primary caretakers of the baby and young child) need to be very careful with how they use fear- it is never a good policy for a parent to excessively scare a child/ to enslave a child using fear as a weapon. Enslaving a child with fear is often referred to as being a strict parent, a euphemism.

Next topic/ second post: he is “not much of an online chatter”, 90% of the time you initiate contact with him. There were times that he was very active chatting with you and at other times he was much quieter. Once he said that he’d block you if he got tired of you “writing to him too much”. He later said that “he’d only say it to people he is close (to).. he apologised and said he’d be more mindful next time”.

You are wondering if he is “just being polite by writing to me or he actually likes talking to me. I can’t figure it out at all… awkward for me I guess to be rejected”-

– from what you shared, seems to me that he actually likes talking to you, just not at all times. Also, his joke, if it followed you expressing concern that you write to him too much- does not seem rude to me. The thing in the quote above that caught my eye was the at all in “I can’t figure it out at all“. Clearly he likes talking with you at times. Why is it something you can’t at all see, I ask myself.

Because we are so very much Formed during our Formative Years aka childhood, I go back there to look for the answer (a simplified answer, not an answer that explains the complexity of everything put together): when your mother treated you like a king and then dropped you to the status of her slave, I bet the child that you were couldn’t figure out at all what happened. In the beginning of the first of your two recent posts, you wrote: “I always felt protected by my mother when I was very little”-

– think of the child that you were, always feeling protected by your mother, surprised and not understanding at all, how it can be that.. the person who always protected you.. dropped you, so to speak. And kept you down, enslaved.

When you become clear, in your mind and heart, that it is not true that your mother loved you “more than ANYTHING” (she didn’t love you more than she loved feeling powerful over you); when you become clear/ able to figure out that the everything in “She gave everything to us”, included the repeated betrayal of her silent treatments, etc., you will also be able to figure out this friend and other people.

“I stopped initiating contact and waiting to see what happens.. is it too silly?”- no, it’s sensible. You wrote that you initiate 90% of contact. If you want to initiate 50% of contact, stop initiating as often as you do, and let your initiation frequency drop to 50%.

“I suddenly developed this need to connect with people.. I was so closed before”- open up cautiously, a bit at a time, to people who are not likely to hurt you.

– You are welcome, thank you and have a lovely weekend yourself!

anita

Dear Nar:

You are welcome. I will again respond to your post part by part, responding to one part before reading the next. If there is a part that I will not be addressing, and you would like me to address it, please let me know what it is.

“one can develop all sorts of issues, in my case, OCD + anxiety”- OCD is not separate from anxiety, these are not two separate issues. Anxiety is what fuels obsessive thinking and compulsions.  OCD is one of many possible consequences/ results of overwhelming anxiety.

“did I tell her about this? no.. I don’t want to hurt her that much”- children are greatly motivated to not hurt their mothers- no matter how cruel the mother has been in many cases- because a child instinctively/ genetically believes that she will die without her mother. A child will not hurt or harm the person she believes that she can’t live without. When as adults, we still suffer from significant emotional injuries that happened in childhood, we still believe that we need our mothers for our survival, and therefore, we are still highly motivated to not hurt her.

“When I was a kid I needed her love and I hated her at the same time”- I am guessing that as a young child, feeling very dependent on your mother, you were not angry at her, or if you were, you did not express that anger. But as an older child, a preteen perhaps, or a teenager- you did not feel as dependent on her, and you rebelled against her, you fought back.

“But that has changed, I just wonder why I no longer hate or fear her”- I am guessing that you are not aware of feeling hate for her, or fear of her because you haven’t lived with her since you were 17, if I remember correctly. Plus, when you are focused on other people, like on the woman you met at the retreat, you get to experience the emotions you felt for your mother- in the context of these new people in your life. In other words, the anger, the hate, the fear.. and the love for your mother are still there, projected into other people.

“She suffered a lot.. unknowingly passed it down to her children”- I am sure that she didn’t have an evil plan to pass on her suffering to her children, and then she proceeded to execute that plan. But when she gave you prolonged silent treatments, she did so knowingly. She knew that her silent  treatments were hurting you and.. that’s why she did it.

“I in my turn hurt many other people as a result of this pain.. so where is the beginning or end of this endless circle of causing pain?”- the beginning is right now, this very moment. When you notice that you are practicing a behavior that is hurting an innocent person- stop practicing that behavior. When you notice that another person is hurting you, leave or assert yourself.

“With compassion, there is no room for hate anymore. It is just love and forgiveness” and with (1) holding others accountable for their behavior, as well as holding yourself accountable for your behavior, and (2) protecting yourself from others’ aggression, and asserting yourself when needed.

“I KNOW my sister… suffered much more than me.. multiple childhood traumas.. she is traumatising her own little helpless child”- I am so sorry to read this. One thing you can do to help your sister is to not minimise your mother’s misbehaviors when you talk to your sister. Instead, validate your sister’s childhood and ongoing experience. If you validate her childhood/  ongoing experience, she may treat her own child’s experience as valid.

“I also know one day I should find enough courage to have this talk with my mother and explain to her how she made me feel”- she already knows: she gave you those silent treatments because she wanted to hurt you, and having seen you hurt, she repeated the silent treatments every time she wanted to hurt you once again.

anita

Dear Nar:

I will attend to two topics in this post, first topic:  excusing parental abuse because of earlier times, lack of education and not having known any better, second topic: the adult’s retroactive efforts to understand by intellectually integrating what a person heard and read during later life (many years after early childhood)-  into that early life experience.

First topic: “These were 90s in the post-Soviet country. People didn’t even know that things like mental wellbeing exists.. nobody thought they were abusing or damaging these kids emotionally or mentally.. my mother was just a product of her environment. And she didn’t know any better… I genuinely think she thought criticising, withdrawing or being strict is a good way to bring up a kid”.

The problems with this argument are: (1) these are the 2020s, and your mother has been exposed for quite some time to the issue of mental well-being: you educated her about it, and yet, “she never said sorry neither to me nor my sister”.

(2) There is plenty of child abuse happening nowadays in the U.S., were the issue of mental well-being is very much a popular topic in the front of public attention. This means that lack of education and exposure to the topic of mental well-being is far from being the most significant factor in child mistreatment and abuse.

(3) Regarding all the adults/ parents who abused children in the Soviet Union in the 90s, adults who were not educated on child abuse: these adults/ parents were once children who experienced the same abuse they inflicted on others later on They remember how it felt, having had a first-person experience of child abuse, which is much more powerful than reading about it in a book or hearing about it on a TV show. These adults/ parents chose to pass on the abuse to children not  because they didn’t know how it felt to be abused, but because they were angry. Anger, not lack of education, is what motivates abuse. Look at nature, anger precedes aggression.

Regarding the second item: you wrote, “I read somewhere strict parenting can lead to developing obsessive thinking patterns. I know I am hurt, but I don’t know why fully. I think it’s more complicated and multi-facet than just my mother’s strictness or silent treatment”-

– when you were a young child, you were very different from who you are now. Your experience consisted mostly of raw emotions, not of elaborate thinking. As a child, in your first decade of life or so, you didn’t know words and terms like “strict parenting”, “developing”, “obsessive thinking patterns”, complicated”, “multi facet” or “silent treatment”. These words and terms came later on, after what’s behind those words and terms affected you and became a part of you.

What’s behind those words and terms were raw emotions- the way a younger child experiences life. Raw emotions without elaborate thinking. Here is a problem as you now, as an adult, try to understand the why (“I don’t know why fully”)- because as a child you did not experience elaborate thinking and you therefore didn’t record your thoughts and feelings at the time in a journal, you now do not remember how you felt then.

The raw, intense emotions of the young child that you were are lost to you now, not having been cemented in elaborate thinking and recorded for future understanding.

But there is a way to retrieve those emotions- I have and it’s been a result of an intentional and long healing process.

Back to you, notice this: “there is genuinely no deep resentment or hate in me towards my mother. And this is only because I really know she didn’t know any better”- as a younger child, when you were hurt by your mother, when you were scared of her, you did not think: “she didn’t know any better”. She-didn’t-know-any-better is a later life thinking.

At the time you were a younger child, you fully experienced raw fear, raw anger- unmitigated/ unadjusted by later life thinking.

anita

Dear Nar:

You are welcome.

“when one is truly angry and then becomes violent, one is not usually aware of what is happening… most people cause harm without being fully aware of it at the point they do it”-

– most people are aware that they are causing harm at the time that they are causing harm. This is why most people fall short of severely injuring or killing the person they are harming when violent. Most parents who hit their children are aware of what they are doing: choosing to not hit the child so hard as to break the child’s bones, or harm their own hands.. and most choose to not hit the child in public because someone may call the police.

You asked me to elaborate on retrieving early life emotions, and if “everyone can retrieve these emotions?”-

– I will partly answer this question today using what you wrote in your most recent post: “I know when I see my childhood pictures, I look sad and serious in all of them. I know my country and my family went through very difficult times when I was growing up and for sure it impacted me as well”-

First, you observed “sad and serious” emotions in the photos showing your face (and maybe body, as in body posture). Next, you directed your attention away from the personal experience of that girl in the photos, her personal difficult times, directing your attention instead to her country and her family.

What caused the girl in the photos to look sad and serious was not her country’s experience or her family’s experience, but her own. In her own, personal experience, her mother’s silent treatments were more powerful than what happened outside her childhood home.

To retrieve your early life emotions, you first need to direct your attention to your very personal early life.

anita