Dear Zoe:

You didn’t answer my first two questions but you answered the third: “Why did she not stick up for you and defend you when your father criticized you?- your answer: “she always felt quite intimidated by my dad too so wasn’t really able to defend us against his anger and criticism.”

After a 3-4 hours talk with your mother, on the phone, you feel “empty and like my self-esteem had taken a blow”.Again on the phone with her, you got “this strange sensation that I had sort of ‘disappeared’ into the conversation… that my mum had this way of sort of encouraging me to continue, by either flattering me about how amazing my insights were or posing new questions…I.. was kind of ‘fusing’ with her”

You explained the latter, suggesting that your mother’s input was a high “level of undivided attention, admiration” and that “this has sort of set my template for what I expect ‘love’ to feel like”

In your second post you wrote: “I am now wondering … whether that experience of sort of having no boundaries is actually the experience of unconditional love that I may have thought it was.”

My input at this point: what is clear to me is that those phone conversations, the communications with your mother have not helped you and do not contribute to your well-being. This is clear to me because of that “empty and like (your) self esteem had taken a blow” feeling after the few hour talk with her, and “this strange sensation that (you) had sort of ‘disappeared’ into the conversation” following the second talk you shared about.

It is also clear to me that you felt these feelings (in the paragraph above) not because of an unconditional love of you. This is clear to me because love doesn’t bring about these feeling in the loved one. A person who is loved does not feel she disappeared when communicating with the loving party, feeling empty and a blow to her self esteem.

You repeated that you receive emotional support from your mother, suggesting she has given you a lot of emotional support. You also wrote that you’ve been thinking of her as the good parent (and your father being the bad parent).

I am thinking that the issue is not that your mother has been the good parent (and she has been in comparison to your father), but that she has been the weak parent. She was too weak to defend you all those many years, against your father. She was too weak to assert herself. This reality and the fact that you perceive your mother as weak (and she is) makes all of her emotional support weak, impotent, void and so… it leaves you empty.

What do you think?

anita