Dear Milda:

This is my final post in your thread (unless you revisit and post here again).

My experience: I was shaped by Childhood Chronic Emotional Neglect, Ongoing Emotional Abuse and the Fawn‑Based Survival Strategy that being chronic and ongoing, led to severe self-erasure.

My body learned long ago: “Mother upset = danger.”, “I am upsetting her= I must disappear.”.

I have carried Conditioned, Programmed Guilt, not moral guilt. I was trained to believe that when she feels badly, it means, I am “bad”, and my job was to become “good” by making her feel good. My nervous system interpreted boundaries with her as wrongdoing, as me being “bad”. So, I didn’t for so long that I was no longer aware of my boundaries.

My identity became fused with making her happy: “I am only valuable if I make her happy”.

I didn’t know who I was outside my dream to make her happy — which is why I had no hobbies, no sense of preference, and no friendships, and why I often felt inauthentic when interacting with people.. too eager to please.

I experienced Enmeshment Trauma- her emotions were like obligations, commands, emergencies. I was never allowed to have emotional boundaries, so saying “no” felt dangerous, disappointing someone feels catastrophic, my mother’s sadness felt like my failure. I felt guilty for having my own life, so I didn’t. This is classic enmeshment.

Her shaming, guilt-tripping and harshly critical voice became internalized.

I was stuck in an “identity void” stage of healing for a decade after I cut contact with her. I felt guilty.

When someone stops performing the role they were assigned in childhood, they enter a period where the old identity is gone, the new identity hasn’t formed. This is the in-between stage of individuation.

My biggest psychological theme has been The Fawn Response as my Primary Survival Strategy. A fawn response is a Trauma‑based Survival Strategy where someone copes with fear, conflict, or emotional threat by people‑pleasing, appeasing, or over‑accommodating others to stay safe. It’s one of the four common trauma responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn.

The fawn response develops when a child learns that the safest way to avoid emotional harm is to stay agreeable, avoid conflict, meet others’ needs immediately, suppress one own’s needs, keep the peace at all costs, say yes when one wants to say no, avoid expressing preferences, try to “fix” others’ emotions, fearing disappointing or upsetting anyone, losing one’s sense of identity because one is always adapting.

It usually forms in environments where a parent was unpredictable or emotionally immature, conflict felt dangerous, love or approval was conditional, the child had to manage the parent’s emotions and had learned that their own needs caused trouble. In those situations, being compliant becomes a way to stay safe. It’s a learned survival strategy that once protected the person but can make adult relationships confusing or exhausting.

It’s the nervous system is saying: “If I keep you happy, I won’t get hurt.”

Self‑erasure is when someone gradually loses touch with one own’s preferences, boundaries, identity, desires, one own’s voice

It’s not just suppressing needs — it’s forgetting they exist.

If someone fawns for years — especially starting in childhood — the brain learns: “My needs don’t matter.”, “My feelings cause problems.”, “I’m only safe when I disappear.”, “I exist to keep others stable.”

Over time, the person stops noticing their own inner world. They become whoever the situation needs them to be. That’s self‑erasure.

Fawning = survival strategy Self‑erasure = long‑term consequence

If someone realizes they’re fawning, they can still reconnect with themselves. If someone realizes they’ve erased themselves, the work becomes rebuilding identity, learning preferences, practicing boundaries, and so on.

🤍 Anita

Hey Confused:

So, the psychiatrist prescribed something mild for you (“just some compulsions, that perhaps might need something mild for a while if they persist”)?

“He said that my feelings are not gone, just covered by anxiety”- didn’t prescribe anything for anxiety, like an anti-depressant that alleviates anxiety?

“I know I have to stop it (overthinking, intellectualizing) because it numbs me from feeling anything, but it’s hard”-

The more you push or pressure yourself to stop it, the harder it’ll get. If you drop the internal pressure, it’d be so much easier for you.

.. But better not pressure yourself to drop the pressure either 🙂

Good morning, Confused:

You wrote yesterday, “I intellectualize everything, so I don’t have to feel them.”-

Intellectualization means * analyzing emotions instead of experiencing them, * turning feelings into thoughts, * staying in the head to avoid the heart, and * using logic to avoid vulnerability. Emotions feel unsafe; thinking feels safer. It’s a common defense mechanism, a survival strategy. But it also blocks emotional processing and healing.

“I intellectualize everything… therapist pointed it out too, told me to stop it.”-

If the therapist literally said, “stop it,” that would be poor practice. A competent therapist would not simply say “stop it.”

Telling someone with an overthinking or intellectualizing pattern to “stop” is oversimplified, ineffective, dismissive of how the brain actually works, and likely to increase shame rather than help.

A good therapist would help someone notice the pattern, understand why it happens, learn alternative ways to regulate, and build tolerance for feelings.

But… (and you can tell me if it’s true, Confused), you may not have quoted the therapist accurately. For example, a therapist might say: “Let’s try to stay with the feeling instead of analyzing it.”, “See if you can pause the analysis and check in with your body.”, “Try not to intellectualize everything — let’s explore the emotion underneath.”

And you might have translated that internally as: “She told me to stop it.” (especially in a moment when you feel frustrated with yourself).

Or the therapist may have been using a quick phrase like “Catch yourself when you start intellectualizing.”, meaning “Let’s interrupt the pattern and try something different.”. But he/ she (if competent) would never mean: “Just stop overthinking. Problem solved.”

Your thoughts (or better 🙂 your feelings about this)?

🤍 Anita

Later, lol 😆, no really, it’s becoming clear to me- for the first time in my life- that it’s not my mother’s fault that she didn’t have confidence in the guidance of her daughter. She needed the guidance of an adult, none that was available to her, or none that she trusted.

So, my efforts to guide her were misguided, the delusion of a truly powerless child.

I have a new understanding of the child that I was: so truly powerless that I had to imagine that I had power I didn’t have: to guide her, to help her, to fix her.. ha-ha, not a chance

I think this is it for tonight. Be back tomorrow.

✨️ Anita

Dear Milda:

I don’t know if you are reading my latest posts here, and I don’t know (if you’re reading) if you’ll respond. But you did take a break of almost 2 years in between responding, so you may again.

The way you expressed yourself here, in your thread, is so insightful 👌 that it encourages me at this time, rereading your words, to understand myself better.

Emotional Neglect and Parentification are two things we have in common.

The parent (my mother, your mother) was not equipped to be a parent. Not emotionally. They were lost “children”, too lost, too immature, too self-focused to attune to their children (me, you),

In your case, your father was “stone”, invalidating; in my case, he was absent mostly, divorced when I was 6.

Back to our respective mothers: they never lived up to their roles as Mothers 👩.

They didn’t provide calm and confident guidance. Oh, no. They were in need of guidance themselves, weak, fragile (and in my case, 😠 angry, vengeful as well).

So, we- children- had to .. guide them, mother them, soothe them, do our best to parent them.

And in that endeavor we had to put ourselves on hold, to focus on her until such time that she “grows up” and becomes able to parent us, Finally.

Which didn’t happen and we’re left alone, frozen as children, fast-forwarded as adults with a huge GAP in- between.

I will continue later.

🤍 Anita

No way . a THERAPIST told you to STOP anything.. to stop intellectualizing, she said: “Stop it”?

Dear Alecsee:

I just went through our 4-page communication and nothing about your childhood. If you would like to share about it, to explore (or explore further, if you already did in therapy or whatnot) how your anxious attachment style and abandonment fears came about, please do.

It can be very helpful to you in hopefully resolving your attachment to this past relationship.

🤍 Anita