Dear Sofioula:

1. Your father and his mother: she mistreated him when he was a child, no doubt. As a result he felt angry at her, but also guilty for feeling anger at his own mother. This emotional dynamic of anger & guilt is still his experience decades later as it was when he was a child. He is stuck in the same emotional experience of his childhood.

* “The obsessive sense of loyalty and respect towards his parents was passed unto me”- all children are born with a complete sense of loyalty and respect toward the parent; it is universal, not specific to you and your family.

When a child is mistreated, he or she gets stuck in the conflict between anger at the mistreating parent and that loyalty, therefore feeling angry and guilty forevermore.

2. Your mother and her mother: her mother was a very angry woman who expressed that anger at her daughter, scaring the hell out of her daughter (your mother). Fast forward, your mother is scared of anyone who expresses any amount of anger.

*Your grandmother was angry at your father (her daughter’s husband) when she didn’t need him, but once she needed him, being “unable to  sustain herself”, she dropped the anger, and loves him “to death” so that he will sustain her.

3. Your mother and you: she has been scared of her mother’s anger all her life, having been “emotionally neglected to the extreme and had no real friends”, you noticed these things as a child, and naturally loving your mother, you instinctively decided to do all that you can do so to help her out.

You decided that you will not emotionally neglect her like the other people did. You knew that her number 1 emotional need is to not be around angry people, so naturally, you decided to .. not be angry.

* “we had to fight together to stay alive at my birth, because she had complications that could kill us both. Maybe that was imprinted in my subconscious”- no, a baby can’t possibly remember the details of her birth, at most she can remember distress (nothing about the circumstances of that distress). What was imprinted in your consciousness was your mother telling you the story of your birth long after the birth.

Yesterday, her boss was rude to her, she didn’t stand up for herself, and you expressed some of your anger about her not standing up for herself, and you felt “nice.. peaceful afterwards”- because you were loyal to yourself at that moment, not to her.

For the rest of your post: “Truth is, there’s nothing I hate more, nothing I am more afraid of than being/ witnessing unfairness. More than death, more than loneliness, more than pain”- then don’t be unfair to another and don’t accept unfairness from another. Both.

* At one point, in your old school,  you were “the MOST outspoken, confident, bodsy, strong girl”, then you were bullied in your new school, and you became quiet, submissive, timid. “I am honestly clueless where this kid ‘went’. Still looking for her”-

– go to your old school, that most outspoken, confident girl is waiting there for you to pick her up. When you do pick her up, you will need to guide her how to be outspoken and confident in your current life circumstances, about ten years later. The most difficult lesson you will have to teach her is to be outspoken and assertive with your mother. You will need to do this in a strong way but in a way that is also fair to your mother. Both. (Otherwise, the anger & guilt dynamic will  be yours too, forevermore, like it is for your father).

anita