Dear Cali Chica:

1. January 2018 you wrote: “my baseline has always been suffering and anxiety”, and “It almost feels like excavating the inner deep fossil roots of the  ongoing chronic anxiety and patterns. Each Uncovering comes with its own emotional journey”- in this post my aim is to uncover more of these deep fossils roots so to (try and) help you further lessen that chronic anxiety and suffering. I hope that sooner than later, your experience of chronic anxiety will be a thing of the past.

2. Your mother was very dishonest with you (and with others in her life). I know that you are not aware of the extent of her dishonesty. It is very, very difficult for a child of any age to fully understand something as difficult as this and it is impossible to go back in time and re-hear all that she said and did.

Here is an example: you believed your whole life that your mother’s siblings treated her badly. Nov 2016: “her own siblings (all she had) shunned, ridiculed, and harassed her”. Jan 2018 you wrote: “My entire young childhood I recall feeling this and seeing with my own eyes My aunts and uncles leaving us out, Insulting us etc. When I was old enough to absorb it on my own I felt so bad that people would treat my parents this way”. But in Jan 2017 you shared about a recent event regarding your mother: “she then proceeded to say how she’s told all my aunts and uncles how horrible I’ve become and abandoned her own parents.. all aunts and uncles are on their side and are saying ‘wow what an ungrateful daughter'”- she told the same people who allegedly betrayed her about how you betrayed her, then using their disapproval of you as proof that indeed you are a bad person.

What I am saying is the mistreatment you observed on the part of your aunts and uncles against your mother/ family may very well have been a two sided mistreatment, back and forth. You only saw and remembered one side of it.

Nov 2016, you wrote: “I always recall feeling, wow how sad my mom’s life was.. why did  people do this to her?”- when she was a child, she was mistreat. Almost all of the mistreatment she complained to you about, I believe, was a lie: either a partial truth kind of lie (as in giving you only the information that supports her claim) or a complete lie.

Your mother lied to you many times, including a few years ago, suggesting that your father who  has a heart condition was having severe chest pain. You can’t tell now, looking back, how many times she lied to you in a day or in a week, in a year, and in every one of the three decades you heard her say things.

3. You wrote Jan 2018 regarding the thought of ending contact with her: “my mother made it her whole life that she ‘needs my help'”, “her focus then was me.. continued to be in adulthood”, that “cutting contact from her (will) lead to more damage to her”, that the idea of losing you will be “crippling to her”, that when she feared losing you to your in laws, “she was besides herself”, and you predicted that if you  do cut contact with her, “she would likely get our whole extended family involved, maybe even end up hospitalized due to deep despair, hysteria, and psychosis related to the idea of ‘losing me'”-

-none of that was true. You were not her focus (it was the other way around, she was your focus). She didn’t see you as capable of helping her (beyond making a call to a friend so  to get the attention of that girl’s parents, or venting to you so to get her relief and such things), she didn’t see you as Super and didn’t treat you as a Super. When at 22 you had your breakdown (“feeling lost overwhelmed, scattered, hopeless, sad”), their response was: “we don’t know what to tell you, ever since you were young you’ve always had a problem. You came  out of the womb crying and you continue still. We just don’t know what to do with you. This is too much you’re an adult now” – this is not how parents talk to a daughter they believe to be Super; this is not Super Treatment.

You heard and remembered hearing what your mother/ parents (“they morphed into one”, you wrote Nov 16) said to you and about you that fit the Super Cali Chica Role,

and closed your eyes/ears, or forgot what she said and did that didn’t fit the Super role.

You wrote regarding the breakdown of a decade earlier:  “I had totally forgot this until 2 weeks ago, something on TV reminded me”.

Regarding that breakdown, you wrote: “I usually went to my friends for the typical ups and downs- but I remember it was so bad I instantly called my parents”- it happened before that you reached out to them and they treated you as they did in this example (not Super), this is why you learned to reach out to friends and not to them. You reached out to them because you were feeling especially bad. You were desperate.

If your parents viewed you as Super, they would have treated you like Super, they would be ecstatic to be there for your in your ups and downs, to encourage and nourish their Super child. They wouldn’t have repeatedly kicked their super child when she was down (“I told my husband and he was horrified… to kick you when you’re down like that. Wow”)

Right after you told the breakdown story, in the same post, you wrote: “because my mom considers me this princess golden child.. she always had an expectation that I would marry the ‘best’ guy”-

– you didn’t compute her behavior of kicking you when you were down, or her endless harassing of you around your wedding, to mean that she didn’t consider you a princess/ a golden child.

One shows respect to a princess/ golden child, not disrespect and abuse!

In summary: you are a very intelligent woman and you were a very intelligent child, but any child needs to be valued, it is a fundamental need. So what the child does is close her eyes best she can to any and all evidence that she is not valued, and focus and magnify all evidence that she is valued. So your mother said things to indicate that she valued you, you remember her words; she applauded you and seemed happy and proud of you when you performed in a wedding, you remember that behavior. A child cannot afford to see the whole picture when the whole picture is one that shows the  child is not valued.

What happens though is that the picture is not a pretty picture, the child knows there is something very wrong. A significant denial of reality cannot be perfectly done, so the child is anxious.

Fast forward, you are now in your fourth decade, did a lot of work, lots of insight, you are in a healthy, solid relationship, you can now endure seeing the whole picture. Seeing the whole picture as it was, will reduce that chronic anxiety that accompanied that imperfect denial.

Reality: your mother/ parents didn’t value you as Super. I know it because their behavior with you, what I mentioned here, and much more (various other examples come to mind) clearly show a lack of value.

Look at all your predictions regarding what will happen to your mother if she lost contact with you- none of them came true, see, you were never this important to her! All she did when you ended contact with her was to make phone calls to your sister (and maybe to a few other people), that is all, and as far as I know, she continued traveling, Europe was one destination last summer, if I remember correctly.

No psychosis, no being institutionalized, no involving the whole family, nothing that took more effort than making phone calls.

This is what I believe to be reality. Let me know if you disagree with any part of it. The purpose of this is to deflate your false sense of value and give up the SCC Role, and instead see your value in a different way, a way that will dissolve your chronic anxiety and increase your energy and ability to focus on what will serve you well, instead of on what is a disservice for you.

I will wait for your reply before I work on the second part.

anita