Dear Cali Chica:

I will respond to an earlier post I missed, and then to the rest.

“a part of me is motivated to find an out so to speak for us, so that we are more free, and not just owned by the system as employees”- I got more of an understanding about this when I talked to my husband last evening- he worked with hospitals and has an understanding of how they function, interestingly he worked with NY hospitals. He said that all hospitals are motivated by profit  and run by accountants and lawyers.  If a doctor is in management then it is a doctor who hasn’t had patients for many years. The focus of management is to cut costs and limit liabilities. If I understand correctly, those in management get bonuses according to the profit made. He said that doctors are small cogs in the big machine.

I think I understand better why you want him not to be owned by management. Your work environment is not that great either, with this woman part-owner you shared about. It is a good idea for the two of you to work elsewhere, I hope it happens soon enough.

Regarding your friend calling you about your mother calling her, you can ask that friend to not tell you if your mother calls her again. You can tell this to anyone who your mother may call, to not tell you anything about it.

“just want to make sure she’s doing okay”, she said. Well, she shouldn’t have hurt her two girls as badly as she did, repeatedly, again and again, to never correct, or even acknowledge that she did.

“I wanted to at some level feel sad or shed some emotion but I felt instead agitated versus emotional”- I think that agitation is the brain/ body resisting and rejecting the experience of painful emotions: hurt, sad, shame, even hope and love. Hope and love can be painful. This agitation is a rush of activity in the brain and through the body which distracts us from the emotions we don’t want to relax into. We don’t want to relax into them because we fear these emotions, they feel threatening.

“I went into the subway… Feeling agitated and feeling tense.. Feeling frenzied”- that is the resisting, the escaping of the emotions that insist of reaching our awareness and will not go away.

“Feeling frenzied. Feeling UNABLE to process and feel good about what’s in front of me. Feeling controlled.. disassociated disconnected… as though I am telling a story versus experiencing the feeling and suffering in real life. Removed”- this is what the brain/body does as we run away from our emotions, trying to escape awareness of them, escape the experience of them, we disconnect from them but we also disconnect and disassociate from everything. The removal you mentioned is the removing our focus from the emotions that we fear. With our focus removed from our emotions we think and think, we don’t feel anything but that agitation.

And then, you felt “some sadness for the sweet young Cali Chica who had a bad parent. A bad mother.. some tears welling up”- there’s much more of that sadness in there.

The boy you witnessed on the subway, his mother reading to him out loud, “he was looking at her- not the book… It is innate… She is his world- she is his everything. He values her every word”- this is why no emotional pain is more intense than what happens when a child is betrayed by his mother. It is not just anyone who betrays her complete trust, it is her Mother, her Everything. The trust of a young child in her mother is 100%, the vulnerability therefore is 100% and so is the pain when that trust betrayed is also 100%.

We don’t want to feel that pain anymore, that 100% pain of betrayal, so we resist and reject any feeling that will make us that vulnerable again.

From this point on, if you trust yourself (title of this thread) to not reconnect with your mother and father, if you trust yourself to not connect with anyone who harms you or is likely to harm you, if you trust yourself to take good care of yourself, to know what is best to do in the future, under various circumstances, then you will feel that you can endure the emotions you are resisting. You will be able to feel soft toward yourself, your husband… and even toward your mother, which is what happened to me.

I resisted feeling any love for my mother, until recently, I felt safe enough to feel that love. I really didn’t want to, but I had to, because it was always there, innate (your word, innate). I felt it but only after I promised myself to never have her in my life again. These very days I am practicing relaxing into emotions that have puzzled me for so long.

anita