Dear Cali Chica:

I am feeling that there is something I need to better understand, so I went back to your Nov 2016 posts. I will quote from you (it helps me process information when I type your words myself):

“they immigrated here with nothing, and raised my sister and I to  be privileged successful and happy-ish… I feel it was ingrained in my whole childhood to ‘feel bad’ I always recall feeling, wow how sad my mom’s life was, how sad people can be, why did people do this to her?… I felt disappointed constantly, birthdays as a teenager I found myself focusing more on ‘who wasn’t there for me’ then the celebration or party at hand… it started the ‘we have bad luck, the world is against us’ feeling that has perpetuated… I work so hard in career and personal life, stay fit, do yoga, have great friends- but.. it always feels like there is something wrong… I recall a picture from Disneyworld.. smiling at 5.. I remember my mom saying, ‘look at everyone else they are here with a big family..’… my mom had been isolated and mistreated and yearned for ‘company’ as she called it (company of others/friendships) her whole life, that it TOOK AWAY what we had. It’s like sitting at a dinner table of 4 and focusing on the 6 that didn’t make it… When I close my eyes I think of my mom as a damaged soul, a sad and abused.. fragile puppy.. this feeling about her makes it quite difficult to ‘hate her’ or to feel I should attempt to have ‘power over her’ in a way it simply just makes me feel soo soo bad for her”.

About two years and five months later, after more than a year (?) of no contact with your mother and father, yesterday, you wrote: “Nothing I do in life, no where I go in life ever matters… nothing is good enough- everything that I am…  Everything that I am doing… Everywhere that I am not is worth being at… the way I am as a baseline is flawed. By definition. Always. We as a family are flawed, we are born into unfortunate circumstance, what a tragedy”.

My hopefully developing thoughts (I will type as I think): I am impressed yet again by the strength of core beliefs. How powerful they are, the beliefs formed in an early age. Your father has been a physician for a long time, your mother and you and your sister traveled the world, you traveled the world with your husband as well, Paris I remember, more recently was it South America? You and your husband are physicians living in NYC. Your mother hasn’t lacked any material thing for decades, living a financially privileged life, same for you and your sister, and yet, “what a tragedy”.

This means that unless this core belief changes in your brain, life will continue to be tragedy. It is still tragedy-in-practice, every day.

Cali Chica the five year old, six, growing up, she observes, she listens.. to her mother. What mother says is the truth. She believes her mother and a core belief is formed.

What holds this core belief in place still is that empathy, I am thinking, “When I close my eyes I think of my mom as a damaged soul, a sad and abused… fragile puppy… this feeling about her makes it quite difficult to ‘hate her’ or to feel I should attempt to have ‘power over her‘..”-

The Cali Chica Voice of reason is not allowed to have power over the Mother Voice of No-Reason. There is the voice of your mother in your brain and there is that voice of yours, an independent voice. But it is her voice that is still more powerful, and it always has been.

I think it is the strong emotion of empathy you have for your mother, and you may not be aware of it these days (?) but it is this strong empathy for her that is keeping her voice alive and powerful in your brain.

“this feeling about her makes it quite difficult to ‘hate her'”- you didn’t hate her yet, you didn’t get angry enough at her and therefore, you didn’t reject her yet, or more accurately, you didn’t eject her yet from your brain and her voice is still in power.

Time to hate her then, time to see her not as a fragile puppy, but as the vicious dog that she was in your life. See, the fragile puppy that she was when she was a child, you never met that puppy, the woman you met when you came into her life, she was not  the  innocent, victim child that she indeed was. In your life, she was not that fragile puppy, she was a vicious woman who told you that she wished you were never born, the woman who berated you when you broke down and cried in medical school.

A fragile puppy doesn’t say those things.

anita