Dear J:

Welcome back!

When you were a child, a witness to your mother’s violence and a direct target of her verbal abuse, you got very, very scared, and for a long time, day after day, year after year. This fear, repeating, ongoing,  is the anxiety you are still suffering from.

You wrote regarding your mother, on March 2019: “her presence and energy were enough to make us walk on eggshells”- at one point on it didn’t take her behavior (verbally abusing you) to scare you, all it took was her presence.

March 2019: “Being away at school.. the distance from my mother helps”. Fast forward, April 9, 2020: “I moved back home.. no longer away at school… I’m living with my mother during this pandemic.. My mom has been working from home.. We get along, I’m even enjoying her company”- but her presence alone is enough to scare you. Sometimes you forget the fear and enjoy her company (the brain has to take its breaks from fear, and it has to experience joy from time to time, otherwise it will collapse). But the fear is still there, ready to be felt sooner than later.

“I feel trapped.. I can’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t feel trapped”- you wanted to run away as a child and onward (that’s the instinct of any animal living in a perceived danger), but you had nowhere to run away to;  plus, a child doesn’t perceive existing away from her parents.

“I’ve been working with an amazing therapist weekly for about 6 months and I know I’ve made progress, but social distancing has made me feel like I took ten steps back”- we always take many steps back when living again with our abusers. It doesn’t matter how much progress you made when you were away.

Social Distancing brought you to social-closeness with your mother, that’s what caused the regression: the physical closeness to your mother.

“My wish is to go to a job.. and come home to a studio apartment…I guess I’m looking for a reason to keep believing in my dream and any advice in continuing to live with my abuser”- I don’t have any advice regarding living with one’s abuser: your brain and body already did, automatically/ instinctively all that is possible to survive your abuser.

To heal, to dream, and to believe again in your dream, you have to get away from your abuser. Therefore, my suggestion is that you ask your father to rent a studio apartment for you this weekend.

Do you think that he goes to work every day even though he doesn’t have to, risking Covid-19, because he needs to be away from your mother as well?

anita