Dear Gaia:

I re-read again all your posts since you were 18. Regarding your recent post about your cousin long ago: “He forcefully  kissed me and wanted to kiss me in other private body areas… now I’m taking into consideration that it’s the main source for my toxic shame and embarrassment”-

– did this happen only once and was your cousin your age or very close  to your age?

Often people, when looking for the reason of their emotional troubles, fixate on any sexual  experience in childhood, such as sexual play by or with other children of similar age, as … The Reason, because it is sexual. Most often the reason for a child’s- and adult’s- significant emotional troubles is in the home life, day after day, month after month, year after year, and not in an incident or a few incidents of short sexual encounters with other children.

Also, you “don’t feel much sexual shame”, so no shame attached to sexuality- not an indication of the cousin’s forceful kiss attaching shame to kissing.

Here is what I did learn about the main source of your shame: it is in your years long experience living at home where you did not belong.

A child needs to feel that she belongs with her family. Belonging to her family that makes her feel comfortable, “at home”, at peace, not distressed about being like very different people at different circumstances (an identity that “changes and turns around depending on the environment and on the people”). Not belonging at home leads a child to not develop a stable sense of who she is (“I watch my friends and they have a stable sense of who they are”).

You therefore didn’t find peace or a comfortable sense of identity in the context of your Family. You found your peace and identities (plural) in Fantasy: “fantasy worlds felt so good to me, like my soul was at peace. I felt in my soul like I belonged to some Narnia, or sailing with pirates, or up with aliens, I craved to be there living adventurously and magically. I called it ‘home‘”-

– see, you said it yourself: you were/ are at peace in Fantasy, you belong in Fantasy, you call it home, and you crave home because you don’t have it irl.

It is when a child feels at peace and that she belongs, that she can live “adventurously and magically” instead of anxiously and troubled, not alive, “wandering aimlessly with nonsensical racing thoughts”, feeling like “a zombie” stuck “in a state of non life”.

When those musicians showed up in your country, you “needed something in real life that could motivate me to feel alive“- because you felt dead at home.

“I never belonged fully to a certain identity or center, or group of people”- starting at home, you didn’t belong with your family. You felt “like an outcast or unable to really shine”.

And why did you not belong- not because there was something wrong with you but because your parents were not there for you. Your mother worked a lot but when she was home she didn’t notice you being a person. For her, you were a place where she dumped her thoughts and her emotions and her life experience, not noticing that you have your own thoughts and your own emotions (“she also  made it about her parading how she works hard for us… crying and  making it about her“)

You were like an object at home (“almost being like an  object”), “an outcast”, someone who doesn’t even exist (“I fear I don’t exist”) because you didn’t belong at home, at least not as a person. “I had a overall smooth home life”- as an object, not as a person.

Being so painfully alone as a child and onward, at home, not belonging as a person needs to belong, you were and still are angry, experiencing “extreme feelings”- even an adult who finds herself or himself trapped in a prison cell, gets angry and experiences extreme feelings. A child trapped in a home where she doesn’t belong also feels angry and experiences extreme feelings.

The simple solution is for you to move out of the home-where-you-don’t-belong and finally live a good life elsewhere, free of that home. Problem  with this simple solution is that you carry with you the anger, the extreme feelings everywhere you go.

Unless a person heals from a significantly distressing childhood, over time and work, the person  keeps re-living the same experience everywhere she goes. Problem is that staying in the same childhood home prevents the healing process from beginning or moving on beyond the first or second step forward.

anita