Dear Jana,

I hope you’re having a great time on your offline adventure 😊 deep in nature, away from the distractions of the outside world ❤️

Thank you for sharing the inner child exercises, as well as your own experience of being in touch with and nourishing your inner child. It’s lovely to read that you love and cherish yourself, and can smile to your reflection in the mirror, after many years of being self-conscious about your looks.

And it’s wonderful to read about your wandering in nature, being curious about trees, animals and insects, and looking at the world with child-like curiosity. I can almost feel your joy as you’re wandering through nature, soaking in all of its beauty and wonders ☀️ ❤️

The truth is, I take it in stride and now I remember the nice things from my childhood much more often.

That’s a good, balanced approach: to focus on the present moment, as well as on the positive memories from your childhood, while not suppressing the negative ones. You’ve done a lot of healing on those negative memories, and now you have the capacity to focus on what’s good and positive.

Another helpful thing is that your parents are much more aware now, so you can build a different relationship with them now from what you had in the past.

Reading about your childhood, I gather that your parents at that time weren’t very supportive and that you didn’t really feel like confiding in them regarding bullying:

I had really nice grandmothers. They were very supportive. It’s a shame they weren’t as good mothers as grandmothers. My parents didn’t have the easiest relationships with their mothers either. I felt that very early on, and maybe it also helped me look at our relationship a little more objectively. Where were my parents supposed to learn to be more emotionally accessible, when their own mothers were quite strict with them?

They knew about my social phobia, but I am not sure if I told them that I was bullied. I was too shy to speak about it.

It’s lucky though that your grandmothers were more emotionally accessible, and that even though they weren’t necessarily good mothers to their children, they were more supportive as grandmothers. I know of such phenomenon, where the person as a grandmother is more easy-going and has more patience (and perhaps empathy) for their grandchild than she had with her own children.

I imagine the teachers failed to inform your parents about the bullying that you were suffering? It seems like a very big omission on their part – specially if they were aware of what was going on?

Good that you still had people who protected you, such as your older brother and his friends. And also older children not from your school, who taught you how to defend yourself and which places not to go alone.

But I can imagine it was nevertheless a very lonely experience, where you felt quite helpless 🙁 It seems that the adults failed you in this case, both your parents and teachers. But it’s good that you’ve managed to heal and are still healing, slowly but surely ❤️

And that now, you’re living in very different circumstances, surrounded by people who love and cherish you. And that even your parents treat you differently, and have realized the mistakes they’ve made as young parents. It’s nice to be surrounded by people who truly love you and care about your well-being – that helps your healing process even further. ❤️

But what about you? How are you doing these days? Do I understand correctly that your mother had/has narcissistic personality disorder?

Thanks, I’m doing fine emotionally. My mother is a pretty tough case, and I’m starting to think that she might have some covert narcissistic traits – in that she is stubborn in seeing herself as the victim and blaming others for her problems. She has a very hard time admitting that she made any parenting mistakes, so yeah… it’s hard to talk openly and honestly.

But the good thing is that I don’t expect her to give me her approval and validation anymore. Also, I’ve given up trying to cheer her up and make her feel less sad. Because she almost likes to feel sad, she likes to focus on the negative. It’s an internal state, which only she has the power to change, if she chooses to.

So I’ve given up on trying to make her happy. Which was a big and important part of my healing…