Dear Gaia:

I will combine the information you shared in your four threads: Feeling like something is wrong with me, July 2016 thread (you were 18 at the time), My suffering doesn’t make sense, your March 2018 thread, Why can’t I be normal, May 2018, and My extreme feelings kill me, your current September 2019 thread (you are currently 21).

You shared the following emotional and mental experiences: feeling “like a living contradiction”, having a personality that “changes and turns around depending on the environment and on the people”, sometimes “super confident and sassy”, other times “shy and awkward”, feeling “trapped in this nasty and frightening identity crisis”; feeling like a split person, the only consistent trait of your personality is being volatile (“the only true trait she has is being VOLATILE”), you feel weird (“I tried to avoid being ‘weird’ for a lifetime”), defective, an alien, an outcast, suffering “an inner turmoil”, and that the real you is “f** up”.

You wrote: “I get this fearful sense that I’m fooling myself ‘acting’ myself… Always monologue with myself about my life, me directing a movie about myself”.

You are being your “worst judger”, “self loathing”, ashamed,  beating yourself up for perceived flaws and failures, especially when comparing yourself to your peers;  feeling that your life and your own self, your person, have been “insignificant and nonsensical”, having suffered from “anxiety and obsessive thinking” since you were 16, diagnosed with OCD,  feeling “somehow rejected by people I want to befriend”. You feel very abnormal and difficult or impossible to understand, that nothing about you is  normal (“Not even my anxiety is normal”).

You feel okay sometimes, but suddenly you become “hyper aware that there’s something really wrong or weird about (yourself).. I get panic, annoyance.. One moment I’m ok and the other I feel and think something’s off”. You “feel crazy, what’s the truth, what’s not?.. thoughts.. are like a web of abstract patterns and connections of fear”.

“I’m pretty short-fused and easy to annoy/ anger.. as a Young girl I happened sometimes to clash with peers, once one girl bullied me… “. You are “overwhelmed by violent thoughts and emotions”, and “also have a bad confrontational side”, “easily annoyed, angered”.

You wrote: “I feel like there’s no means I can express my emotional storms and mental conflicts and thought outside, with someone that either understands or can be trustworthy”, that you feel “stuck and stagnant in life” since you were 14, and that in your 21 years, you never dated nor did you experience “intimacy with someone”;you live “behind close doors.. constantly pulling my hair and engaging in weird compulsive habits.. sleep late.. daydream on music”.

You wrote: “the more I try to find myself, the more lost I get”, that you “can never find a solution”,  and that you want to “stop panicking whether my affections, thoughts and every f*** thing about me are authentic or not”, that you “no longer know what’s real and what’s not”.

About your home life, you shared that you currently live with your parents “in a pretty peaceful way”, having “a ordinary relationship with my parents”, that you “had a overall smooth home life.. Nothing truly remarkable”, that you and your mother “Always had a fair relationship”, and that you “Value a lot (your parents’) opinion of me”.

About your mother you wrote: “my mom, she’s caring and hardworking, but extra-sensitive… I don’t like a lot to share those things with her cause later, I feel  like I have to comfort her… it’s exhausting… she’s somehow easily offended”, that “she’s emotional, attuned to Others feelings and on the bad side, touchy.. easily moved to tears.. emotionally expressive and on the bad side, overwhelming, lamenting and self pitying”, that “she lamented her hard work, health stuff”, “crying and making it about her.. throwing a scene.. yelling”.

You shared that you “dread spending time alone with her”, that you “have this repulsive feeling at the idea that she might try to do deep conversations or inquire about me”; that you “resent her for making me less carefree in  my young years.. preventing me from attending certain events or situations that could only bring me joy”. You wrote that her behavior “instilled a certain anxiety or heaviness in me”, and that you envied peers who had a mother who was “Always light-hearted”.

Regarding the music events that your mother did not allow you to go, you wrote: “I needed something in real life that could motivate me to feel alive… I looked forward even as a chance to take some fresh air and bond with people and finally had some common interests”, “however they didn’t allow me to go, she also made it about her parading how she works hard for us and that we shouldn’t talk back to her.. my parents almost couldn’t care less about it oh well f*** them”.

In your most recent post you wrote: “I’m careful about the words I use cause I don’t want to make my mother look like some kind of evil narcissist that she isn’t”.

And now, following reading and studying and compiling the above for solid three hours this morning, I will offer you some of my understanding. I will make it shorter and if you ask me in a reply to this post that I share more- I will. The reason I will be making it shorter is because your anger is strong and I expect you to get angry at me and reject what I write next. The more I write, the more angry I imagine you get, so I want to avoid that.

My understanding therefore, shorter and straightforward: we humans are social animals. A child cannot possibly be emotionally and mentally healthy without adequate socializing. The most important socializing context for a child is her (or his)  socializing with her parents. You didn’t get your socializing needs met, not  with your father and not with your mother. But it is your mother who harmed you the most because she made your life about her- in her world you didn’t exist- and therefore, in your own world, you didn’t exist. Her words, her behavior was not about you- it was about her.

Perhaps you read about mothers who beat their children, starve them, not feeding or clothing them, and you think: those children are abused, I am not abused, I have food and clothes and my mother never lay a hand  on me.. I suppose I have had a “smooth home life” and “ordinary relationships” with my parents.

Problem is that human children are not turtles. All a turtle needs is food and shelter. We, social animals, need socializing. Adequate socializing means to be treated by someone as if we were visible, audible and present, there to be seen and heard. Inadequate socializing is when we are treated as things or as turtles, and so, we don’t grow up and see ourselves as things or turtles, strange entities that play a part in a weird movie, observing ourselves from the outside, wondering: who are these things pretending to be people?

When you wanted to go to those music events, you “needed something in real life that could motivate me to feel alive”- at home you feel dead, not alive. No adequate socializing= no feeling alive, no motivation, and stagnation is the result, being stuck.

Regarding those music events, you wrote “I looked forward even as a chance to take some fresh air and bond with  people”- bonding with people was what you desperately needed at home and what you were prevented from doing outside the home. Bonding with people aka adequate socializing is a need almost as strong as our need for oxygen, for fresh air.

anita