Dear Anita,

W.O.W. You say it so well.. I don’t need to watch all the YouTubes you watched, you are giving me the best of what you watched and IMPROVED ON, I have no doubt!

Haha, thank you! 😊 I’m glad this is helpful to you! ❤️

As for the corrective exercise:

– but if I stop being angry at her, I might let her get close again and hurt me..???

– but if I get to believe that she cannot destroy me, I might let her back in.. I mean, If I don’t perceive her to be dangerous, I may renew contact with her and that’s something I promised my inner child to never do.

Let’s take an example from the animal kingdom: if you see a snake – whom you know is a potentially dangerous animal, are you angry at it, or you know its nature and you seek to protect yourself from it? You don’t even go into areas where snakes are expected, however you’re not angry at a snake for being a snake.

This is how I imagine treating certain abusive people: we don’t need to be perpetually angry at them, because it’s like being angry at a snake for being a snake. Still, we don’t want to hang around with them, we don’t want to have any contact with them, because we know how hurtful and obnoxious the person can be.

In other words, our releasing anger doesn’t prevent us from wanting to protect ourselves. It doesn’t mean we want to renew contact, and even less that we want to expose ourselves to their abuse again.

Frankly, I don’t think anger is the best protector in the long-run (because us constantly being in fight-or-flight isn’t beneficial for us). Anger is there to tell us that we need to protect ourselves. That we shouldn’t expect love from a snake (but only poison). And so we don’t go into the snake pit, and we don’t imagine the snake will suddenly turn into a beautiful princess, or whatever.

I believe that anger is a signal, not a long-term solution. I believe that the goal is to process and release anger and replace it with clarity and clear boundaries, so we don’t feel threatened by the person anymore, but still we’re very aware of who they are and would never expose ourselves to their abuse again.

I wonder how this sounds to you?

I think that the exercise is not a one size fits all strategy or solution. I don’t think that there’ll ever be a time when an adult me can be calm in a room with her, and I think that aiming at such a situation (in a room with her in real-life or in my imagination) would be harmful to my inner child.

I do understand if processing and releasing anger at this point seems very scary to you, and you don’t see it as a feasible path forward in your healing. I totally respect if this is not something you’re willing or able to do, at least not at this point. And that’s okay. ❤️

Dear Alessa,

you’re welcome, and I’m happy to talk about it and better understand you and what you’re dealing with ❤️

I wouldn’t say that I withdraw from the relationship. I tend to just retreat from conflict, manage my feelings and carry on as normal outside of conflict. I self-regulate pretty quickly as long as I don’t force myself to stay in the conflict.

Oh I see. So I imagine you stop talking about a painful topic – something that bothers you but the other person isn’t willing to address – and you let go. You don’t go into conflict, but instead, you self-regulate. And you don’t mention the painful issue to the person any more, or at least you don’t insist on it, right?

And the people that this happens with are mostly your siblings, whom in the past you were taking care of and sort of took on a parental role, in place of your mother (who was very abusive), but also your adoptive parents, who weren’t too caring either.

I learned to ignore parents and just focus on taking care of the house and siblings. I hoped that if I took care of things that there would be less interaction with parents. My siblings always had behavioural issues because of the abuse received from parents.

Perhaps you were managing your siblings’ behavior, so they wouldn’t provoke your parents? Like, you were trying to keep everyone in line (as well as took care of the household), so that your parents wouldn’t become abusive?

I think it’s a few things not just anger that I avoid. Rejection or even just not being listened to.

And when they (your siblings) didn’t seem to care about your feelings, e.g. when they kept doing things that would get them in trouble with your parents – that’s when you felt rejected, if I understood you well? Perhaps them behaving badly and provoking your parents also put you in trouble? Like it was harder for everyone, because they weren’t behaving themselves?

Dear Alessa, I’m aware that this is a sensitive topic for you, and so I don’t want to overwhelm you with questions. But I think I can now better understand some of the dynamic during your childhood and youth. It certainly was tough, and no wonder you tried to minimize abuse, reduce conflict, placate your parents, calm down your siblings… so things wouldn’t get even worse.

You were working non-stop to try to minimize conflict, because conflict had the potential to lead to serious consequences… and so you tried your best to prevent it.

Would that be a fair interpretation?

My heart goes out to you, Alessa, for everything you went through and all your efforts to protect your siblings from even greater abuse. You’re a hero, Alessa, and a survivor. And now you’re learning to thrive, not only survive ❤️

If I understood you well, your brother is still problematic (and perhaps your other siblings as well?) and doesn’t listen to you. However, you’re not trying to manage his behavior (or his feelings) anymore, but are focusing on your own well-being.

You can detach yourself from those painful issues, retreat from conflict and self-regulate. This helps you maintain your inner peace (which you need for raising your precious son) – in spite of potential chaos happening in your brother’s or your other siblings’ lives.

If so, that’s fantastic, Alessa, and a testimony to an amazing healing that you’ve achieved. ❤️❤️

P.S. I apologize if some of the assumptions/interpretations I made aren’t completely true, i.e. if I’ve misunderstood something.

Dear Alessa,

thanks, I’m glad you’re fine talking about this ❤️

I’m not very comfortable with people expressing anger and such. … I have a bad habit of not sharing.

Okay, so you’re afraid (and maybe know) that if you were to express your frustration about something the person is doing, they would get angry with you. And that’s not something you want to experience because it’s stress/trauma inducing, right?

And so you don’t say anything and kind of withdraw from the relationship for a while? I’m asking this because you’ve said: “I recently learned that retreating from conflict is a bit reactive.”

That’s why I’ve assumed that you tend to retreat from the relationship, at least for a while, if you’re feeling upset about something.

Whereas in the past (if I understood you well), you would stay in the relationship and try to appease the person (manage their moods, specially their anger):

I think it’s shades of when I was younger, I used to actively try to manage others moods.

When you were younger, you did your best so that the person wouldn’t get angry with you (or at those you cared about), right?

I heard that all of these things are a trauma response.

Yes, it’s a trauma response, it’s the so-called fawn response. It’s what the child typically does with bullying or otherwise intimidating parents or caretakers (could be alcoholics or addicts too): the child seeks to appease them and make sure they don’t explode and get out of control and hit/harm the child. It’s a self-preservation mechanism.

So if I understood you well, in the past you’ve stayed in the relationship with a difficult person, trying to placate them and neglecting your own needs. Whereas now, you don’t neglect your own needs, and so you withdraw from the relationship (at least for a while), but you don’t share what’s bothering you, because it would cause the other person to get angry.

Am I understanding this correctly?

If so, that’s already a step forward – you’re not neglecting your needs, you’re not giving up on yourself so to stay in the relationship, but you’re taking care of your needs.

And with some people, there’s even no point in sharing what’s bothering us, because they wouldn’t understand it or wouldn’t respect it anyway. So perhaps your tactic is not that bad. Of course, it depends who this person is and what role they play in your life, and how you want the relationship to look like on the long run.

Anyway, good that you don’t resort to appeasing anymore, but can withdraw from the relationship if it becomes too much.

❤️

Dear Anita,

Because of recent practice, I let myself feel what I was feeling, not trying to suppress or escape it, and I watched the feeling of feelings subside. And I talked to myself, saying: Huh.. yes, this is how it was, how it was.. being around her, the mother, that’s the effect I experienced of her being in my life.. the legacy she left in me, this very suffering.

And then I felt empathy for myself, I redirected my attention from where it’d normally go (guilt for the mother’s suffering, me being bad.. that PAIN.. orbiting around her being the Center) to me being the Center, my Center, being on my side and.. the distress CALMED down. I didn’t – don’t feel guilty.

That’s great that you could observe all your feelings and feel empathy for yourself as you were experiencing those feelings. As a result, you haven’t slipped into guilt, which would have been your automatic reaction. You didn’t start feeling guilty for choosing yourself over your mother, for protecting yourself from your mother. You chose yourself, and you didn’t feel guilty about it. That’s great! I think that’s great progress, Anita! ❤️

It’s all been just TOO MUCH. I am scared of her now as much as I always have been, an imagined look in her eye, the sight of her face, her voice, imagined (if I was to talk to her/ see her)- to me, it feels terrorizing.

Little girl Anita is so scared of the Mother- Monster in her life.

I’m sorry to hear that, Anita. But it’s understandable, because you were all alone with your Mother-Monster, and no one to rescue you. There was no escape from her, and you weren’t even sure if you needed to escape or you needed to become “better” so she would finally stop persecuting you. I guess a part of you wanted to escape, but a part wanted to stay and please her, so she would finally love you and accept you, right?

A way to heal the inner child is by giving her a so-called “corrective emotional experience”. The way it happens is that we imagine a distressing situation from the past, and then our adult self “steps in” and intervenes, i.e. protects our inner child from the abusive parent. Our adult self intervenes on behalf of our inner child. By doing that, we rewrite the old traumatic imprint and with that, the habitual traumatic response too.

Ideally, this is done with a therapist, in a safe environment. But it can be done on our own, if we’re anchored in our adult self and have absolute confidence that our adult self can protect our inner child. If we feel we can be a good, loving parent to our inner child.

I wonder how you feel about doing something like that – that the adult Anita intervene on behalf of LGA and protect her from your mother, in a rehashed situation from your past?

I’d also like to say that in order to strengthen our capacity to be a good, nurturing parent to our inner child, we need to be able to feel calm and relaxed in our body – because that’s how we calm our nervous system. We cannot be a good parent – neither to our inner child nor to a real child – if we’re stressed and anxious.

You’ve mentioned embrace on the other thread, and it occurred to me that you might want to try the self-hug exercise, which is great for calming our nervous system. It’s basically putting our left hand under our right armpit (a little below it), and our right hand on our left shoulder, which simulates a hug. And then breathing.

You can look it up on youtube, in a video by Irene Lyon (who is a somatic practitioner), and the video is titled “DIY: Ancient Anxiety Medicine.”

❤️

Dear Alessa,

That was tough with your son climbing out of his crib all the time and you needing to cuddle him and hold him while he falls back asleep. If you experience body pains due to your health condition, especially during a flare-up, I can imagine it was really strenuous and exhausting. Good that you’ve thought of a solution with the chair to make things more comfortable for yourself! ❤️

You’re describing an interesting dynamic during conflict: if I understood you well, you’re saying that you’re able to set boundaries, and aren’t likely to budge even if the person is guilt-tripping you.

At the same time, you say you have a problem expressing what’s bothering you in a situation (i.e. expressing your negative feelings), and so you only discuss that later.

You’ve said something that touched me:

I guess it is just the keeping things inside. I wish that other people didn’t feel so much pain and could see me.

Perhaps you don’t feel like sharing your feelings, because you feel that the other person wouldn’t even understand you? That they expect you to be very understanding of them, full of empathy, and never show upset or other negative emotions:

I feel like people depend on me being too understanding and over managing my emotional regulation to keep things off their plate which isn’t healthy. At the same time, I recently learned that retreating from conflict is a bit reactive.

It seems you believe you need to be strong for others, and shouldn’t bother them with your needs and your feelings? And you don’t feel like expressing those feelings to them, because it would be futile? And so you withdraw from the conversation/communication (in order to protect your boundaries), but without explaining what’s bothering you?

Dear Alessa, I apologize if I’m asking too many questions and/or jumping into conclusions here. I just wanted to understand the dynamic better. But if it’s making you uncomfortable and you don’t feel like analyzing it further, I’ll completely understand and respect it ❤️

Lovely talking to you too, Alessa ❤️

Dear Alessa,

Sorry for the delay. I had to pick up his ashes and paw prints. I’m getting there now. I’ve been distracting myself with studying and my son is fighting sleep a lot at the moment, climbing out of his crib.

Oh poor you, you’re not getting much sleep then, are you?

How thoughtful to keep your doggie’s paw prints as a memento ❤️ He will forever stay in your loving memory ❤️

It’s not really being loved or accepted though is it? It can easily cause one-sided relationships and leave you in a care taker role with people who are unhealthy.

No, that love is very conditional. They only like you and accept you if you give up on yourself and your own needs, basically. But as children, that’s what we do to make our parents or caretakers happy. And if we don’t heal that, we keep doing that in our adult relationships too.

My therapist used to say to me that as a child I had a tendency for magical thinking and self-blame. I tried to be perfect and prevent mistakes. But new “mistakes” were always found. There was no way to prevent the abuse. It was just who my mother was.

Oh yes, we do that as children. We think that if our parents/caretakers treat us poorly, it’s our fault. And we try to do everything so they would be pleased with us. But as you say, we’ll never be good enough, a dysfunctional parent will always find reasons to abuse us…

I do stand up for myself in the moment. It is just afterwards. I find it tiring to hash things out, especially if the person isn’t receptive. I do still try to do it though.

Right, so you do speak up, but what you find challenging is if the person isn’t receptive, if they don’t respect your wishes and keep crossing your boundaries, right?

I try to keep conflict low in general because my health issues are stress related. After my dog dying, I’m going through a rough flare up.

Oh sorry to hear that 🙁 I hope it will calm down soon…

It is also not healthy to have conflict around a child. Not to mention my tolerance for additional stress is just lower as a parent because I’m already to some extent already stressed. Heck, with a child I barely have time to process my own feelings. Just when he’s asleep really.

Sure, being a parent brings with itself quite a lot of additional stress, that’s for sure. It’s not easy to be a parent… and since you’re a very self-aware parent, you’re trying to be maximally calm and patient with and around your son, and not to show when you’re upset with something or someone, right?

I was definitely more co-dependent and reliant on the other person to help me to feel better in the past because I was not as good at self-soothing.

Good that you’re not relying on other people anymore to feel better about yourself or to emotionally regulate. Sometimes people say something insensitive inadvertently – it’s good that it doesn’t bother you as much anymore. And sometimes people are truly insensitive and lack empathy – it’s also good that you’re not craving their “acceptance” anymore and can self-soothe if they say something hurtful.

I guess with any conflict the issues people have are their issues. I just happen to be there. I don’t feel as threatened by it personally whereas I would take things a bit more personally in the past thinking that perhaps someone might be acting in a certain way because of how they felt about me.

Ah yes, sometimes people behave in not very caring/compassionate/thoughtful manner because of their own issues, not because it has anything to do with us. Sometimes people get easily triggered, they’re overly sensitive, and it has absolutely nothing to do with us.

It’s good that you can remain relatively calm in those situations and not take it personally, i.e. that you can step back and see a bigger picture: that the person is having a problem, but that this problem is not caused by you, but by their their inner landscape, so to speak. I guess that can help us to step back and not react defensively (fight response), but be more calm in our response.

Hmm well I have known people to change over time. But that only happens when you manage your boundaries. It’s a bit slow sometimes. You are right though, people only change as much as they want to

That’s a great observation: that people can change (or at least can change their behavior towards you), but it only happens if you set boundaries. If you just keep allowing hurtful things, people usually will just keep doing it.

Some people – mostly narcissistic – will get offended if we set boundaries and will stop communicating with us. Some will just ignore our boundaries and then if we speak up, they’ll try to guilt-trip us into giving up on those boundaries, calling us selfish or heartless. They’ll use all kinds of manipulation tactics.

I wonder if this is what you’re experiencing when you try to set boundaries? (“I find it tiring to hash things out, especially if the person isn’t receptive”.) That they try to guilt-trip you into giving up on those boundaries?

But I’m glad that some people have changed their behavior once you’ve set boundaries and expressed how you want to be treated. Yeah, some people don’t mean bad, they’re just unaware how their behavior affects us, and they’re willing to change once we ask them to.

How are you doing? ❤️

As I’ve shared on Anita’s thread, I’m experiencing some health issues again, so need to have that checked by a doctor. But I’m trying not to focus only on that and lose my head, but remain calm (or rather, less anxious than I normally would be). So it’s a new challenge, but I’m hoping for the best… 🤞

Dear Anita,

I didn’t see through her. I didn’t see that she was bluffing.. All Those Years.. I didn’t see!

You said it, “fake suicide threats”, I wasn’t sure. No one called them Fake before, not that I remember.

I can imagine no one said it out loud. However your sister, once she was already a grown-up woman and had spent decades listening to the same threat, probably realized that your mother is using it to emotionally blackmail her. Probably that’s why she told her “then do it!” You don’t say that to someone who is truly struggling with suicidal ideations, but to someone who has been repeatedly using it to emotionally blackmail you. And indeed, after your sister’s remark, your mother stopped mentioning it… because clearly, she didn’t want to commit suicide – it was just a manipulation tactic.

But as children and youth, we don’t know that. We believe our parents – and we’re afraid to lose them. So of course it works. It’s a very cruel manipulation tactic, and a very potent one, because it stops us in our tracks and we give into anything the person wants, because we’re afraid they might harm themselves 🙁

Yes, BIG TIME! Always, 100%, no nuance, no shades of grey.

Narcissistic behavior right there – it’s always someone else’s fault, never their own…

So, no way to help her.. because she’s been helping herself by being always-victim. That I figured out some time ago.. She’s been helping herself the only way she knew how.. How did I say it before, in one of my other threads: I tried so hard to help her, feeling so guilty that I failed.. while all along she was helping herself to me, at my expense. So, I helped her simply by being her victim.

Unfortunately, yes. Her playing the victim was a manipulation tactic, because she never really wanted to get better. Covert narcissistic people complain not because they want solutions to their problems, but because they want attention, they want people to worry about them, spend their time and energy on them. They also guilt-trip people for being happy while the “poor them” are “suffering so greatly”. They guilt trip you for laughing – you’re not allowed to laugh because it offends the narcissist… etc etc.

Yes, exactly! Again, I am having this strange feeling that you were there. Didn’t have this feeling with anyone before, not irl or online.

I think it’s a combination of my personal experience and other people’s experiences, which they’ve shared on youtube, as well as those expert videos. It seems those personality patterns are quite universal, i.e. people with a certain personality type behave quite similarly and use similar manipulation tactics. I think that’s why I may appear so “accurate”, when in fact I’m just listing the common features of this kind of parents, unfortunately.

mission impossible, rogers that.

Yeah, that’s a heavy realization (that we can’t really do anything to please them), but for me, it was a freeing one as well. How is it for you at the moment?

L.Y.I.N.G. It makes me angry!

Oh yes, a lot of narcissistic behavior is anger-inducing! And it’s a real skill to communicate in a detached way (if we choose to communicate with them). That’s why I’ve been mentioning emotional detachment so much – that’s one of the key preconditions for healing from narcissistic abuse. But it’s a process, and it’s okay to feel angry first, because that kind of behavior is certainly abusive… and we have the right to feel angry.

Now mostly in my shoulders, back then they were everywhere and more severe, every single voluntary muscle tic-ed. It was difficult to fall asleep, and the social embarrassment was acute.

I can imagine it was extremely hard for you, both physically and emotionally, specially during those sensitive teenage years 🙁 If it’s any consolation, I’m glad that your tics have lessened over time, which is I assume the result of healing and processing some of those emotions?

As a teenager, I clearly remember my head jerking from right to left, as in saying NO. That tic happened a lot when she was talking to me. I remember thinking: Doesn’t she see me “saying” no? Why wouldn’t she stop talking..???

Right.. your body was expressing what you didn’t dare to: your protest, your NO. And you’re rightly asking how come your mother never stopped to ask you what’s wrong.

But unfortunately, it only goes to show how narcissistic parents are insensitive to their children’s needs, how self-absorbed they are: it was more important for her to meet her “need” of criticizing you than to inquire about your well-being, when you were clearly and visibly in distress… 😕

Dear Anita, have to go now, but hope to reply to your 2nd post a bit later…

❤️