Dear Gaia:

For a child the main caretaker, usually it is the mother, is the most powerful person in the child’s life, not only during childhood but all through life. It is in the context of the child’s interactions with her mother that the child’s brain is formed, that is, the many thousands of connections in the brain are formed.

I will look at your interactions, as a child, with your mother best I can from the little information I have. If you would like, read and evaluate what I type next and let me know if it is true to your experience and where it is not true, correct me:

As the little girl that you were, you witnessed your mother expressing (facial expressions, including tears, voice quality, words used, etc.) intense distress. You saw and heard her suffer again and again… and yet again.

You in turn became very distressed witnessing her distressed. You naturally wanted to help her and you tried, tried hard to help her, to make her feel okay.

But you failed. Yet you kept trying. It was exhausting. In your trying, no one was there to comfort you.

Notice this: an adult psychotherapist sometimes gets overwhelmed by the suffering of a client, a client who is a stranger to the therapist (not her mother). A term used for that is compassion fatigue, I think.

Imagine a child, more vulnerable and way less equipped than a psychotherapist, not having graduated with a Masters degree and so forth, you can imagine the … compassion fatigue of that child watching her mother suffer.

You used the word overwhelming, meaning watching her suffer was too intense for you, too distressing. As she expressed self-pitying to you, you felt pity for her, intensely.

No wonder to me that you were jealous at other kids who had “their mother… Always light-hearted”. You were not a light hearted child because you were burdened with your mother’s expressed distress, with her heaviness. Her expressed distress was the heaviness that you carried with you and still do.

anita