Dear Tee:

I am on my way out the door, but I read enough to want to clarify: I don’t normally feel angry at her anymore. The anger came up at-the-thought-of facing her in the same room, even in imagination. That’s when the fear and anger got activated earlier today.

Do you understand the context of the anger?

Anita

Dear Tee:

* By the way, I quote so much of your posts because I copy and paste my responses to you into a private file for safekeeping, so in case something happens to the site, I have a record and I can go back and read your words at ay time in the future.

In regard to your yesterday’s post:

“It definitely feels like your inner child seeing things with new eyes, seeing your mother with new eyes, and not craving her love – or not craving her love so much – anymore. You’re slowly beginning to understand and accept (and it seems not only on the rational level, but also at the inner child level) that she didn’t have the capacity to be a loving mother. It seems her mothering was all about meeting her own need to feel better about herself by abusing and denigrating you (and your sister).

“She created a false image of you in her mind – a twisted image, as you called it – and she raised you as if that twisted image were true. And you believed it, like every child does…In her twisted image, she was all good and you were all bad. She needed to see you as ‘bad’ so that she could keep seeing herself as ‘good.’ So that her fragile ego wouldn’t collapse.

“Simply put, she needed to put you down, so that she would feel good about herself. Which is typical for narcissistic people: they need to see themselves superior to others, they need to feel better than others. Come to think of it, it’s actually impossible to get validation from a narcissistic parent, because if they were to admit that we’re good enough, that we’re worthy, in their twisted mind it would diminish their own worth. And that’s a tragedy of being raised by a narcissistic parent: you can never be good enough, because it would threaten their ego.”-

W.O.W. You say it so well.. I don’t need to watch all the YouTubes you watched, you are giving me the best of what you watched and IMPROVED ON, I have no doubt! 🙏 🙏 🙏

“We are lovable and worthy, but we were born to parents who taught us that we’re not, who taught us that there’s something very wrong with us. And now we need to rejected that old programming and kind of build ourselves anew. Re-parent our inner child, so we can be the fullness of who we are.”- Amen.

As to your first post today:

“That’s great that you could observe all your feelings and feel empathy for yourself as you were experiencing those feelings. As a result, you haven’t slipped into guilt, which would have been your automatic reaction. You didn’t start feeling guilty for choosing yourself over your mother, for protecting yourself from your mother. You chose yourself, and you didn’t feel guilty about it. That’s great! I think that’s great progress, Anita! ❤️”- thank you ❤️!

(Anita): “It’s all been just TOO MUCH. I am scared of her now as much as I always have been, an imagined look in her eye, the sight of her face, her voice, imagined (if I was to talk to her/ see her)- to me, it feels terrorizing.”

“Little girl Anita is so scared of the Mother- Monster in her life.”

(Tee): “I’m sorry to hear that, Anita. But it’s understandable, because you were all alone with your Mother-Monster, and no one to rescue you. There was no escape from her, and you weren’t even sure if you needed to escape or you needed to become ‘better’ so she would finally stop persecuting you. I guess a part of you wanted to escape, but a part wanted to stay and please her, so she would finally love you and accept you, right?”-

I definitely gave up on the idea of pleasing her there and then. I daydreamed a lot about pleasing her one day in the future, if I became rich and famous and able to buy her the luxuries she’s been audibly and wistfully daydreaming about.

About pleasing her right there and then, it was failure after failure until I stopped trying. I mentioned that one part of her personality disorders combo was Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. So, when I washed dishes or tried to clean so to make her life easier, she severely criticized my efforts, saying I had two left hands and just did things so poorly. I remember one day using a dish washing sponge to scrub each and every little square of floor on my hands and knees so to make sure it’s done just right. I don’t remember her response to that particular effort. Likely, she criticized me for destroying the sponge or whatnot.

“A way to heal the inner child is by giving her a so-called ‘corrective emotional experience’. The way it happens is that we imagine a distressing situation from the past, and then our adult self ‘steps in’ and intervenes, i.e. protects our inner child from the abusive parent. Our adult self intervenes on behalf of our inner child. By doing that, we rewrite the old traumatic imprint and with that, the habitual traumatic response too.

“Ideally, this is done with a therapist, in a safe environment. But it can be done on our own, if we’re anchored in our adult self and have absolute confidence that our adult self can protect our inner child. If we feel we can be a good, loving parent to our inner child.

“I wonder how you feel about doing something like that – that the adult Anita intervene on behalf of LGA and protect her from your mother, in a rehashed situation from your past?

“I’d also like to say that in order to strengthen our capacity to be a good, nurturing parent to our inner child, we need to be able to feel calm and relaxed in our body – because that’s how we calm our nervous system. We cannot be a good parent – neither to our inner child nor to a real child – if we’re stressed and anxious.

“You’ve mentioned embrace on the other thread, and it occurred to me that you might want to try the self-hug exercise, which is great for calming our nervous system. It’s basically putting our left hand under our right armpit (a little below it), and our right hand on our left shoulder, which simulates a hug. And then breathing.”- I just did.

“Diaphragmatic breathing, with one hand on our chest and the other on our belly, would be another method to calm down anxiety and feel safe in our body.”- I just did.

Most recent post:

“Hmmm, if you’ve felt an impulse to engage in a fist fight with your mother, I’m guessing there is still quite a lot of anger that would need to be processed first.’- the anger goes hand in hand with the fear of her, it wants to protect me from her, to keep her away from me.

“Our adult self has the qualities of a loving, caring parent (among other things), so it would probably resort to milder tactics, such as saying something to your mother, or standing in between your inner child and your mother, preventing your mother from hitting your inner child. Or what you did around the age of 20: you grabbed your mother’s hands and prevented her to hit you. So, ideally, our adult self should have a mature response, like a loving, caring, responsible parent would have.

“Please don’t take this as judgment – it’s okay to feel angry, to express our anger and process it. But if anger remains the primary emotion that we feel towards our abusive parent, it means we feel threatened by them, and as such, we won’t be able to protect our inner child either.”- but if I stop being angry at her, I might let her get close again and hurt me..???

“So, the goal would be that your adult self doesn’t feel threatened by your mother, but to arrive at a place where you understand that she doesn’t have power in your life anymore. That she cannot destroy you, because you don’t believe her lies about you any longer. And you don’t need her to love you or validate you.”- but if I get to believe that she cannot destroy me, I might let her back in.. I mean, If I don’t perceive her to be dangerous, I may renew contact with her and that’s something I promised my inner child to never do.

I mean, part of me wants to make her happy and if I stop being angry at her, the part that wants to please her will get me into trouble.

“And so, if she can’t harm you any longer, you (your adult self) doesn’t feel threatened by her and can release the anger that you feel towards her. And that’s when we can help our inner child, i.e. truly protect it from our abusive parent.”- I am scared of her.

“Just a small clarification: the hand below our armpit is positioned in a way that our thumb is resting on the side of our chest, pointing upwards, while the rest of our fingers are below our armpit.”- thank you for the clarification, it does feel better this way.

“Hmm, that’s a good question. I guess the inner child represents all our sensitive, vulnerable parts, where we feel scared and need external protection/soothing/comforting. For example, our inner child needs to feel loved, and if we haven’t healed it, even the most benign situations can trigger a sense of being unlovable, e.g. if a shop assistant doesn’t smile to us, it’s a “proof” to us that we’re unlovable and unworthy. This would be a very childish behavior, which with healing goes away. Which I think means that this part of our inner child is integrated into our adult personality. So next time a shop assistant is rude to us, we won’t think there’s something wrong to us, but that they’re having a bad day 🙂.

“But there can still be situations in which we feel vulnerable and scared like a child, e.g. in case of a severe illness, or loss of a loved one, or some catastrophic external event (wars, disasters), etc. That’s when we feel the need to be soothed from the outside, because self-soothing isn’t enough. Many people find that comfort and soothing in a higher power, or perhaps a very supportive friend or a partner, or a therapist, of course.

“I believe a part of us always remains a child (here by a child, I mean a part that feels scared and helpless and is in need of external soothing and regulation). But as we heal and mature, this child part is less and less, and only comes forth in difficult situations, however not in everyday situations, which we can hopefully manage on our own.

“I hope this answers your question 😊”-

Yes, you have inner Child Champion Tee 🏆 🥇 👑 🔥

Back to the corrective exercise you suggested: none of me wants to be in the same room with her for any reason. She is still the Trauma in my c- pTsd. How about a corrective exercise I can do away from her, I mean, not having her in the same room/ place/ country where I am.. no contact whatsoever.. Can that be done?

Maybe the corrective exercise in the format you presented it/ saw it on YouTube, is no for everyone- depending on the extent, complexity and history of trauma. What do you think, Tee?

Anita