Dear SallyDaisy:

You wrote about your mother, “She was extremely hostile towards me during those years”. Recently, when you sought her input regarding the recent relationship, her response: “she thought I was making a big deal out of nothing. She thinks I’m a b*&* and I drive people away”.

Like so many aggressive and abusive people, your mother too blames her victim. Her message to you is that you drive people away, there is something wrong with you! Which means that her aggression toward you all those years were your fault, not hers.

Not only that, she gives you the message that.. there was no abuse, not by this man and not by hers. Just as she said you made a big deal  out of nothing regarding this man, I bet she told you the same thing in many different ways regarding her abuse against you- there was none, you made a big deal out of nothing… nothing happened.

So she sent you the message through the years that there is something wrong with you and you believed her, so you are afraid that other people will “see the real me and repulsed”.

“The sadness and trying to suppress the urge to cry  is all I know”- the sadness of a girl abused is intense, no one to help her, all alone with that aggressive person hurting her. And the person hurting her is the person she loves the most in the world, the person she needs so desperately.

“I was convinced in my teenage years that I hated my Mother”- notice you wrote mother with a capital M, this is because a child needs her mother so much, loves her so much, wants nothing more intensely than her love, a mother is a god for her young child.

Like you I was angry with my mother for ages, didn’t know that I loved her all along, underneath. What the anger tried to achieve was to remove her from myself, to remove the source of aggression from my life. Only I also loved her and still felt I needed her. So I was conflicted, terribly conflicted for too long.

I had my first quality therapy 2011-2013 and continued what I refer to as my healing process since and to this very day, today on my own, that is, not in the context of psychotherapy with a therapist. Part of my healing process is my participation here, almost four years of it.

“I feel like I need (your therapist) to tell me the answers because I can’t find it”- you are afraid, that is all. Fear is very powerful, so you make yourself as small as you can, feel the least that you can, close your eyes best you can so to see …  less of the things that scare you.

You wrote earlier: “She’s the only person I have left to talk to”- did you mean your therapist or your mother?

anita