Dear Anita,

in receiving such generous help, I am naturally more than satisfied with your answer!  It is already a sheer miracle to me that I am able to communicate with someone about my thoughts and feelings, and receive such in depth help and advice.

So thank you for your detailed explanation.  I find it really helpful. I wish I could get straight to that “Zen” calmness which your words emanate, but I’ve just begun an internal Kondo-ing (clutter clearing) and have this huge, disordered pile of “everything” within me.

I do actually literally still feel visceral fear of my mother when I think of her.  I was wondering about trying some Somatic Experiencing or something along those lines to finally get my body calm again because my inner tension increased enormously since being with my husband (18 years), not just because of him, but also because our lives were hit by many awful tsunamis during the first years.

I still see my husband quite often and sometimes we talk, sometimes mundane things and sometimes the past.  I was doing quite well emotionally until recently, when I became confused and depressed (after we’d gone to buy garden plants together which was like old times).  Eventually, after some researching, I realised I was stuck in the same loop with him as with my mother = still hoping.  I was suffering so much that I wondered what else there is I could try and I realised I had so far never considered accepting that my mother doesn’t love me.   That had seemed to me like capitulation and confirmation of my worthlessness, but now I feel ready to accept and move on.

I feel it is a bit different with my husband because he is trying to understand himself and is open to talk, although he has so much fear of emotions, I don’t know if he’ll ever open up again.  I don’t want to live with him though, as I find his avoidant behaviours too frustrating for everyday life, and sometimes a bit crazy-making.  I can accept that he is like that now, although it is very sad.  I don’t feel angry towards him as I do with my mother, but I’ve realised that hanging on to hope or anger is just messing my life up so I want to stop.

I was starting to think I had hung on to our marriage because a relationship with someone proves I am worthy of being loved (=disproving my mother), but as you have pointed out, the deeper layers, the subconscious, are full of fear, and I can certainly feel that fear of “life without my husband”.  I will take some time now to let that sink in, because I hadn’t seen the connection between my childhood fear and my present fearfulness.

In many ways my husband and I have been like Hansel and Gretel, lost children clinging together.  Even now in separation, he is the person I most often speak to about how I feel.  I do have contact with my family (mother: narcissist, father: enabler, sister: distant) but they don’t want to know about how I feel.  It’s forbidden to speak your truth anyway.  I don’t have to go no contact with my mother because she simply never bothers with me, so I just keep in contact with my father and sister.  It has taken my father until now (in his late 70’s) to dare to call me without my mother’s permission though.

I absolutely do have difficulty these days in knowing what to think about people I meet, i.e. what do they want from me, and I am not sure whether I can trust people or not.  This didn’t use to be the case at all, but when my husband and I moved away, I discovered all my local “friends” were just users who dropped me instantly, and my remaining friends dropped me once I began to have marriage troubles.  Nevertheless, I am going to have another shot at just happily meeting people and trying to make new connections.

I would like to ask how you achieved your understanding on the emotional level?  Now I have realised I’ve been eternally hoping my mother is going to love me and that I need to accept she isn’t.  And thinking about the way she treated me, and still does treat me, this is obviously not love.  I already knew when I was a little girl that she was not treating me the way a mother would.  So if I know this much, what is missing so that I can process this emotionally?

You write about truth, and this is something which always confused me – why did I always end up with men who lied to me?  Drove me round the bend, as I find lying the pits.  Now in reading another response of yours to a person with an “allergy” towards liars, I could see that I had so far not connected the dots between my mother’s lying and the lying of partners. And indeed there is a kind of unspoken law in my family that you are not allowed to “say it as it is”.  So today I have also just begun to realise that my mother, indeed the whole family, was lying all the time.  I was the scapegoat and was subjected to all kinds of unfair treatment, but it was always portrayed differently and I wasn’t allowed to “say it as it is”.  And really, as I’m just learning to say, they were blatantly lying in my face!!

I do believe it must be less painful to live with the truth, despite the hole in your heart, than living in this eternally painful place of feeling unloved and worthless.  I wonder how many other kinds of blindness I am still suffering from?

I would be really grateful for any help and guidance which you can give me to become truly free and live in my truth.  I have already survived so much, I do believe I deserve to have a “happy ending”, even if it is in solitude.

Juanita