Dear Lost soul:

I read your recent two posts and we do have lots in common. Learned Helplessness- it was only a few summers ago (and I imagine I am about your age), it occurred to me, as I was sitting in the sunroom, perspiring because it was hot, it occurred to me that I can open a window and make it better for me. It simply didn’t occur to me before. So I opened a window and the air got cooler, what a relief… and I made it happen.

It is mind boggling, at 50 something, to experience opening a window as an initiative I didn’t consider before. Isn’t it something a five year old initiates.. definitely by ten. What happened in these decades of years… letting life happen to me because making it happen didn’t occur to me as a possibility. I rushed through everything because I figured I was doing them wrong anyway and preferred to not do anything at all.

My mother told me when I was a child, she said it with great emotion, and she sounding convincing: “You are a big zero. You are Nothing”. She then slapped my face hard with her hand and said: “The only thing I like about you is that when I hit you, you look down and you don’t answer back”.

In addition to that clear message she criticized me day in and day out for doing everything wrong, for thinking wrong, for feeling wrong if I blushed or.. wrong, wrong. I tried to do things right but failed, again and again until I stopped trying and found my refuge in daydreaming, a world of imagination where I made wonderful things happen, magically, all good things come true.

You wrote about the criticism you received as a child: “I definitely didn’t have the skills or perspective to withstand the criticism I received”- no child is capable of withstanding the criticism received from one’s parent, after all, the parent that is there in a child’s life is god to her, her words are Truth.

Did you see the movie Awakening? In it a group of older adults wake up from decades of coma, this is sort of..  my experience in this healing process as I call it. Like the characters in the movie,  I ask myself once in a while- aren’t I too old for this, for experiencing life from-the-beginning, learning basic initiatives.. why bother.

In the movie they choose to go  back to their coma, (I may not remember the movie well, didn’t watch the movie for many years), but I keep going because I have nothing better to do than to keep awakening.

It was three or four years after the beginning of my healing process, (the beginning was 2011, my first quality psychotherapy experience) that it occurred to me on a walk I took outdoor, these words: “There is nothing wrong with me”- I said these words out loud and they sounded so foreign. This didn’t occur to me before.

A few years later, this very day, these words don’t sound foreign to me anymore. I fear less, and believe more that I am adequate, that I was not born defective, inadequate, less than… and I am experiencing life.. as if there is nothing wrong with me, but wait, I just typed “as if”- no, no.. there really is nothing wrong with me.

anita