Dear Narsil:

You wrote in your recent post: “every time he makes me laugh or I feel tenderness or affection towards him.. every time I feel warmth something in my head snaps and I feel like I need to get out”. This is why and how this is happening to you according to my best understanding:

As a child you felt great affection, tenderness and warmth toward your mother, and sometimes she expressed the same to you, but sometimes she hated you and that hate hurt so much because it hit you were you were tender. It is a horrible experience for a child, a most horrific kind of surprise when expecting affection and receiving hate instead.

When your mother yelled at you and tore your homework, those were acts of hate. It is very difficult for a child of any age to think of her mother as hateful. So I will clarify: I am no saying that she was 100% or even 50% hateful. I am saying that the amount of hateful behavior on her part against you, was more than you were able to handle.

When you remember your mother yelling at you, tearing your homework, harassing you to get perfect grades and perform perfectly in extracurricular activities and so on, you probably don’t feel much, the memories feel neutral, not scary, aren’t they?

This is so because children disassociate- they repress and burry the fear best they can so to keep going. It is impossible for a child to be overwhelmed with fear and to perform the tasks in front of her: getting dressed, going to school, etc. So the child removes the majority of her fear from her awareness.

This is how much fear you experienced as a child before you removed that fear from your awareness aka disassociated: “panic… vomiting, trembling, hyperventilating for hours”. This is the fear of your childhood, repressed and then erupting once you moved in with him in Rome, the move in with him being the activating event.

Although you don’t feel the fear to that great extent now, as when you did the day you moved in with him, it still exists and it is significant, leading you to focus on his flaws, question your love for him… take away the feeling of love, and wanting to leave him. This is not about who he is and how he behaves with you (from what you have shared); it is all an activation of your childhood fear.

Back to the quote of what you shared in your most recent post: “every time he makes me laugh or I feel tenderness or affection towards him.. every time I feel warmth something in my head snaps and I feel like I need to get out”-

– as a child you experienced a mixture of warmth and fear, the two were connected. Fast forward, you feel warmth toward your partner, and soon after, if not at the same time, you feel fear too. Sometimes you feel only fear and no warmth.

The two are connected: warmth and fear.

When he makes you laugh, you relax for a moment but then your brain remembers that hate is next, some act of aggression and harassment is next, so the laughter turns to fear.

“something in my head snaps“- the connection is made between warmth and fear, relaxation and danger.

There are other things going on, but what I wrote here is the core of what is happening, according to my best understanding.

anita