Dear Kay:

“my mother was always angry at me”- that is a scary thing for a child, to have an angry mother. Animals in nature are scared  of other animals’ anger because when animals are angry they are motivated to hurt the  ones they are angry at. So living with an angry mother means living with a person who  is motivated to hurt you at any time. It is living in danger. When in danger we become very alert to danger signs, we don’t attend to the  “good parts”, naturally. It is not different from deer, when they hear a noise that scares them (could be a predator approaching), they stop eating (“the good parts”) and look and listen, alert to the danger,  focusing on the danger.

Living in ongoing danger means to suffer,  this is why you “just prayed and wished to die”.

“When he (your father) came back from work I knew I would be safe”- you felt in danger alone with your angry mother.

And then, your mother took away that safety from you, telling you that you must choose between her and  him.  You chose her because you were afraid that if you didn’t choose her, she would get angrier at you.

In college you got depressed- when we are afraid for too long, we do get depressed. It is the  natural way for the brain/ body to recover from the ongoing neural excitation  of fear. Sadness and exhaustion are supposed  to be temporary, just long enough for us to recover. Depression happens when we don’t recover from what scared us, what still scares us.

Later on your mother “changed completely… because she was scared of me killing myself or something”, so I suppose  she stopped expressing her anger toward you, but “invaded my space and everything,  I could  not  do anything without her knowing”.

Four years ago you got a job offer to  work abroad, and  you “accepted without  hesitation… to escape from everything in my home country  including my mother, I wanted  to be free”.

You currently do not  live  with your parents, you visit them a couple of times a  year. “I  wish a lot to see them, but when I am there  after a couple  of days I want to go  far away again..  I feel trapped when I am with them”-

-trapped in fear, trapped in danger. Even though there is no real-and-present danger at home, with your mother, as a child, there was a real-and-present danger. A child has no way of knowing that her mother will not… harm her physically when angry. A child doesn’t know that, she sees the anger, and she is scared.

Problem is, even when away from your parents, the fear is still there, the fear of being trapped in any relationship, be it one with a man, any closeness  is scary because the same old same old fear is still there.

My mother too was angry a whole lot. Post more if you want and I will reply anytime you do post, if you want that.

anita