This is an amazing thread, not only in pages 1-2 but for the remaining pages where I had a conversation with a very empathetic member about our respective childhood abuse.

This is what I shared with her back in March- April, 2022:

“I remember little but I remember this one scene: she was hitting me, with her hand across my face on and on, and she said to me, she praised me, saying the only thing I like about you is how you look down at the floor when I hit you. You don’t talk back to me, like other people’s children do. Of course, I wanted to be a good girl, I wanted her to think of me as a good girl, I wanted to please her while at the same time I couldn’t help the anger that made my face and inside my head feel such heat, wanting so badly to hit her back, it was instinctive…

I want to start with something that occurred to me before I turned on the computer this morning: when you share about your personal experience with having been abused, and when I share about mine, there is something to be cautious about… I am so used to my childhood abuse experience being denied, downplayed, explained away/ rationalized, misunderstood, excused and so forth, that when you (or other people) positively respond to what I share but include an assumption that is not exactly true to my experience, or an assumption that I feel is not true to me, I experience, or used to experience a frustrated, an anger, as if: here I am misunderstood again!…

The ruminations and mental torture, the guilt about feeling anger at her and wanting to hurt her, that was after an attack and in between attacks, especially when she expressed affection for me. I felt guilty because I didn’t understand that the anger and instinct to fight an attacker is built-in in me as an animal species, nothing to do with me as an individual…

The last time my mother sort-of ran toward me so to hit me with her arms extended in front of her ready to hit (she used to run the couple-few feet between me and her when intending to hit me, because she didn’t have the patience to walk toward me. She had a… passion when it came to hitting me), was when I was about 20. I extended my arms in front of me, grabbed her hands in my hands and exerted just enough force to block her from getting to me. She instantly retreated. I remember how disappointed I was in her quick withdrawal. I asked myself: this is ALL it took? All these years… and that’s all it took for me to stop her?…

When I looked at my mother much of the time growing up and later, I did not see an abusive adult, I saw a hurt little girl whom I wanted to love and protect. In my child’s mind, she was the good, innocent child and I was the bad, guilty adult…

She told me with that passion of hers: “You are a big Zero!!!“, and I proceeded to live my adult life as if I was indeed a Zero, internally and externally…

Yes, I would like you to not say (to me, this is not a suggestion that you don’t say it to other members) that you are sorry about what you are not responsible for (ex.: “I’m very sorry that you were treated like that!“). I understand the sentiment behind saying it, but I don’t like reading it… Why does a series of I-am-sorry, or I-am-very-sorry responses bother me in this context? Because when I, for example, accidently bump into a person because I am not looking where I am going, I’d say “I am sorry!”… On the other hand, years and decades of a child’s misery is too much of an eternity to fit into a series of I-am-sorry, particularly on the computer screen. To me, a repeated I-am-sorry in this context feels perfunctory, careless, dismissive…

Interesting, in the quote of my mother saying: “the only thing I like about you is (submitting to her abuse)”, I focused on the I-like, as in: she likes me… for this. When I read your valid interpretation, my focus moved from she likes me (however minimally) to she didn’t like me…

I used to feel very guilty for… everything (including for nature’s choices), so when I read your words (that I protected myself) I projected into it a suggestion that you did not make, which is that I made an individual choice to protect myself, and that as an individual choice, it may have been the wrong choice, for which I may be guilty. I then proceeded to defend myself against an unmade accusation. I need to be more aware of this kind of projection….

She fit the histrionic personality disorder criteria to a tee. She went on for hours and hours… and hours about her painful life past and present, crying, wailing, talking about suicide, about her life not worth living, showing me her wrists, where she already cut herself, or where she would cut herself, or both, I don’t remember. These episodes ended only when she was exhausted and what proceeded was an eerie silence lasting for days and nights, her silent withdrawal. She would then return to her normal until the next time, and then again…

She told me a whole lot about a whole lot, not only during the histrionic episodes but in between (during her normal) talking to me a lot, a whole lot, too much, non-stop, couldn’t escape her ongoing barrage of words…

My mother insisted on washing me way into my teenage years, I remember the acute shame and the dread every time I was required to call her name while standing naked in the bathtub. She insisted that I wasn’t capable of getting all the dirt off of me…

I used to hate every I-am-sorry and other expressions of empathy because I had to live without empathy for too long, growing up with a mother who owned empathy and insisted that none of it belonged to me. Plus, she was a very insincere, two-faced person, showering people she despised with flattery and gifts. Fast forward, when I read your I-am-sorry, I believed that it was an expression of sincere empathy on your part. But I didn’t trust myself to keep viewing it this way a 2nd, 3rd, 4th time if you repeated the expression. I now feel okay with original expressions of empathy: it is easier for me to trust the sincerity of an original expression of empathy over the standard I-am-sorry because for too many people, I-am-sorry in any context is a knee jerk reaction, not a sincerely felt expression….

In regard to what I learned to expect from men is that I expected from everyone, men and women the same behavior as my mother’s. I still do, I’ll give you a small example that happened today: in another member’s thread, the member mentioned my name, as I read my name, I felt fear as I expected a verbal assault to follow my name, and then, a relief when an assault did not happen. This happens every day in real life, let’s say I am washing dishes and a dish falls from my hands, not breaking, but it creates a loud sound, what follows in my mind is that an assault is about to happen next, verbal or otherwise. Next thing that comes to my mind is that because I was so scared of my mother, spending time away from her with whomever, felt like an improvement, it felt safer. I needed a break/ a relief from the ongoing tension that I felt in the presence of my mother and… anyone, anywhere, anything would do as a break from her.

Next thing that comes to my mind is that a combination of my very poor self-esteem, absence of self-empathy, and the extent of my severe and ongoing dissociation and inattentiveness led me in the past to passively accept disrespect and mistreatment, not being adequately aware of what was happening.
And last thing that comes to mind, and this may answer your question best: because my mother talked badly about everyone, men, women and children, saying that they all hurt her in one way or another, and because the only person- in her mind- who deserved empathy was herself, I felt angry at everyone, no empathy for anyone but for her, and I proceeded to be a very distrustful adult, angry at everyone, sooner or later… I believed that everyone was inherently bad….

When I cut contact with my mother, I felt guilty and once in a while I’d think, what’s the point of cutting contact if… my guilt was still ongoing, distressed when in contact, distressed when not in contact, so what’s the point? But I kept walking on what I referred to as the healing path (I still like this term, it’s just that I didn’t use it for a while) and over time things that confused me became clear, with clarity my distress lessened and lessened… I used to think that by not having contact with her, I was causing her a lot of emotional pain, so I felt guilty. I still felt angry at her but guilty as well (conflicted… complicated), but once it became clear to me that throughout all the years that I was right there, in her presence, she felt great emotional pain which she frequently expressed to me… I realized that if I resumed contact with her, it would be like it’s always been- she would be in pain; pain with me; pain without me. Before this clarity I used to think (without being clear about it) that if I resumed contact with her, she’d be happy, and I felt guilty for not making her happy; after this clarity I stopped feeling guilty, realizing that I never made her happy and never will.”

Edited: By too much emotion, I mean too much fear of the kind you grew up with (“yeah same sadly”)- fear of hurting her, fear of being hurt.

When you grow up being afraid…

Hey 👋 Confused:

You are welcome, I meant those words and still do ✨️✨️✨️

Back in November I think you got overwhelmed (too much emotion), so you downloaded all that emotion, so much of it that you found yourself in a minus

🤢 (that’s a face with too much inside, got to expelled it)

“How does your body react when you give yourself permission to just notice the tension without needing to explain why it’s there or the ‘who’ it is happening to?”-

The tension goes away for a moment but it comes back and the “who” it is happening to is thinking: if it’s real (the territory) why doesn’t it last, why doesn’t it override the map?

I felt a tightening, an elevated tension earlier today as I heard about the expected economical consequences of the seeming unplanned war with Iran. I got scared.

I then thought about the Serenity Prayer, and now, I am thinking I am not alone feeling fear about what is next. And maybe there is comfort in just that.

“Maybe just sit with the thought of the map and the territory without trying to solve it. See if you can simply relax into the untying”-

Untying the thinking or overthinking trying to solve. A lifetime solving-frenzy with no solutions to show for it.

A frenzied thinking done by.. not me.

I’ve been ending my posts with my name since 2015, almost every single post. I will end this one a bit differently.. ha-ha.

Anatta

Here’s a knot that may be relaxing this evening for the first time: “I” who’s observing the thoughts is a thought. So, there is no me separate from my thinking, the “me” is a thought. Did I get it right, Peter?

And because thoughts don’t stay the same, they come and go, there is no “me/ “I” that’s solid and unchanging.. because “me” and “I” is a thought.

And the brain that produces thoughts dies every time.

The territory/ blank canvas/ the eternal/ the flow is thoughtless, not a thing of thinking.

More a bit later.

No, no, Confused: I visited that place as a visitor, not as a patient (I 🤔)

My 🧠 has been compromized though (not quite lobotomized 🤢) having grown up scared on an ongoing basis.

And no, no, Confused is not a 🐔

He is an intelligent, kind and couragous man, I says!

🐔 🦉 🐇 Anita

Continued:

Yes, my next reply did get worse.

Emma responded to my critical, judgmental last reply by saying that she sensed criticism in it, and then explained herself a bit more, honestly and politely.

My response (6/21/2021), the last one before she deleted her account): I accused her of criticizing me (for telling me rightly so, that she sensed criticism in my reply)

(Continued next- using my phone)