Dear Cali Chica:

I drink almond milk with my coffee or tea, unsweetened with vanilla. Regarding my hostility baseline, I started to type away about it but am having difficulty. I’ll come back to it later. Maybe I will start with my thought about S and it will bring me to talk about it. (interesting how it is easier to talk about people and circumstances at a distance, and not about the people & circumstances at the center, less distress that way).

S- you mentioned her texting you while you were working in a very busy hospital, and you took five minutes of a ten minute break, in a 10 hour shift if I remember correctly, she texted you about her relationship, with a boyfriend. You took your precious few moments break to attend to her non-life threatening issue, by far not an emergency whatsoever.

Knowing the insides of your brain some, more true to say, she took your precious time away from you, as if she owned it. (She may not have been aware, didn’t really steal your time, but she tapped into pathways that where time was stolen from you).

And this example is tapping into my childhood experience of time being stolen from me by my mother. Was she aware, don’t know. But she stole my time anyway because I didn’t have a choice. Back to you CC, you have a choice only when you are aware of what is happening. A child is not aware, cannot be aware because what is she to  do-tell her mother to shut the hell up?

So I had no ownership of my time as a child, she talked to me whenever she felt like and she talked a whole lot, a whole loooooooooooooooooooooooooot. About people hurting her, using her, all her exchanges with those people, what they said, what she said, what she should have said, what she will say next time. It doesn’t matter what I was doing- she talked to me. And she talked in that distressed voice, high pitched or going up and down, never a calm voice. Fast forward decades later I need my alone time no  matter where or what. I look forward to  it. And silence is golden for me. Every noise, until lately, was magnified in my brain and disproportionally distressing.

There is so much more- her humiliating me at length, making a project out of it- what words to choose and in what syntax so to deliver the biggest punch where it will hurt most. And then, when with other people, she flattered them, put them on a pedestal. This part here is related to the event of recent. I get hostile when I think or feel that others are treated better than I am. I am afraid that they will get what I am not getting, that they are a higher priority, I am jealous, envious. Angry. Enraged that they .. deserve good treatment and I don’t. It is enraging to be treated as an inferior, a less-than.

anita