Dear Nar:

You bring up such interesting things in your posts that I like to read your posts part by part, respond to the first part before reading the second part, etc:

“My mother has this saying about upbringing- ‘up to 3 years old, treat your child as a king, up to 16 as your slave and then as your friend’- it is quite sadistic to lift a person to the status of a king and then drop the person to the status of a slave, it’s a longer and more painful Fall,  an Extreme Fall. It makes a former king extremely angry and rebellious (“my mom hit me a couple of times too when I was 13-14. I was an extremely rebellious child”)

“.. and then as your friend”- so the mother (1) picks up her child to the height of kingship, (2) drops her child to the lows of slavery, and )3) stands looking down at her wounded child with a smile, saying: it’s time to be friends!

“I started fearing her excessively from 10 years old maybe, because she was presenting herself as a figure of authority who we should respect and listen to”- a slave owner ensures a slave’s respect by instilling fear in the slave, severely punishing the slave for the smallest disobedient, shackling the slave with fear.

If your mother wanted to be your friend later, it wasn’t wise of her to first establish herself as your enemy.

“Do I understand correctly you think the origin of all  our human fears are related to our mothers?”- the newborn cries when expelled from the comfort and familiarity of the womb, I am guessing that’s the original fear. If the mother then frequently holds her baby close to her chest, so that the baby can again hear her mother’s beating heart and feel the warmth of her body, the baby calms down. The baby understand, in an instinctual way, that the mother is still there.

When the mother drops her young child from her protective arms, and when she does so repeatedly, she betrays the child’s trust that the mother is still there to protect her. The child becomes fearful of the mother she still needs but can no longer trust.

“Fear just takes many forms obviously, but what I want to know is the origin of it. Or look at it as a whole”- fear is like fire: once it starts and is not quickly contained, it spreads and spreads. You contain it in one area to soon find out it is burning in another.

There is no way to eliminate fear. Fear is meant to be our most intense emotion because of its survival purpose: a most intense emotion is needed for an animal to run or fight immediately and with greatest speed and/ or force. Excessive fear in a child can be prevented. As adults, all we can do is regulate fear: it takes a lot of time and practice to do that.

Mothers (most often the primary caretakers of the baby and young child) need to be very careful with how they use fear- it is never a good policy for a parent to excessively scare a child/ to enslave a child using fear as a weapon. Enslaving a child with fear is often referred to as being a strict parent, a euphemism.

Next topic/ second post: he is “not much of an online chatter”, 90% of the time you initiate contact with him. There were times that he was very active chatting with you and at other times he was much quieter. Once he said that he’d block you if he got tired of you “writing to him too much”. He later said that “he’d only say it to people he is close (to).. he apologised and said he’d be more mindful next time”.

You are wondering if he is “just being polite by writing to me or he actually likes talking to me. I can’t figure it out at all… awkward for me I guess to be rejected”-

– from what you shared, seems to me that he actually likes talking to you, just not at all times. Also, his joke, if it followed you expressing concern that you write to him too much- does not seem rude to me. The thing in the quote above that caught my eye was the at all in “I can’t figure it out at all“. Clearly he likes talking with you at times. Why is it something you can’t at all see, I ask myself.

Because we are so very much Formed during our Formative Years aka childhood, I go back there to look for the answer (a simplified answer, not an answer that explains the complexity of everything put together): when your mother treated you like a king and then dropped you to the status of her slave, I bet the child that you were couldn’t figure out at all what happened. In the beginning of the first of your two recent posts, you wrote: “I always felt protected by my mother when I was very little”-

– think of the child that you were, always feeling protected by your mother, surprised and not understanding at all, how it can be that.. the person who always protected you.. dropped you, so to speak. And kept you down, enslaved.

When you become clear, in your mind and heart, that it is not true that your mother loved you “more than ANYTHING” (she didn’t love you more than she loved feeling powerful over you); when you become clear/ able to figure out that the everything in “She gave everything to us”, included the repeated betrayal of her silent treatments, etc., you will also be able to figure out this friend and other people.

“I stopped initiating contact and waiting to see what happens.. is it too silly?”- no, it’s sensible. You wrote that you initiate 90% of contact. If you want to initiate 50% of contact, stop initiating as often as you do, and let your initiation frequency drop to 50%.

“I suddenly developed this need to connect with people.. I was so closed before”- open up cautiously, a bit at a time, to people who are not likely to hurt you.

– You are welcome, thank you and have a lovely weekend yourself!

anita