Dear Gaia:

You shared before: “I had a overall smooth home life.. Nothing truly remarkable”, and that you and your mother “Always had a fair relationship”-

– not true, cannot possibly be true.

It cannot possibly be true because you also shared: “I dread spending time alone with her, I  just have this irrational repulsive feeling at the idea that she might try to  do deep conversations or inquire about me”.

The emotions of dread and repulsion connected to your other do not go together with “a fair relationship” with your mother, with a “smooth home life”, or with “Nothing truly remarkable” having happened in your home.

Your mental/ emotional issues at 21 also do not go together with a fair relationship, a smooth home life and nothing remarkable that having happened in that home. What you described in your most recent post is the shut-down that happened to you in your home. When a child/person is under great distress, the person shuts down. It is similar to a tree in great distress- having no water in the ground. What it does is shutting down: shedding leaves, then shedding branches, shedding everything possible so to remain alive on little to no water.

These are the ways a human shuts down (taken from your most recent post): “my life is dull”- if your ability to see color is like a branch of a tree, you shed that branch, and life looks dull, no color.

“it takes my brain some seconds to recognize something happening around and how  to interact with it…. I don’t know what to do with my hands and with my eyes, how to interact with all the things happening around.. I genuinely look off or subtly uncoordinated”- if your ability to pay immediate attention to what happens around you in the here-and-now is like a branch of a tree, you shed that branch.

Sometime in your childhood, life at home was so distressing that you shut down, shed those branches. What remained is an overthinking, fantasizing brain that is not paying attention to the real- life distressing home life. And that is the purpose of the shut down: to not pay attention to that dread and repulsion you feel about your mother, to not pay attention to her emotional outbursts and lashing out.

But the body cannot shut down attention only at home and not outside home: you shut down your attention to your mother so that you were able to have as smooth of a home life as possible, but you are also  shut down to everything that goes on outside of you.

The good news is that the shut down is not permanent. You do have some ability to interact, it just takes you longer. And you can increase your ability to interpret a situation and interact with it effectively. I too was shut down, I too felt uncoordinated and clumsy and didn’t know how to interact  with other people, as if I too “just entered another dimension that don’t belong to me I can’t comprehend and I’m forced to act”.

Sometimes I felt okay with people, laughing a lot, almost hyper, but most of the time I was clueless as to what was happening and what I should do or say, and I felt out of place, weird, and abnormal. And I imagined everyone can see that and pity me or think  so very little of me.

With healing, which I started in 2011, I no longer feel this way. It took a few years of healing work though.

anita