Dear Helcat:

“The level of abuse and neglect I experienced at the hands of my mother was severe” – I have learned from my own experience and from daily communication with hundreds or thousands of members in these forums, for close to 7 years, that when we suffer significant or severe neglect and abuse as children, we keep re-living the same emotional experience of childhood as adults.

“An emotional part of me does feel like pain from the past will last forever, simply because it has so far“- as adults, we keep experiencing the same emotional pain of childhood.

“I worry that my loved ones will one day decide they made a mistake by caring for me and abandon me” – as an adult, it seems to me, you experience the same worry that you experienced as a child: fearing the next time your mother (your loved one at the time) will view you as a mistake and abandon you.

“I have a habit of worrying about various stressors in my life as opposed to focusing on emotional pain from the past” – seems to me that you did not adequately process your emotional pain from the past, that is, your childhood pain about your own mother viewing you as a mistake.

As a child and during most of my adulthood, I too refused to focus on the pain involved in truly understanding that my mother did not love me. No! a voice in me objected! She did love me, it’s just that she suffered too much, it’s that I am not the daughter that she needed, poor mother, being stuck with the wrong daughter, etc.

“I left home at the first available opportunity and never looked back” – I hope that this means that you are no longer in any contact with your mother because it has been my experience that every time I heard the voice of my unrepentant abuser, aka my mother, every time I saw her face, or worse, felt her touch (even when her voice and touch were soft and her eyes expressed affection, even then, and maybe especially then), the severe abuse got re-activated in my brain all over again.

“My mother often told me she loved me, but her behaviour told me otherwise” – in my experience, adult daughters who acknowledge a lot of faults in regard to their mothers, will not acknowledge this one fault: the absence of love for her daughter. I personally experienced the greatest freedom from re-living my childhood emotional experience when I realized this simple, yet previously unbearable truth.

anita