Dear limbikanimaria:

Good to read from you again.

May last year, this woman left a note by your things which said: “I see energy, you have a black heart, I will pray for you”. You asked what it means and “whether she was a trustworthy person or not”-

– she was not a trustworthy or responsible person because if she was, she would have left you a note asking to speak to you so to get to know you better and offer you some… cure for an alleged black heart.

It is similar to this: a Christian comes across a non-Christian and instead of inviting that person to church for coffee and cookies and pleasant fellowship, he leaves a note to the non-Christian: you are going to hell, I will be praying for you!- that’s not helpful, is it.

Which brings me to the thought: what does her note say about her heart? Leaving you a note with the judgement that your heart is black (whatever it means, but doesn’t read like a good thing) without any suggestion of what you can do to fix it?

A good person, a concerned and responsible person, wouldn’t leave a note like this. Given the sender of the message is not good or responsible, but rude and crude… I see no reason to value her message.

anita

Dear limbikanimaria:

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words.

“she didn’t seem like a mean or cruel person”- doesn’t mean she was not a mean or cruel person. Traditional cartoon artists make sure that a mean and cruel character looks mean and cruel at all times, but in real life mean and cruel people aren’t cruel and mean at all times and when they are, they don’t necessarily appear that way, on purpose or because of disassociation.

Regarding why her comment resonates with you, it probably has to do with what you shared Dec 2016, in your thread about shame, you wrote that comments your mother made left you “to feel immense amounts of shame.. incredibly shameful comments… These comments are haunting me and I want to make peace with them and my mom”.

She never apologized for those comments, did she.

(I will be back to the computer in a few hours).

anita

Dear limbikanimaria:

I am glad you “got past the shame that the note the woman left” you with, and that you are intrigued instead. Shame is a terrible feeling- thinking, a painful experience.

Intrigued myself, I looked at Wikipedia and there is an entry for “Blackheart”. It states there: “Blackheart is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character is usually depicted as an adversary to the superhero Ghost Rider… The character has also appeared in other media, such as the 2000 video game Marvel vs Capcom 2, and in the 2007 film Ghost Rider… He possesses vast inherent supernatural powers, including superhuman strength, speed and endurance which are magical in nature. He also has telekinetic and telepathic powers”-

– if you did indeed have this kind of a black heart, you certainly don’t need this woman’s prayers, because you have all these supernatural powers.

The urban dictionary has this definition for black heart: “a person who is no longer able to feel emotion i.e. their heart is dead. Usually occurs after multiple tragedies in life” and the slang dictionary states: “A black heart describes someone or something seen as innately evil or fundamentally corrupt”.

Who knows what this woman meant. I suppose you can research further on what it means in various contexts.

anita

Dear limbikanimaria:

I want this morning to study all your previous threads and offer you what I understand, hoping that maybe it will be of some help to you. The photo by your screen name reads: “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”- I will keep these three gates in mind as I proceed.

January 2016, four years ago (age about 23), you wrote about dating a man for a few months, you wrote: “Honesty is obviously important in all relationships, but I am obsessive about needing people to be honest with me”. Your boyfriend misstated the truth about a topic that was not important to you (maybe because he forgot), but your response: “I can’t get over that he lied to me.. I feel like he knew that he was lying, but he says it was an honest mistake.. I know myself and that I’m a nazi about people being honest with me… I keep going back and forth between feeling like I should forgive him or getting the f*** out of this relationship… It concerns me that if he did in fact lie about this, that he might lie about more important things in the future. .. a part of me feels like he lied to tell me what I wanted to hear in that situation”.

December 2016, a bit over three years ago (age about 24), you wrote that you’ve been suffering on and off from bulimia for about seven years, since you were around 17. You wrote: “I’m focused on working through shame that I feel toward myself right now and examining the reasons why I began to feel this shame in the first place”. You shared that when you were about 17, your mother “made shameful comments” toward you, such as: “did you enjoy your binge?”, “All you’ve been doing is eating all day”, and “You can do whatever you want when you leave the house. No more puking”. You felt that she didn’t care about you, that she “didn’t want to deal with my feelings or disorder, and didn’t care for my wellbeing”, and that she left you “to feel immense amounts of shame about my eating disorders”; that you needed her “support during these vulnerable moments, not to be shamed”. You wrote: “I try to understand it from her point of view, but I also feel enraged.. These comments are haunting me”. You resolved to “not let my mother’s shameful comments have power over me anymore.. not judge her for making those comments.. but rather.. empathize with her more”.

July 2017, about six months later (age 24), you wrote that you are “working towards recovery from an eating disorder” and you shared again about your on and off relationship (first thread), two years long, at this point. You wrote: “it has been eating at me that he is following 800+ people on Instagram”, including women he came across at Tinder before he dated you,  and that he “liked” photos of attractive women. You stalked his Instagram. You told him that you want him to unfollow these women and he told you that you are controlling, “I can’t seem to let go of this and allow it to continue eating at me”.

October 2017, three months later, you shared that you’ve been working full time, and that you were living on your own two years by that time, and that living alone made it “too easy t give into binging and purging”, so you considered moving back to your parents’ home so to have your parents around, “to help me get back on my feet from my ED”. You then decided to stay where you were because commuting is three hours less than it would have been if you moved back to your parents’, and because you loved your apartment. So you asked your mother “if we could have weekly phone calls to check in and make sure I’m headed in an upward direction”. She agreed and indeed made supporting comments to you during those phone calls, like “we’re in this together and things will get better”, and “This isn’t your fault”.

April 2019 (age 27), you wrote: “I have been feeling stuck the last few years and very resentful towards my mother for neglecting to support me/ getting the help I needed when my disorder first started”, you told her on the phone the day before this thread, and you told her that you felt very angry at her. She then told you that it wasn’t her fault that your disorder started or that you were angry at her, that what you remember (her shaming, uncaring comments) didn’t happen. “She kept saying over and over, ‘I would never say that. Maybe it was a dream you had. Maybe you misunderstood something else that I said'”, “it was almost as if she was trying to convince me that my memory was false.. It almost felt scary how genuinely she was denying it… Now I must accept that she denies my memory”.

Same month and year, April 2019 you posted about a new boyfriend you’ve been seeing since January that year. He told you during a conversation: “I’d be happy to call you my girlfriend”. You wrote about his statement: “it sent me he message that he wanted to be exclusive”. Next, “anxiety set in for some reason and I felt an impulse to check if he was still logging into his dating profile”, so you checked and found out that he did log in there. You were confused, “Why didn’t he just say he wanted to keep things open? It just seems like his words aren’t matching up to his actions”.

And now my input: sometimes reality is much simpler than we think it is. We think things are more complicated than they are because we refuse to see a part of it. If we saw that blind-spot, so to speak, the whole picture will become simple and clear.

I will get to that blind spot and the whole, simple picture in a moment. Before I do, I want to clarify the following: I never communicated with your mother and never will. I don’t feel angry at her. I don’t have a desire that she suffers or that she will be punished. What I care about here is your well-being, trying to offer you something helpful.

I don’t have a desire that you continue to feel angry at her. I am very well aware that not feeling angry… feels way better than feeling angry. I am also aware that there is a valid message behind every emotion, and that the message behind anger has to be acknowledged before the anger relaxes and we are free from it, no longer being stuck in it.

The blind spot I am about to suggest will not be easy for you to read, this  is why you haven’t seen it so far. But seeing it will make the whole picture simpler and clearer, and that will definitely be helpful to you. It is very possible that as you read the following it will mean nothing to you because .. after all, it is a blind spot and you may very well not see something noticeable in the following, plus you may deny it all and get angry at me. Nonetheless here it is:

The blind spot: your mother lies. And I don’t mean just about the specific comments she made when you were 17, denying that she has made them, but before you were 17, way before and after.

I will now elaborate: you know that people lie, you suspected the two men you shared about lied to you. You read and hear about people lying frequently, don’t you, in the news, otherwise? We all do. Here is the blind spot: children can’t wrap their minds around the idea that their own mother lies.

Realistically, lots of women in the world lie. Many of the women who do lie are mothers. But a child can’t hold this in awareness, that her own mother lies. Often children of adult age can’t do that either.

How do I  know she lies? Because you shared Jan 2016: “I am obsessive about needing people to be honest with me.. I’m a nazi about people being honest with me… if he did in fact lie about this, that he might lie about more important things in the future”- but you didn’t mention anything about his behavior that explains this obsession. You did mention a previous boyfriend lying to you. But you also mentioned your mother, and I know that our mothers, our main caretakers, are the most powerful people by far, in our lives. And you clearly stated that she lied to you about those comments.

But how many times did she lie to you and you don’t remember, how many times did you turn a blind eye or ear to her lies.

You turned a blind eye to her lies but you open your eye wide to anyone else who may lie, stalking an Instagram account of one man, checking the dating profile of another and obsessing about being lied to.. by other people, not by your mother.

We keep re-experiencing our childhood experience as we move on into adulthood and through adulthood. She lied to you way before the beginning of your ED and repeatedly over the years, and you keep experiencing being lied to. Children’s perceptions by the way, are very accurate, they don’t have any prior experience to project into their parents, what they see about their parents is true. But when what we see is scary, we close our eyes to it.

anita

Dear limbikanimaria:

You are welcome and I am grateful for your gracious reply.

“I do know that my mother lies, that I lie, that we all lie at times“-

-When people ask me: how are you? Most often I will answer: fine, thank you. Even if I don’t feel fine. Is that a lie? Yes, and in this way we all lie. This kind of lie (there are other examples) are part of what I call social lubrication lies. If I was to answer truthfully the question: how are you, asked by multiple people per day, neither I nor they will have the time or the desire to listen to a long answer, a long answer that will take time to develop as I answer.

You made a distinction between lying so to protect other people’s feelings and lying for selfish reasons, like your ex boyfriend did (“to endure that he would see me and we would have sex”), a very painful experience for you.

Back to your mother: I was not referring to her lying to you as in social lubrication lies, an accepted and practiced social custom in all modern societies, or as in what you mentioned, lying to protect others’ feelings, as in let’s say, a woman asking her husband: do you think I look fat?

I am talking about lying for selfish reasons. I am suggesting that your mother lied to you for selfish reasons. And this kind of lying, we don’t all do, do we (outside of extreme circumstances such as when held hostage and physically tortured)?

anita

Dear limbikanimaria:

My mother lied to me too, selfishly. Like you, my empathy was with her, not with me. Like you I focused on her, on her reasons, her life experience, not mine. Like you I was invested in seeing the best in her, to explain away her selfish behavior  (ex.: “maybe it’s a subconscious defense mechanism”, makes her selfishness unconscious, and therefore denies the reality that she was .. consciously selfish)

What I am trying to bring to your attention is the following: a child has to believe that her mother loves her and will never selfishly and intentionally lie and hurt her. So the child closes her eyes to that, when it happens.

Fast forward, as adults, we have to open our eyes because keeping them closed leads us to walk in the dark and stumble, so to speak,  that is, to live dysfunctional lives in the context of relationships and otherwise.

As an adult, to heal, I had to shift my empathy from empathy for her—> to empathy for me;

from my focus being on her (her reasons, her motivations, her childhood)–> focusing on me (my reasons, my motivations, my childhood).

You wrote then that she didn’t lie to you to protect you but “to protect her self image rather than acknowledge my feelings”-

– does this mean that what was important to her was not that you will get better, that you will heal from what hurts you, but that she will looks good in the minds of others, like your father’s?

* Please take your time answering, this is not easy to process.

anita