Dear Nekoshema:

You shared very little about your childhood, nothing about your relationship with your father or with your sister and very little about your relationship with your mother. Therefore I don’t need more time to go through your writings. This is almost all of what you shared about your childhood: when you were about 9, your parents started fighting. Your mother had depression and cancer at the time, and your father was so stressed that he smoked 3 packs a day. Your parents went through a “nasty divorce.. a very rough divorce (hearing them screaming every night for 3 years)”. Following their divorce, you moved to another Province with your mother and younger sister. Your mother “would get upset whenever we reminisced or called our dad, dad’s side, or old friends, so my sister and I stopped contacting them, and they eventually did the same”.

Being their oldest child, you were “told to ‘be a rock… told I had to step up and take care of everyone”; you were the “parentalized child, had to play therapist for my mother, became her ‘rock.. I’ve been an acting therapist for friends and family from a very early age”.

In 2015 and 2016, you described your emotional state as “‘numb’ I don’t really feel anything, just a steady medium..  typically if I’m not happy, I’m sad, other emotions don’t register”. When you discovered “the emotion I typically feel is shame”, you were excited at the discovery. You indicated that you were diagnosed with anxiety and depression, and you mentioned a history of an eating disorder and self harming. In your poem “Avocados and Caviar” you mentioned “The feeling of nothingness”, a deep, useless bleak, melancholy, a suffocating doubt, something lost, locked away, captured in a picture, trapped in hell, and a “Crushing intense pain”.

About your mother, you wrote: “she has a tremendous amount of guilt surrounding all the stuff growing up, but she doesn’t believe in therapy, doesn’t want me being too open with a therapist (which is why she doesn’t know I go to therapy) and becomes defensive if I bring up the past”.

My input: I think that you are very loyal to your mother:

1. She got upset when you as a child called your father or his side of the family, so you stopped contacting them. And indeed you didn’t mention your father other than his smoking 3 packs and participating in arguments with your mother before their divorce, as if you have no contact with him whatsoever, and maybe you don’t.

2. She doesn’t want you to be open up about your past, about your childhood, that is, she doesn’t want you to talk about her,  so say almost nothing at all. You shared a very, very tiny portion of all that there is. Instead, you shared a whole lot about.. other people, friends, co workers, people .. farther away from you.

3. The friend you wrote so much about (he may be the one you wrote about in your post today), had a good point when he suggested that you confront your mother, a suggestion you rejected. You are afraid of her and you are under her spell, so to speak. She .. has dominion over you.

Referring to your poem, I think that she is responsible for your “suffocating doubt” and crushing, intense pain. I think that she locked you away, that she captured you in a picture and trapped you  in hell.

– Time for you to quit your childhood parent role (“the parentalized child” role.. “therapist for my mother” role.. “her ‘rock'” role), and shift your loyalty: end your loyalty to her and shift your loyalty .. to yourself!

(Easier said than done, I know, I know…)

anita