Dear Al:

I wrote to you earlier that it is not likely that one event caused you severe anxiety and years long stuttering. What is way more likely to have caused you severe anxiety that led to your stuttering is the multiple events of having been separated from your mother, day after day, week after week, month after month.

“I never wanted to leave my house to go to kindergarten (in Italy we go there from the age of 4 to the age of 6), and I remember crying a lot because I didn’t want to go.. I didn’t like my kindergarten teachers either… I didn’t want to stay.. and I remember wanting my mom to wait outside the whole time because I didn’t want to feel by myself. The first day of elementary school I also didn’t want to go, I was scared and I remember crying there as well.. but that time I had to stay, and there was no mom outside the door”.

At the age of 4 through 6 and longer, you were shocked every day when you were dropped in kindergarten/elementary school, being separated from your mother. Sometime within that period of time, at the age of 4 or 5, less than a year after the first day separation from your mother, you started stuttering. It took daily anxiety of a few months (less than a year) to cause your stuttering.

“My mom always said that (being stung by a bee at the age of 4 or 5) was a huge shock for me, and she remembers that I started stuttering from that moment”- interesting how she missed your huge shock at being left in kindergarten, crying a whole lot every day. And it is interesting that because she pointed at the bee incident as the cause of your stuttering, you believed it to be so, not thinking of the daily separation from your mother as the cause.

When parents, often mothers, leave their young children in day care or kindergarten and the child cries a lot, they think (and they are told) that it’s normal, that all children cry, that the child will get over it, that it will be okay. And children do survive separation anxiety, but with a cost. In your case, the cost was stuttering and the extra anxiety caused by the stuttering and being made fun of for stuttering through the years, leading you to socially isolate, a way of adjusting to a ridiculing/ hostile world outside (“I remember spending many, many days in my room all day and until late at night, in front of the computer”).

How did it feel for that young child that you were, being left behind in kindergarten? Probably the same as how you felt recently (the italicized): “Staying at home is also leaving this dark feeling of time passing before my eyes, and I feel like for some weird reason my mind thinks life is over“-

-When a young mammal like a fawn finds himself alone, without his mother, it panics, it feels like life is just about to be over any moment. Because in nature, without his mother, he will not be fed or protected from predators and the cold at night. It is the same for a human child, the fear is instinctive, the feeling that death is about to happen is instinctive. (The child does not consider relatives taking care of him or social services). He sees his mother gone=> he feels death is about to happen.

More about how it probably felt back then: “something inside just broke.. been without any energy.. feel like something is just swallowing me alive and slowly.. Too many thoughts.. feeling of the clock ticking”-

When a child is trapped away from his mother, with no rescue and no escape, time is a torture. It feels like time is not moving. Time becomes a trap in itself. Every minute feels like eternity- a powerful experience that awakens in you whenever you experience sameness for too long, trapped in time that will not move on.

Five days ago I asked you: “I wonder about a version of you before the one you mentioned: earlier in life, as a child, when all you needed was to be safe, before you longed for freedom?”

You answered: “I never really thought about the version of myself prior to the one I’m so attached to.. Before falling in love with freedom”.

I can see now that this early version was a scared child, being trapped away from his mother for hours at a time, day after day, desperately needing to be with his mother. No doubt your anxiety was visible and audible, but all the adults ignored it, so there was no help, no rescue for you and no  way to escape.

“I can feel it.. The constant desire to escape a situation.. an eternal run for some kind of Utopia”- for a young child his mother is Utopia.

I will stop here. I will next look into some information in Wikipedia and post you quotes from there.

anita