Dear Girija:

By the way, your replies in other threads are amazing, exceptionally intelligent and insightful not only for a person in her early twenties but for any age!

“I feel a little overwhelmed by the recollection so I wrote it here”- what we are doing here is overwhelming, the emotions that glue those core beliefs, they are overwhelming. This is why this kind of work should be done in the context of psychotherapy, over time, with a capable therapist, both the therapist and you working hard, over time, persistently, patiently and gently.

(Problem is many therapists did not resolve their own relationships with their mothers and so, they are unable to be helpful to the client after a certain point, not being able to help the client examine a reality the therapist herself didn’t yet examine!)

In our communication here, whenever you feel overwhelmed, take a break and come back to the thread whenever it is that you are ready.

“My mother did not enjoy anything. I feel bad for her. She was a prisoner…this is part of the system so she never realized it”- your hope is not in understanding her, explaining her and the system, feeling empathy for her. Your hope is in feeling empathy for the child that you were.

“My mother did not enjoy anything” and that included you, she didn’t enjoy you. The baby and young child that you were smiled at your mother, reached out to her again and again, but she didn’t smile back at you.

What you needed so to see in the mirror that you are a good girl, that you are likable, that you are okay- was to see her looking at you with a smile.

You asked her what will happen if your father lost his job, she told you: “we will just have to kill ourselves”. Next, you “looked shocked”-

– seeing you shocked, scared, did she feel empathy for you, saying to you something like: oh, I am so sorry, no.. we will be okay if he lost his job, I will take care of you, we will be okay-

-no, instead of empathy, she felt anger at you and used the opportunity to hurt you by adding guilt to your fear (“oh aren’t you the one that is always yelling about wanting to leave, why are you scared now”).

This is what I meant by betrayal, she betrayed the girl who loved her and trusted her, and she did so at times intentionally, as in the example you gave. She wanted to hurt you and then proceeded to say what it took to hurt you.

Therefore, really, the system doesn’t matter, her childhood doesn’t matter, these don’t matter to the context of you-and-her. What matters is that you trusted her and she hurt you at times intentionally… and did not apologize for having done so, later, did she.

anita