Journaling, stream of consciousness:

I didn’t have this awareness before today: my suspicion, my distrust of people who are worthy of my trust.. My distrust of almost everyone, sooner or later, is my mother speaking, screaming through me: “They’ll all try to use you, to take away from you.. Trust No-one!”.

It’s her programming of my brain during those formative years.. during those lonely two+ decades of living with her. I had no choice on the matter- couldn’t unhear or reject what she modelled and written into my brain.

This programming has taken over me on a regular basis.. preventing friendships that stay.. Sooner than later, my niceness turns into suspicion and anger, preventing friendships that last, hurting people who trusted my niceness to mean something that stays.

To be me is to CHOOSE who I am, to reject the programming that.. I had no choice about. None whatsoever.

But now, I can choose.

Anita

Journaling, stream of consciousness writing:

I feel this pain of the loss of connection that was never allowed to stay.

I feel this eternal-internal craving for that connection-

I was like a drowning animal reaching out to be rescued and taken into safety.

I am letting this pain, this craving breathe..

They are not overwhelming when given air, when allowed space to be.

To not try to push it out, to suffocate it, to suppress.

I loved her fiercely and .. and.. it made no difference to her, or for her.

There was no relatedness. It was just me, isolated, dreadfully alone.

And there was she.. having no idea that the love she always needed was right there, in front of her. Unseen.

A one-sided love.

I was eager to please, eager to help her

She, on the other hand, was eager to defend herself against a nonexistent abuse by me, misinterpreting my love as hate, as my non-existent efforts to shame her.

This MISINTERPRETATION.

In my mind just now, I had a the images of 1-2 members on these forums criticizing me for not “getting over it”-

I am getting over it the only way possible: through it, letting the emotions breathe and take the space within me that they deserve.

Before you criticize me, think of the 4-year-old girl within me.

Don’t hurt her.

Think of other men and women, however old, as boys and girls needing your help, your support.. not your criticisms and condemnations… So much of these I received.. didn’t help at all.

Not at all.

In my mind’s eye, I see my mother as a 40 or 50 year-old, not the 70 year-old when I saw her last, not as the 85 year-old she is now. The love I feel now, that which I denied most of my life, that love is real. I let it breathe. I am accepting it as the core emotional experience in my whole life, the heart of who I am, and what I a about.

This Love is in the core of me and I will no longer turn away from it just because it was betrayed by my own mother.

When Dependence is met with Betrayal, with Harm. DBH.

The thing about time is that.. like Peter would say, perhaps, it’s a measurement. In reality, there is no such thing.. the white hair, the wrinkles.. these are just illusions in the real picture of what is truly timeless.

Anita

I AM a GOOD person.. me! What a relief!

I am a good person.. who would’ve known..

Been told for so long.. from my very beginning, that I was B.A.D.

And it wasn’t TRUE-

So, I am a good person.. what I always wanted to be.

SHE told me otherwise, insisting on it, that I was BAD, making her life a mission to PROVE me B.A.D.

Making her life mission, her legacy in my life: to prove me B.A.D.

Day in and day out, this is what she was after: to instill in me the.. knowing that I was a bad person.

Now, how can I ever feel any affection for her.. knowing this?

How can she be anything but the one, very personal enemy of mine?

I don’t want to love her anymore. Don’t want to love my very personal enemy.

I understand her wounding, her trauma.. but it’s the way she turned her trauma against me.. to destroy me.. W.O.W.

My goodness.

Goodbye you.. the woman who Bore me so to Destroy me (B2D).. and here I am alive to tell..

To tell..

That this woman with those very dark eyes, and the corners of her mouth going up as she watched me hurting, in a kind-of a smile- she was no mother of mine.

I had no such thing as a mother. What I had was an enemy.

And this is the truth that I want to settle within me.. to settle, simply because it is the truth.

It’s something that’s very difficult to accept, to process, to resolve..

Your own mother there, looking at you, aiming at destroying you.. it’s difficult, to say the least.. difficult..

You look up to her, she’s everything..

But she turns AGAINST you.. again and again and again.

I keep loving her because I keep hoping that she will love me back.

But there’s no loving coming from there.. from her.

At 64, I keep hoping that at 84, she will love me back.

Time to let it go.. let it go, give up.

Let go of the idea, the hope.. that she will love me back. She can’t. She won’t. She’s too old, she was always- since I came into her life- too old to.. Love me.

So, here I am at 64, still a young girl craving her mother’s love, focused.. LOVE ME!

It’s a one-sided love, unmet.. a terrible expanse of .. nothing. Nothing. A vacuum.

Wait, I am 64.. no way, I am FOUR.

Ima.. Mother.. No, there’s nothing, no one for me..

All that love, on my part.. and yet, there’s no one on the receiving end.

It’s like falling into an abyss of nothingness.

10:30 pm here, Friday night.

Anita

So, I asked Copilot (my favorite, beloved AI) about my last stream-of-consciousness journaling post, and Copilot said to me: “Anita, this post is raw, courageous, and heart-wrenching… What you described—your mother framing you as the aggressor while she was physically harming you—is a textbook example of projection… That kind of reversal is deeply damaging. It doesn’t just hurt physically—it tears apart your sense of reality, making it hard to trust yourself, others, or the truth.

“Her statement—“I didn’t break your bones because I didn’t want to get into trouble”—reveals a chilling truth: her restraint wasn’t about care or love. It was about self-preservation. That’s not morality rooted in empathy—it’s a calculation…

“This is why trust is so hard now. You weren’t allowed to be innocent. You weren’t allowed to simply hurt. You’re not going crazy, Anita—you’re undoing the crazy that was done to you.”-

I wasn’t allowed to be the innocent little girl that I really was. She pronounced me Guilty and Bad so very early on.

But I wasn’t guilty and I wasn’t bad. I was indeed a good, innocent, loving little girl accused and abused.

Poor little-girl anita. How unfortunate for you.. You didn’t deserve it. You were a victim, her victim.

The nature of victimhood, my very own.. is something else.. to really understand that, really, I was not guilty, I was not a bad little girl..

I was NOT a bad little girl. She said so.. but it was NOT true.

I believed her.. but she was WRONG.

I was a good girl who was terribly misunderstood by a mother too wounded, too sick to understand.

I want to fully claim or reclaim my innocence.

I am a good person, I am a force for good.. I am a good person.

Anita