Dear Nar:

You are welcome. I am glad that you attended to your language exams and hope you did well. Your recent posts are amazing: they make a high quality essay that shines a realistic, very intelligent, educated and insightful light on (1) growing up with a lack “of understanding, genuine contact and just human respect”, (2) having rose-tinted illusions and delusions when looking back at one’s childhood, (3) feeling trapped as a child (and later, as an adult) and reacting rebelliously, (4) anger, (5) forgiveness and culture, (6) fear, (7) OCD, (8) sex, shame and guilt, and more.

I went back to your post on February 5 and found something interesting that I didn’t quite detect earlier on the topic of love. You wrote then about your mother: “she loves her children more than ANYTHING and ANYONE in the world”- notice how you kind-of screamed (using capital letters) that she loves her children so much, as if trying to hush a defiant voice in your mind that said: she did not love me!

You continued on that day: “Now back to the girl and her mother trauma.. she never felt loved by her mother. So she goes around.. and says everything is love“- similar to you saying that your mother loves you more than anything and anyone.

Is it true that she never felt loved by her mother? I doubt it very much: as a baby and a young child, she wouldn’t have survived without some love. For a baby and a young child, all it takes to feel loved by the mother is to be held . If her mother held her once, then she felt loved.

You too felt loved when you were held as a baby, and later on, every time she smiled at you or attended to you positively.. until you didn’t feel loved anymore, until her moments of feeling and expressing love for you failed to reach you as love. Am I correct, or am I projecting my experience:

When my mother hit me with her hands, slapping me across the face, angrily and loudly calling me names and verbally humiliating me, her touch was not gentle and  comforting, it hurt and it was meant to hurt. Her voice was not gentle and comforting- it hurt and it was meant to hurt.

After that experience (a repeated experience), when she held my hand gently sometime later- I cringed/ recoiled, felt intensely uncomfortable and wanted to crawl out of my skin, to escape her and her touch. Her soft touch no longer reached me as soft, but as rough and punishing.

When she said kind words to me in a soft voice, her voice and her words no longer reached me as soft and kind, but as angry, loud and punishing.

What I described right above, is the reason why I ended all contact with my mother eight years ago- I was not able to stop feeling that automatic, instinctive anger when I was around her, when she was part of my life. I suffered the massive, cultural pressure to forgive-and-let-go, to love her no matter what because she did her best, etc., but I eventually had to respect .. me/ the child within me, the child who cringed and felt so very uncomfortable, suffering in the mother’s company, so I accommodate the child-within and  removed the person in her life that made her suffer.

anita