Dear Joanna:

You are making progress in seeing more and more of reality. Your inquiring mind is active, you are challenging what you thought you knew. You are giving up communicating with your mother and you agree that cutting contact with her sometime in the future is the right thing for you to do.

The voices: well, when working in the yard I cut and gather brush in piles, to be burned later (hopefully, got so many piles waiting). As I gather the brush on top of  pile, I hear a voice saying: You are doing it wrong, placing it wrong, making the pile messy. It will be impossible to burn it.

I hear these voices being spoken by a person I know, a person looking at me with angry eyes and angry voice, angry expression, accusing me of adding the brush on the pile wrong on purpose.

I didn’t recognize the latter for a long time. I just felt very distressed, suffering a whole lot and exhausted. Later, over time of paying attention to those voices, I realized that I was feeling like a bad person, guilty.

It is not only that I was doing things wrong (when I was doing them right!), but that I did it on purpose to hurt someone else.

Another example, I walk daily. There are sticks on the road. If I pick one, so to make the road better for drivers, I hear a voice saying: why didn’t you pick up the other stick, why only this stick? Next I feel that extra distress of: you did it on purpose, to hurt the drivers on the road, so that their car will be damaged!

The other day on the walk I came across a bottle of water, partly used. I thought to myself: if the bottle is made of glass, I will pick it up so to prevent a car from being damaged. I checked. It was plastic, so I left it alone (it won’t hurt cars and… I can’t pick up everything on the road, the idea is for me to walk not to remove trash and such!)- next there was that voice: you lazy you! You should have picked the bottle, And there was the beginning of that distress, that I am being a bad person for not picking up the bottle.

I found out that I suspect I have bad intentions although I do not. It is automatic. Because she accused me of what was not true- I believed her and accused myself of what is not true.

anita