Dear Jana:

Thank you so much for sharing your reflections yesterday. Your words have stayed with me and inspired some meaningful thinking, which I’d love to share with you.

You mentioned, “Let her go,” when referring to my mother, and, “I only learned to let her be herself and let me be myself,” when talking about your own. Letting go has been incredibly difficult for me, largely because my mother’s presence was so overwhelming that it left no space for me to simply be myself. Her emotions and needs consumed so much room that I had to minimize myself—shrinking smaller and smaller—just to survive. Without enough of “me,” letting go has felt impossible.

I wonder if the connection you found with nature helped you feel more like yourself—more whole—and created the space you needed to let go. Perhaps the openness and stillness of nature allowed you to reclaim enough of yourself to feel free. And maybe your relationship with your mother was inherently different from mine; if she wasn’t personality disordered, as I suspect, that could have made letting go less complicated for you.

Your comment about my attachment to my mother also made me reflect. I believe that attachment is deeply tied to the lack of space I had for my own identity. Her overwhelming presence left me feeling as though I wasn’t truly my own person—like I existed as an extension of her. Letting go has meant not only releasing her but also reclaiming the parts of myself that were overshadowed or lost.

Thank you for sharing your perspective—it’s helped me gain deeper insight into my own experiences, and I really appreciate you listening. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts.

anita

* Trigger warning: strong emotions and childhood abuse to follow.

Her needs, her emotions, her presence were so overpowering that they left no space for me. In response to her taking so much space, I developed a strong element of self-denial, or self-minimization, as a way to survive. I suppressed my own thoughts, feelings, and identity to avoid conflict and to make her emotional storms just a little less overwhelming. I remained trapped in this prison of self-minimization for over half a century. As a result, I was a passive survivor of life, with little to no sense of agency or autonomy—adrift, like a broken ship on a stormy sea, at the mercy of the winds.

I am learning today that empathy, at its core, is meant to be a voluntary emotional response, a choice to connect with someone else’s feelings. In my relationship with my mother, however, empathy was something I had to feel, rather than something I freely chose to extend. Her histrionic expressions of pain, intense, and prolonged—acted like a gravitational pull on my emotional state, making it impossible for me to disengage. I was essentially trapped in her emotional orbit.

Every time she shared her pain, she forced me to absorb and internalize her struggles. No wonder I felt raped by her. I used to wonder why I felt that way. Now I understand: she forced me to take in her pain.

More about empathy, I am learning today: in healthy relationships it is reciprocal—it is given and received in balance, allowing both individuals to feel understood and supported. In my case, empathy was a one-way street: I was expected to feel for her, but she didn’t reciprocate by acknowledging or caring for my emotions. This imbalance turned empathy into a burden where her dramatic expressions of pain demanded my attention and emotional investment, leaving me drained and emotionally neglected.

My empathy was held hostage by her, emotionally trapped by her histrionics. Her emotional dominance overpowered my ability to step back, disengage, or prioritize my own emotional well-being.

Because her pain consumed so much emotional space, I was left with little to no room to process my own feelings independently. My emotional autonomy—the ability to separate her struggles from my own— was lost. Instead, her emotional world became my reality, forcing me to prioritize her needs over mine and leaving me with unresolved emotions of my own.

By constantly absorbing her emotions and being unable to process my own, my sense of self was fragmented and reduced. My emotional identity became entangled with hers, making it difficult to recognize, assert and develop my individuality and experience life on my own terms.

The anger I felt was about preserving the minimal “me” that managed to exist. That anger was my defense, a way of drawing a line in the sand and protecting the last remnants of myself from being completely consumed by her overpowering presence.

anita

Dear Peter:

I am feeling that I have friends on this difficult day, that I am not alone, thank you, Peter.

Your poetic words about untangling and the resilience of the heart are giving my emotions space to be. The heart breaking, keeps beating, the way of an open heart- powerful, peter!

anita

* Trigger warning, just in case what I am about to type-as-I-think may be overwhelming to some:

My experience with my mother was something like Either Her Or Me, never a We.

No amount of love a child feels, no amount of love I felt for her could have made us a We. It was her OR me.

No matter how hard and how long I tried to be a We with her, she rejected me and kept me in the cold.

Only her type of cold was hot, full of conflict, hot anger, rage, unpredictable, always about to happen.

It saddens me that she is so very weak and fragile now that she couldn’t hit me even if she tried, too weak and too short, being that she is severely hunched over. I am so sad that she lost her physical strength.

I feel a deep pain, emotional pain. Oh, how I wished she was strong and healthy, physically and mentally.

I feel no anger at her anymore, only sadness.

Did I love her? Yes, at the expense of myself.

Did she love me? she loved me in combination with destroying me. Moments of affection, acts of kindness (like traveling a long way so to get me an expensive cake that I liked) amidst homicidal (“I will murder you!”) and suicidal (“I will kill myself!) moments. It was like living with a mountain lion’s kisses in between the bites, bites leading to my bleeding.

If I flew across the world to see her now (an impossibility because both of my passports expired long ago, and I have not done any paper work kind of work for years), she can’t physically hurt me, but the emotions I feel are too overwhelming, emotions involved in the idea of seeing her. Plus, I don’t trust her to not hurt me via guilt tripping and/ or shaming with words, or a look in her eyes.

As is, I will climb the tallest mountain to save her, to change her life now and retroactively. I’d climb that mountain in the cold and the rain and I will risk my life in that climb as long as there would be a chance that her pain will go away, her massive pain.

If I saw her in-person, I think that I will sink into a hole, same hole I was trapped in for so very long. I will not be able to climb my way out of that hole.

Since I was told the news about her yesterday, a wound had reopened. I feel retraumatized. But not angry (I am thinking about the title of my thread, “Untangling Anger…”)- the anger is gone. So strange. The anger has been with me for so long, attached to thoughts and images of her. Now there is only compassion, deep, painful empathy.

It just occurred to me: my Anger at her protected me all those years from how painful empathy for her felt. If I am angry at her= I don’t care that she is hurting. I need to explore this further: how and why feeling empathy can hurt so much.

anita

Thank you, Jana ❤️

Can you tell me how or where she will be all right in the end?

* I will process my feelings further in the next post. I need to do so.

anita