Dear Cali Chica:

Your parents in law sound wonderful, being great listeners, kind and wise, what a valuable resource to have!

I wonder what new insight and new understanding 2020 will bring to me, and to you. The understanding you expressed regarding your sister reads perfectly perfect, to me, from “we were raised in a household of sickness” to “I  know my distance will create alarm in her. I also know it will create alarm in me”.

Let’s look at what you wrote: “our interaction is based on sickness. There is resentment and anger within each one of us”

Also, you wrote that her hidden manner of communication with you is the reason why you feel “uneasy and uncomfortable many times”, doubly distressed- angry and guilty for feeling angry, invalidated.

All very well said, very accurate, excellent job on your part.

Then you talked about primal love and here I am confused. You wrote that you had that kind of love for your mother, “instant of course as a newborn”, I agree. But then you wrote that this primal love evolved (“evolving as I grew with her”)- primal love does not evolve. It stays the same. If a child grows up to have an honest, healthy relationship with her mother, then a different kind of love is added to the primary love.

You wrote: “I do hope to establish a good balance of ‘closeness with boundaries’, suggesting that you will not over-communicate to her what she doesn’t have “the capacity to understand”, to not worry what she thinks, t say ‘no!’ to her.

I don’t think it’s going to work. I will explain: what I wrote to you earlier in that primary-love post is that truly, better keep the relationship with her primal, pre-verbal. I don’t mean that you no longer speak to her, articulating words. What I mean by it is that honest, healthy communication with her is not possible. It is not possible because like you wrote yourself: “our interaction is based on sickness. There is resentment and anger within each one of us”.

Well, if it is based on sickness, it is not healthy. And if she is angry at you, then she will sometimes intend to hurt you, aka bite you. How can this possibly be healthy.

If you intend to heal this relationship, it will take no less than the two of you being motivated to do so, then attending professional family psychotherapy for a long time, the two of you attending sessions together. You can’t heal this relationship by yourself, can’t do that.

What I suggested in my earlier post to you is to keep the relationship primal, meaning, you view your closeness with her as primal, something that is there and will never change, a closeness that doesn’t require changing of any kind, including healing. It will always be there, that primal love/ primal closeness. Have no ambitions to create a better, honest communication between the two of you. Let it go, let go of any such hopes, intentions and hopes.

It will take no less than a miracle to add an honest, healthy closeness to this primal closeness. So don’t try. See her and interact with her as if indeed, you are interacting with a delightful puppy that will bite and act in hidden ways sometimes. If you see her and interact with her as that puppy, her bite will not hurt anymore because it’s a small puppy’s bite, a nibbling of some sort, no blood, no bruising.

(If you hope for more with her, her bite will feel, as it has felt, like the bite of a big dog, and that does draw blood and leave bruises).

anita