Dear Cali Chica:

“Every single time I see m dog his entire body shakes from wagging his tail so much”- he feels great affection for you, he gives you his affection and expects affection (and treats/ food/ shelter) in return, win-win. Biology arranged for the dog to shake his tail as part of a win-win project.

Many of us are taught that “to be loving is to be naïve, and perhaps foolish.. being taught such, I have learned that to be loving… to be a good person, isn’t actually good, it is foolish…Those that are loving.. haven’t really experienced much in life… so the world is a happy go lucky… It is much harder to be loving when you know the truth about people”-

– your mother was not naïve, not foolish to … think that her own two babies are innocent, no she knew better, so she treated them accordingly. She knew “the truth” and her own little girls were not going to fool her!

(I just read that you were planning on sipping tea and reading my response at 9 am, if I knew it earlier, I would have written to you earlier!)

“no progress comes from self cruelty or self hatred… To be gentle with myself doesn’t mean that I am giving myself a pass”-

– your mother was cruel to you and she hated you here and there and repeatedly, never to acknowledge it to you, express her regret and then correct. She figured to be gentle with you would be to give you a pass to be cruel to her (she will never be foolish and naïve and expect anything but cruelty from anyone!). So you unlearned your natural “wagging of the tail” kind of love, the one you were born with, and learned to “love” yourself like your mother “loved” you, that is, to be cruel to yourself, not gentle.

“She never asked me how I felt.. how she made me feel was never of concern to her.. everything she did was to escape any distress in her own self, whether that meant to lash out ay myself or my father or whether it meant To lay screaming on the floor acting like a victim from an earthquake”-

– everything she did was also to punish you, your sister, your father, whomever was there, for being cruel to her.

“Pay up… Look at you, just taking from us your whole life.. you have nothing to pay us do you?!??”-

– pay your mother for.. her cruelty?

– let’s put aside the parent/ young child context where the child is weak, born unable to sit or feed herself, or control her bodily functions, let’s look at this context: two adults, one giving to the other a delicious cake to eat and a slap on the face, at the same time. When the adult being slapped gets automatically angry for having been slapped, the other says: how ungrateful you are for the cake I just gave you!

Rule: when a person gives you a cake and a slap, the slap voids the gift, and when she complains you are not grateful for the cake, she adds a guilt-tripping-mental slap to the original slap, so you end up with a double slap and your stomach hurts because you can’t digest that cake.

anita