Dear Cat:

You can post here the email you sent to your sister a week ago or so.

You wrote that your sister said that hearing your voice helped her, “it brought her a sense of comfort”. And you asked: “Should I feel responsible/guilty now for removing her sense of comfort? (me)-  or should I see this as a good thing which is hopefully going to help her grow?”

My answer/ input: a sense of comfort is a short term help, not different than taking a narcotic. As a matter of fact, from personal experience, there is no better comfort that I experienced than the first few times (before I got sick and stopped) of taking a heavy duty narcotic. It felt great!

She hears your voice, she said, this is very telling, isn’t it? That your voice comforted her, not your words, not what you said.

From your sharing, your sister’s mental health, like yours, is not good. And did not improve over time. So clearly, you didn’t help her. By not having her hear your voice, you are not providing that comfort of your voice, a short lived comfort, that is all.

You asked me: “How do you manage with your own health/mental health? And balancing that- as you help people on here??”- I don’t know if I am helping people here. I would like to think that I am helpful but I am very, very humble in this regard. What I am doing here (as I stated many times before) is help myself. I am helping myself heal by being here, on this website, posting to you right now. I am learning here, and learning is healing. The more I learn about you, the more I learn about me because we are both humans and we have so much in common.

When I am here on the forums, I am not distracting myself from myself, I am connecting with myself. And so, there is no balancing, it  is not helping others OR helping myself. I am helping myself.

You wrote: “We were simply just things that they had made together. If that makes sense”- yes, it makes sense to me. I was a thing too. I was not a thing, that was the problem. Feelings got in the way of me being a thing. Oh, how I wished I was a thing, so that there was no hurt, no pain, no fear.

You wrote: “They argued in front of us all the time- they didn’t care if we saw or not”- things don’t see and you don’t pay attention to the things unless they get in your way, or you need them at the moment. You pay attention to the things when you feel like it.

“I know how it feels to be in a situation of which you can’t escape. It feels like eternity”- this is childhood in an abusive home. For a child, it does feel like eternity. Time has a different feel to it than later in life.

Back to your question for me, I wrote that I am learning here, about me. Your most recent post taught me on a deeper level that a person can feel comfort in hearing another’s voice, being in the presence of another person, but that comfort does not mean help. It only means feeling better for a short time.

It picked my interest that she said it is your voice that comforts her, not the words you say, not the message you try to deliver to her.

anita