Dear LoveandkissesZaphod:

You are welcome!

“I don’t think it’s a mature thing to blame your parents for every difficulty you are having in your life”- it is not about blaming, for me, it is about understanding. Our brains are Formed during those Formative Years of childhood. Most of what we learn about ourselves and others, about life itself, is learned during those years, first and somewhat second decades of life. During our childhoods, the most powerful people in our lives- by far- are our parents (the caretakers, the adults we live with). Therefore, a whole lot of who we are is about what happened in those years between us and our parents.

So it is not about taking your parents to a  court of law, so to speak, charging them with inadequate parenting and sentencing them to prison; it is about understanding ourselves better so that we can live better lives as a result, feel better and function better. (And so that if we bring more children into this world, that we will do better for them than our parents did for us).

Here is the most important thing you shared regarding your childhood relationship with your mother: “She also made me think I was cold and distant because this is who she describes me to my face and to others”- a child is naturally very warm and close to her mother, there is no stronger feeling of closeness than that which a child has for her primary caretaker, usually the mother. What happens is that when the mother hurts the child over and over again by rejecting the child, disapproving of the child, then the child withdraws from her mother. When the child associates her mother with pain, she withdraws from her. All animals withdraw from pain, it is instinctive.

“up until I was in my thirties I accepted these as certain facts about me, and I internalized them”- as children we can’t see ourselves unless we look at a mirror. Our mother is our mirror. What she says about who we are sticks.

“she is one of the reasons why I can be mean and insensitive to myself”- she was mean and insensitive to you (your Outer Critic) when your brain was forming, and so your brain contains a sort of mental representative of her (your Inner Critic) that continues to be mean and insensitive to you.

You wrote about your mother: “edgy and passive aggressive to my father every time he drank…nervous, anxious… critical, judgmental and even somewhat puritan and uptight about me and about people”-

-I can see why you were attracted to “calm and acceptance and relaxed” nature of this recent man in your life, it being opposite to nervous, critical and anxious. That’s what you needed from your mother, you needed her to be calm, relaxed and accepting of you. But like you wrote, he was “a little extreme in these same aspects to the point of”.. urinating on your bed and not bothering to replace it. Something I am sure that your puritan mother would be horrified by.

We often do find ourselves with the opposite of our parent when what we need is someone in the middle of extremes. I suppose your mother was on the extreme of anxious/nervous/uptight/critical and this man was on the other extreme.

I would like to read your thoughts about what I wrote here. Also, I am wondering what is it that she disliked so much about the boyfriend you had when you were 23?

anita