Dear Cali Chica:

This is exciting: you asserting yourself, exercising your personal power, will take the ROAR away. The roar was the part of you rebelling against living without power.

Remember you referred to your mother as a “fragile puppy”? You didn’t see her at all as a monster. The opposite of a monster, a puppy, a victim of bad people out there.

“who is that monster?! My mother”- no one in your life has hurt you as badly as your mother did, and likely no one will every hurt you as badly as your mother did. It is so because of how very vulnerable you were to her, so her rudeness, her selfishness, her histrionics, these cut deeply into the soft flesh of the needy child.

Truly you were powerless as a child and in the context of you and your mother, she was very powerful.

Fast forward, the bad guy, man or woman, you did perceive them as more powerful than they were or are in your life not because you gave your power away but because you didn’t make the change yet from the powerless child to the powerful adult. You were still a powerless woman who ROAR-ed at times.

anita