Dear Cali Chica:

I like your victories, from your first recent post and your resolutions in the second post.

So much intelligence, insight, beauty in you. I do wish you well, healing, so that you can live a good life. To think that a woman like you will continue to suffer and then pass on the suffering to her own children, it is such a shame, a great shame. And for what purpose.

We operate based on Core Beliefs. What we believe is thoughts glued with emotion in multiple neuropathways. A person cannot undo a pathway by mere thinking a different thought. Emotion has to be involved. This is why it takes so much time. With time of growing awareness and learning, you insert new thoughts and emotion into existing neuropathways, and over time you believe differently.

It is about growing to believe what is true, not what is convenient to believe at any one time, not what others tell us we should believe. It is about believing what is true in reality.

When a child grows up with a mother who is lacking empathy for the child (my case and yours), what happens is that the child overreaches to the parent, trying to get there, trying to get that empathy. A mathematic simplification: if the mother expresses 5% empathy for the child, the child will fill in the void and experience the missing 95%.

So you call your mother evil and a monster, having used th0se words, but those neuropathways do not allow you to hold on to that view of her. In multiple pathways you see her as a suffering little girl.

She was at one time a suffering little girl. But you never met that girl.

You were the suffering little girl in the relationship with her, but you see her as the suffering little girl. This is the overreaching, the filling of the Empathy Gap.

Yes, it will take time and I am here for you, for as long as you need me to be here, for as long as I am able to be here.

anita