Dear Javairia:

Good to read from you again. I wonder what is wrong with your stomach: should you see a doctor/ any ideas as to what is wrong? (Often, it’s a symptom of anxiety).

I just re-read your June 2 description of that traumatizing March 16, the day after your birthday. On that day, following your parents fighting (one more fight in a series of many fights), your mother left the house with you and one of your siblings. Later, back in the house,  your father hit your mother “real bad.. dragged her by hair to the master bedroom”. Next she walked to the laundry room, while you followed her, and as she was about to drink poison, you tried to stop her, begging her: “‘No, mum.’ ‘No, please no’ ‘please don’t do this’ ‘please someone come for help!'”. As you tried to save her life, she pushed you away and looked at you with “very cold and angry” eyes, “full of anger/coldness, and nothing else. Not even sadness”.

What happens to a child experiencing her parents fighting badly, and then, experiencing a fight escalating, when both parents react to their felt stress by taking extreme actions of destruction?

The child believes that she has extreme powers to destroy.

She believes that her words and actions can be bad, evil, powerful and dangerous. The child takes responsibility for her parents’ extreme, destructive behaviors and believes that she has caused their behaviors, and that she has to be very, very careful about every word she says, any act she performs, so to not cause destruction around her:

“I imagine things before hand; what are all possible ways of my words or actions getting twisted  enough in others’ eyes to be taken or misunderstood as bad/ evil… most of the time I don’t have the ability to distinguish, if my word or action really hurt or affected the other party negatively, or it is totally  an irrational critic inside me speaking. And as long as I remember I’ve dealt with this for a long long time. Ever since as a child.. I can’t justify  what was moral or immoral, even though the intention was sincere, did the person get hurt, or discouraged or anything? This keeps me thinking A LOT” (May29)

It is this belief in your extreme powers to destroy that you mentioned in your recent post, Aug 22, as “‘the psychotic hallucinations… something can be believed and felt to be true when it’s not”-

– it is indeed not true that you caused your parents’ extreme behaviors. It was never true that your words and actions had extreme powers to destroy. In reality, you had no power, your words and actions had no power. No one was paying attention to you. If you were not there, the fights would have been the same as they were.

You had nothing to do with the bad things that happened to you when you. When they asked you to  pick a side in their fights- you thought that they really cared to hear what side you pick, that they were paying attention to every word you said- but it was not so.If any one of them paid any attention to what you said, they would have stopped fighting; they would have stopped hurting you.

When your mother looked at you with those cold and angry eyes that day- those eyes did not see you. If they saw you, they would get soft, and she would have put the poison away, and take you in her arms, and say: thank you, my precious daughter. You are so good to me. You saved my life. I am so happy that you are my daughter. Please forgive me for scaring you so badly.

Her eyes did  not see you; her anger and coldness were not about you.

How is your home life now???

anita

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