Dear wildoceanflower:

When you were a child, and your mother was unhappy, discontent, complaining about being oppressed, you wanted to help her, didn’t you? It is natural for a little girl, watching her mother suffer, to want to help the mother, to make her happy.

You wrote: “my mother was always discontented with what she had”- and you were powerless to give her what she wanted, what she didn’t have. You were only a child, how could you give her the things she wanted (you didn’t have money or earning abilities), but you were able to do something for her, and you had to do something for her because you cared so much.

What you were able to do, I am thinking, is to ask very little for yourself, to have very little yourself and to sabotage your own success and fortune, so to make your mother feel better.

Maybe that was your way to express your loyalty to her (if my mother can’t have what she wants, I won’t either!)

You wrote: “i often had girlfriends who were jealous of me, they wanted so much..i would sabotage my own successes and fortune to try and make them feel better”-

is that what you did first with your mother who “wanted so much”?

Did she ever express jealousy at you when you were a child, expressing to you that you have a better life available to you than hers?

anita