Dear Linarra:

Before I am able to understand your question at the end of your post, I need to rewrite (italicized are your words) some of what you shared because it helps me process information (reading without rewriting results in information escaping me). If what I rewrite here is incorrect, please let me know:

You wrote that  you are calm, resilient and very well adjusted to your life as it is now. Your meaning/ passion is aiming at an art career. Living with your abusive mother (and with your siblings), you feel strong enough, you know what you are facing and what for, and it provides you with enough difficulty to keep yourself stimulated/inspired. If you lived anywhere else/ in the outside world, you will not feel strong enough, or calm enough, and you will have no idea what you are facing and what for.

Writing in your thread, having the opportunity to write and rewrite provides you with clarity out of your own chaos, soothing you.  You are uncomfortable with the idea of psychotherapy because you are (or appear to be) very well structured  and the therapist may wrongly conclude that you did not/ are not suffering that much trauma and abuse, because if you did, you wouldn’t appear so well-structured. You are afraid that the therapist will therefore minimize/ invalidate your difficulties, confusing the fact that you adapted to your circumstances a little too well with the notion that your circumstances weren’t/ aren’t too bad.

You are grateful for your adaptability to your current environment, but you are afraid that it causes an un-adaptability to the outside world. You feel like a fraud when you are functional and when you are not functional.

Your mother mostly cared about appearances and surface, so she wasn’t able to locate and possess your creativity, psychology, or philosophical explorations. You are therefore motivated to explore what has been all along protected from her, and unmotivated to explore relationships, mingling with the outside world.

“I wasn’t able to find enough meaning in the outside world to take the risks alone… I am still tied to my safer path. The appeal doesn’t match the difficulty and risks… Am I willing to let other humans get close to me? Is it worth it? Even if my mother was gone, I am too guarded and cautious, too much focus on damage control. It is very complicated and exhausting. What are your thoughts and your experience on this, Anita?“-

It took me 2 hours of processing your recent post before I experienced an aha moment. My aha moment answers these 3 questions: “How can I be both so calm and so anxious? How am I able to take abuse so well and yet unable to face casual interactions with outsiders? How can I be so functional in a messy environment, and feeling like a mess in situations that seem manageable for other people?”-

– I hesitate to give you my answer, not because I think that it may be untrue, but because it is something that took me many, many years to realize in regard to my life-experience, and I am afraid that it will fall on deaf ears, it being too soon for you to consider, and that it may distress you. If you choose to keep reading, and it distresses you, you are welcome to not respond to what follows, so to .. forget about it):

Here it is: you still love your mother and your sense of (relative) safety is with her. You know that she abuses you (and that makes you so anxious), but you also believe that she will not kill you. You know that she will  let you live because she has let you live so far. This relative feeling of safety allows you to feel so calm living with her. You can be so functional in a messy environment because you love the woman who is creating the mess, and you believe that she loves you enough to keep you safe.

On the other hand, in the outside world, people other than your mother (those strangers she claimed to have hurt you, protecting you against them before)- they may kill you. Those outside world situations that seem manageable for other people- feel deadly to you because if you let other humans get close to you, they will hurt you real bad. 

That’s all as far as my aha moment/ answer goes. As to your reaction to the above, it occurred to me in the last fifteen minutes or so, that it may hit you as an intellectual understanding, and that you may agree with it, but not be connected to it emotionally (?)

anita