Hello Everyone:

* I am adding this comment after I completed this post: the following feel intense to me, so, please feel free to not read, or stop reading at any time. And you are welcome to share, if you read, what these things I share here, mean to you, in your life, your experience–

This thread is not about being Right while .. the other, or the others are Wrong. It’s about me continuing to uncover deep patterns and changing those patterns that need to be changed.

This thread is not about being defensive or aggressive (the line between these 2 is often unclear to me)

Here, I am continuing to type-as-I-think, stream of consciousness (with minimal editing), but not in a journaling context. Everyone is welcome to post here.

Earlier I wasn’t able, or it was very difficult for me to see faults in myself.. no, better say: I felt so faulty, so defective, that any criticism, any suggestion of criticism or rejection – felt like too much. Too much shame.

It’s been only because recently I’ve been peeling off me layers of shame and guilt, that I’ve been made available to consider single pieces of criticisms.

I want to look a bit deeper in this post into why there’s been so much shame and guilt piled up and what taking accountability as a child meant, or would have meant (again, I am typing as I am thinking).

I think that as a child, I didn’t get the chance to take accountability because my mother did not leave alone any part of me that could take accountability, as in.. a good, strong enough part in the core of me that could engage in self-accountability.

There has to be a core part in a person that’s valued as good and worthwhile, so that. that part can hold the rest of the self accountable.

My mother didn’t hold me accountable, she crushed me with long, protracted histrionic shaming episodes. So crushed, I couldn’t sit or stand up, figuratively. Any sincere apologies on my part for real or imagined wrongdoings were met by her shaming me MORE, using my apologies for further offense, further shaming. She didn’t stop the shaming before she got exhausted and needed to rest.

The feeling of being crushed by her was humiliating, severe, and in time, ANGER grew within me, equal in proportion to the intensity of the shaming- humiliating.

To humiliate me was her passion and she did it well, with talent, thoroughly. Let’s say, I was guilty of X, she didn’t drill that X just a bit into my skin so to bring about correction, she drilled it into bone and heart. As deep as she could go, and she could.. and she did.

The damage inside, bone and heart- was massive.

I want to acknowledge this damage here, in this post, in this thread.

She got relief from her own shame by externalizing it/ inflicting it on me, feeling free of it for a while. But I didn’t know it at the time, I was just lying down on the floor, so to speak, crushed. Weak and forever angry.

Correcting me was not her goal; shaming me was her goal. And this is what I’ve been expecting others to do to me. And I keep getting surprised that there are so many good, un-shaming people in my life, and not a single person ever got even close to the extent of her shaming me.

But my emotional reaction to people criticizing me- whether I express it or not- is proportional not to their behavior, but to my mother’s behavior.

The sentence I wrote right above, this particular understanding phrased as it is, that’s new to me.

More later.

🤍🌿 Anita

P.S. I am not in a hurry to reply to your two recent posts, Joanna, because I know you’re on a vacation away from the computer, and also, I intend to do the inner child exercise and take guidance from your notes at a later time.