Dear Sofioula:

I am glad you are feeling better, being able to calm your mind, talking back to yourself in a soothing way

(I wonder what you were referring to in “selfish/ egotistical/ bitchy thoughts that seem soooo strange to have”).

You wrote  regarding your fear of your own anger, that if you react angrily to a guy’s mean remarks, you will “never find another man”, so better “suck it up”; if you talk back to a work colleague, you will be fired; if you curse someone who cursed you on the streets, “they will kill and/ o rape” you, so “better be quiet”.

You wrote that in your family, your father warned you about what you shouldn’t do using examples of “extreme consequences”, ex., don’t be intimate with a guy because he’ll use you and get you pregnant. Also, your father was in the habit of “guilt tripping himself 24/7”, that he shouted at you for making the smallest mistakes such as dropping food of the floor, that he over-reacted to the mistakes he believes you were making by saying to you things like: “You are driving me insane when you do that! Why do you want to destroy your mom and I?”

Your mother warned you when she believed your father would be coming home from work angry, asking you/ instructing you to “pretend/ act like nothing happened/ like you know nothing/ Tell him this or that (with extreme detail).. Please do it for me, say nothing it shall pass, I don’t want any fights in the house”. She was/ is “so coward.. never stands up for herself. She prefers calmness instead of justice”.

You wrote that you love your mother “more than anyone”, and that you “cannot bear” her being so coward, that it is “so unfair for her”, it is maddening to you, that you want a man to be “her polar opposite.. Even now that I type this, the thought of an angry man is the sexiest thing ever!”.

My growing understanding and input today: your mother instructed you to “Pretend/act like nothing happened..  say nothing” in the face of anger/ aggression, and “it shall pass”. So you followed her instructions because you  loved her so much.

She told you that the reason she wants to you pretend like nothing happened, to say nothing, is because she doesn’t “want any fights in the house”- you didn’t want to say or do anything to bring on the fights she was so scared of.

Thing is, you didn’t like following her instructions, you didn’t want to pretend nothing happened, you didn’t want to say nothing, you didn’t want to act like a coward! But you loved that coward, your mother, deeply-this is your core conflict.

You wrote: “I can’t grasp how I got to be so like her”- you got to be like her because you loved her, and you still do; because you were loyal to her, and you still are loyal to her.

Because of the conflict, meaning you don’t value a coward but you act like a coward, you ..kind of partly solved the conflict by inviting into your life the “polar opposite” of what you don’t value, the polar opposite of a coward, which is an angry, aggressive man. This way you remain loyal to your mother and you get to enjoy anger and aggression by proxy.

Of course, this solution is unsatisfactory- it brings you temporary joy and excitement, but causes you to not have a healthy relationship with a man (because of the choice of men to start with), and you are still submissive in your daily adult life, so conflict is not solved.

To really solve this conflict, you will have to .. betray your mother, so to speak. Can and will you  betray your mother this way, asserting yourself, acting in a way that you value, a way that will cause you to admire yourself?

anita