Dear Rainbow:

I used to be very scared of saying the wrong thing. I would say something to someone, can be something logical, empathetic, sensible, and then I felt distress: maybe I said the wrong thing, maybe I offended the person. I didn’t know if I did say something offensive, but I was scared that I did. What I did next was to explain myself, to restate what I just said, to attend to all the possibilities that what I just said can be taken as offensive and explain that I didn’t mean this and I didn’t mean that and so on.

What a torturous way to live!

I learned that this torture came about because of my experience as a child (and onward) with my mother. I said something and she accused me of offending her, of saying what I said with the intention of hurting her feelings. And she expressed how hurt she was, crying and so on. I knew it wasn’t true that I meant to offend her, and I knew I often said what I said with the intention of helping her!- but she accused me otherwise, again and again. She was my mother, so I believed her.

Problem is, she accused me a whole lot of things I said that were not offensive. She was delusional. She believed something that was not true. And because she accused me of what was not true, there was no way for me to prevent it from happening again. Other than not to say anything at all except that she accused me of that as well, of not saying what I should have said…

And so, the habit was born: I say something, innocent or sensible and well meaning, trying to help… doesn’t matter, I feel distress anyway, AS IF I said something with the intent to offend. As if I am a bad person who can’t help but to offend.

It has been a long process for me to learn that I was not a bad person as a child, inclined to offend and that I am not a bad person now. It took a long, long time for me to learn that I am not full of poison, so to speak, and that when I open my mouth and say something, or move my fingers and type these very words, that the poison will come out of me and …. poison others.

anita