Dear Ravi:

You are welcome. As I took my long walk today I tried to put the different elements you shared here together in my mind and this is what I came up with as a possibility for your consideration:

Your grandmother is driven by fear: not the fear that something bad will happen to you, but that you will abandon her through loving relationships with others. Her MO is to possess you by discouraging you from going out and developing intimate relationships with others. She discourages you from talking on the phone to a potential friend all the way to discouraging you from attending college where you can make friends.

When she is aware that you are in the process of making a friend, she tells you that the person you are interested in has bad intentions toward you, that he or she is untrustworthy and so, he or she will hurt you. She takes your pure hopes for love and companionship and contaminates them with distrust and assumptions of ill will on the part of the others.

This is her MO with you as well as her MO with her children before you came along, and maybe still with them now, as well. Incapable of loving relationships herself, she discourages you from having it elsewhere and so, you are home in her presence and so, her fear subsides, for as long as she knows you are her, under her supervision, under her control.

What do you think?

anita