Dear anonymous03:

First thing this morning I read your reply on the other thread and was very impressed by how well you expressed your intelligence, insight, honesty and compassion, and that’s before you mentioned me in the last paragraph, thank you for the support. I appreciate you.

Regarding your post here: again I am amazed by how much we have in common, in terms of (1) our mothers, (2) our anxiety and guilty core belief, (3) IBS-C, (4) body dysmorphia, possibly.

When you described these behaviors on the part of your mother, you also described my mother’s behaviors to a T: “I did get scolded a lot, sometimes for doing things that weren’t even wrong… She seemed to be mad at me for something or the other… After getting mad at me, she would give me the cold treatment, not talking to me for days on end and acting like I don’t exist or as if I have done her a terrible wrong… I was her emotional punchbag: She would return from work after having a bad day and immediately start scolding me… after she vented, she would calm down.. feels better. She has read my diaries and breached my privacy and trust in other ways too… Her behaviour towards my cousins and others was always pretty pleasant”.

And as a result, I too was “terrified of my mother and was afraid of her scolds. As a child, I obviously thought I was a naughty/ bad kid and caused her anxiety and trouble… So I would always wonder what I did wrong for her to hate me so”.

Following are my 1-6 comments regarding the mother part of your recent post. Please take your time reading what follows, allowing different parts to settle in a bit before moving on. Following these comments, if you don’t bring up the topic of your mother-yourself, neither will I:

1. “In the lockdown, both of us have been at home all day everyday, and I can’t help but lash out”- I was too afraid to lash out at my mother, but I did twice: once when at 20 or 21, she ran toward me with her arms extended toward me, so to hit me- I caught her hands in mine and forcefully pushed her arms down. The result: she never tried to hit me again. Another time, I grabbed a kitchen knife (yes, I did) and pointed it at her from a distance. The result: I heard that she told someone that she is afraid of me.

My points in telling these stories are that a. It is almost impossible for a victim to be.. a perfect victim, to never lash out; it is almost not-human to accept abuse without resistance at all times, for years.

b.  The mother is abusive to her child because she views the child as weak and dependent, and there is no one the child can turn to for help (there was no father/ no other adult but my mother when I was a child). She doesn’t abuse the cousins because they might tell their parents who are adults, adults who are not weak and dependent on her. Once the child is old enough and she/ he asserts herself convincingly and consistently, the mother will back down because her child.. is no longer weak and dependent.

The rules of parental abuse are the same rules that are practiced by predators in nature: they attack the Weak, not the Strong. When a mountain lion, for example, does not attack a Strong buck (male deer),  it is not because the mountain lion has changed, or has compassion for the buck: it’s because the mountain lion is afraid to be hurt by the buck.

2. “I told her my heart starts beating really fast when she yells and that I get anxious… she herself must have gone through some real crap in her childhood for her to be so anxious all the time”- she did go through some real crap in her childhood, no doubt, and her heart beat very fast too. Therefore, she knew all along that your heart beat really fast and that you felt very badly when she yelled at you.

3. “I set some boundaries and told her I will not respond to her if she yells..  she.. has been trying to change her behaviours”- she will stop yelling at you for good only if and when she fully understands that she can lose you, or that her life will be very uncomfortable if she yells at you again. “I’m all she has”, you wrote, and she knows it. Please be consistent and show her that you are undeniably Strong. If she yells at you- make her life very uncomfortable, every time she yells or gives you crap otherwise.

4. “she has had a massive impact on my mental health.. I probably would not have been such an anxious person.. had she not been the way that she is. I realize that I was never a bad or even difficult child (I have relatives who told me I was too stubborn)”- notice this: as an adult, you rationally understand that you were not a bad or difficult child, but as a child- you believed that you were a bad and difficult child. A childhood strong belief, aka core belief, does not disappear when an adult forms a rational understanding. The parenthesis you used in the quote above is evident of this:  you stated that you realize that you were never a bad or difficult child, but a thought arose from that core belief, saying: yes, you were a difficult child, relatives said so!- you placed that thought in parenthesis.

To change this core belief that you were and are a bad, difficult person who is at fault for anything and everything, it takes emotional healing that surpasses rational understanding. Such emotional healing takes persistent intent, work, perseverance and courage over a long period of time.

5. “While I understand how she has affected me, being mad at her doesn’t help me or us at all. I’m all she has, and vice versa too”- if she does not completely stop yelling at you, you will have to at least convince her that if she yells again, she will lose you. If you don’t feel anger at her, then sound and look angry, so that she will be afraid to lose you and, and/ or to make her life very uncomfortable as a consequence of her yelling.

She has been venting and yelling all along because it made her feel better (“after she had vented, she would calm down and there would be a massive change in her behaviour, and I realized that after she vents out she feels better”). Feeling better is her emotional payoff which keeps fueling her abusive behavior. The only way to stop her from abusing you is to replace her emotional payoff with a different consequence: make her life very uncomfortable each and every time she abuses you.

6. “I kind of not like it if someone spoke ill of her. I am protective that way”- yes, a lot of society (=parents) conveniently encourages this strong message: you have to obey and worship your parents forever more, no matter what they say and do! This message is not about love, it is about maintaining power: the abusing parents maintain their power at the expense of the abused children.

Regarding the second topic of your recent post, IBS: the treatment for the physical aspect of IBS is the treatment of various real ailments and dysfunctions of the digestive tract, most common: bacterial overgrowth, and a motility disorders.

Wikipedia has an entry on a motility disorder called Intestinal pseudo- obstruction, which is “caused by severe impairment in the ability of the intestines to push food through.. In primary chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction (the majority of chronic cases), the condition may be caused by an injury to the smooth muscles (myopathic) or the nervous system (neuropathic) of the gastrointestinal tract… Clinical features of intestinal pseudo-obstruction can include abdominal pain, nausea, severe distension, vomiting.. constipation, depending upon the part of the gastrointestinal tract involved…

“There is no cure for primary chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction. It is important that nutrition and hydration is maintained… Nutritional deficiencies are treated by encouraging patients to avoid food high in fat and fibre, which are harder to digest and increase abdominal distention and discomfort, and have small, frequent meals (5-6 per day)”-

– in my case, I suffer from primary, chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction, which means that on X-rays, you will not see a growth or an object that is obstructing the movement of waste material in the large intestines, but the symptoms are the same: waste material gets stuck there, gas builds up and the belly gets bigger and bigger, resulting in that pregnant look (which has nothing to do with body weight. I used to be underweight and still look very pregnant). The reason for this obstruction is that at some point, repetitive, ongoing and irreversible damage was done to the  smooth muscles that make up the walls of my large intestines, and/ or to the nerve cells in the walls of my large intestines. This damage could have been a result of my years-long habit of over-eating and years long use of laxatives.

I personally experienced significant improvement in the distension aspect after no longer eating raw or undercooked cruciferous vegetables (cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, etc.), and after no longer consuming wheat bran or psyllium husks (used to treat constipation). Also, eating a smaller portion at any one time is helpful.

This is a disorder and a condition that I have to live with best possible. As to the anxiety loop which is what IBS is about, as I see it: when I feel the sensations involved in the stretching/ expanding of the intestinal walls, I say to myself: this is not danger, this did not kill me before, and it will not kill me now, and I try to relax my muscles best I can.

In regard to red wine/ alcohol: I hate the taste of all kinds of alcohol, some more than others. The way I came to drinking red wine was in an afternoon party a few years ago where red wine was served with slices of orange. There I discovered this particular combination. I further experimented and discovered that the combination of red wine+ squeezed and added orange slices (or added orange juice) + stevia (a natural sweetener) tastes very good, to me. The diluting aspect of the orange juice makes a unit of alcohol volume less potent. I further discovered that for as long as I don’t drink too much (and feel  badly as a result), the drinking of this combination makes me not notice at all any and all intestinal discomfort during and for hours following the drinking. It is as if.. the problem does not exist, and I cherish this temporary relief.

As far as alcohol being frowned upon in your culture and in your home, by your mother: if you decide to “sneak it in and give it a go”, and your mother complains, telling you that she frowns upon alcohol, tell her that you frown upon yelling. (Maybe a deal can be made with her: no yelling= no alcohol in the home).

Regarding you being conscious of your belly, and having noticed that other girls’/ women’s are flat and yours never has been- same here, I am at awe at the idea of having a truly flat belly. I wonder: in the past, before experiencing these intestinal problems, did you overeat and/ or use laxatives?

anita