Dear laelithia:

You are welcome.

“How then, do you think if not by setting boundaries and limiting contact with my mother, can I stop living in the past and begin to live in the present?”

My answer: through quality psychotherapy, you need to access the child in you, aka inner child, the young child that you were more than twenty years ago. You need to see your life then from her view, her young wide- open eyes, not retroactively through your adult eyes.

The young child that you were experienced life from a very fresh perspective, with what is called “a beginning mind”, that is, what she experienced was not influenced by the education she did not have yet, by what you were taught in school and higher education, what you read, what you were told. Her experience was raw and true to reality. It is over the years of retroactively re-interpreting our childhood that our view becomes distorted, that is, not true to reality.

When you access the child’s view of what happened, you will be amazed by how different her view is from yours, from the view of the adult that you are now.

As is now, you are not seeing your childhood as it was. You are not seeing your mother as she was and as she is, and you are not seeing you as you really are.

Once you re-experience the child’s perspective, once you see your childhood, your mother and yourself through your inner child’s eyes, then you will have the information you need so to proceed toward a better mental health, a better life for yourself.

If you want, you can try an exercise right here on your thread, it may work, it may not, but I don’t see the harm in trying: take a break if you need to, and when you are calm, when you feel ready, come back to your thread and pretend you are a little girl, a five year old, and type her words.

Don’t worry about her typing making sense, let it flow, let it come to a stop and then continue, not worrying about the continuity of thought. Just type away. Do not insert later life interpretations, later life higher education terms, labels and concepts. Do not be your mother’s apologetic, explaining her reasons and evaluating her parenting. Stay instead with the child that you were-

Let her speak. Your hope is in letting her tell her story while you keep the adult you out of the way.

anita