Dear eris:

It is not happy people who repeatedly hurt other people. It is hurt people that do that. But people get confused I think, like I have been all these years. I didn’t understand that it was not my job to feel empathy for the one who was damaging me, intentionally, repeatedly, with no efforts of repair. Yes, she, my mother deserves empathy only not by me.

I live in a wooded area. I see sometimes a fawn, a baby deer follow its mother into the woods. It feels that attachment (that we felt to our mothers) to its mother. It is that attachment, or love, that motivates it to follow her. What if the mother deer would turn around once in a while and bite, kick and throw her baby to the ground? the baby, bleeding, limping will continue to follow her, still feeling that attachment, that love it was born to feel for its mother.

But it doesn’t happen in nature, only in humans, a mother turning against her own child, again and again, and injuring the child. What a perversion of nature.

Empathy for her stopped me from healing for many years. It was not the anger that kept me stuck, it was empathy for her.

She was hurt, of course, had a terrible childhood AND she chose to hurt me, intentionally. It is when I saw my own pain and stopped seeing only her pain as valid, that my healing started.

anita