Dear Anita,

I apologise for what may seem like a delay in my responses, please rest assured that I would like to continue my communication with you and will respond as and when I can always.

I must admit, your last response to me almost came as a shock, I had never quite looked at things in this way and perhaps it was a bit of an eye opening experience.

Regarding point 1 and 2, to my understanding your mother could only understand as much as she could understand and therefore would shut down anything that was beyond her level of comprehension. This does slightly resonate with me and my mother. I mean don’t get me wrong, she has always been more like a best friend to me than a mother and she has in the past during my adolescent years shown a lot of compassion and understanding towards topics or areas of my life she couldn’t quite comprehend but I must say I always felt like a failure or disappointment bringing those topics up because I knew that I wasn’t living up to her expectation of what my life should be. I’ll give you an example for better understanding, as a teen (16/17) I had a bisexual experience, in fact a full blown relationship with this girl at the time. In hindsight, it was most definitely just a phase or experimenting, whatever you want to call it which I would say was influenced by the people I was hanging around with at the time etc, nonetheless at the time to me that was serious. Now whilst my mother ‘accepted’ & welcomed my partner to my house, family do’s etc at the time I KNOW she was not happy with the situation. I know because I remember back then opening up our home laptop to look for something online and she had accidentally left her forum open, probably one similar to this, and being nosy I snooped only to find her posts about me and her not knowing how to deal with this phase of mine – again, left me feeling less than, a failure and disappointment despite doing what I thought at the time was following my heart.

Number 3 hit home for me a lot. When I look back on my childhood, I really cannot recall times when I would be ignored or my expression of my needs disregarded, I really can’t so I don’t know if this has much to do with my mother or my bio father actually however there must be a reason why I am the way that I am today. I did live away from my mum and step dad for a total of maybe a year or year and a half when I was about 6/7. Due to the poverty back in my home country, they left to go abroad to settle in and build us a new life in th U.K. before bringing us over a year or so later. During this time I was staying with my step-dad’s mum, who I too call grandma but could always feel that she treats me different to her real grand children, I felt that always as a child. I was extremely unhappy there, I was only young myself and was forced to look after my little sister (3/4) at the time whilst my grandmother worked in the evenings to put food on the table. I was also unhappy because I didn’t feel ‘safe’, I could tell I wasn’t wanted there or loved how I needed to be loved – genuinely. So I used to often run away to my aunties house. She doesn’t have any children and always treated me like her own, I loved being there, I remember we played and baked cakes and I felt loved and ware there. But that was cut short after and I was made to go back to my grandma’s to be with my sister. Perhaps at that point I felt abandoned by my mum? I felt like she had left me knowing I was unhappy? Don’t get me wrong, as an adult I completely understand and appreciate that they left and gave us a good life in the U.K. I know it was necessary to do so, but perhaps it affected my emotional/mental state more than I anticipated now that I try to understand all the pieces. That last bit about either going silent or overstating pain is 100% me, especially right now. I either shout and scream it from the roof tops and when I feel I am not being heard or am being disregarded I go completely silent, never speak of it again and also withdraw from that person… I create a major distance. I cannot believe how much you’ve hit the nail on the head with this one Anita.

Healing has been a difficult one for me Anita. Really difficult, because I don’t know where to start. And even looking back on it, I’m following all of the ‘guidelines’ to healing and it seems nothing is shifting. Being so completely lost for a long time is overwhelming and exhausting and I wonder if I will ever find a way..