Dear Juanita:

You are welcome.

“I have recently come to realise that I must let go of the hope that my mother will ever love me.. this has set me up to end up being stuck for years now in a relationship which is not working.. my whole life is stuck. But letting go of that hope makes me feel really frightened.. I’m in my 50’s now… never having had a mother’s love as feeling like you have a huge hole in your heart and in your life. I felt my husband filled that hole for several years, until he became closed and distant towards me.. separated a year ago… I have somehow got stuck in a place of fear.. kind of paralysis”.

Connecting the quote you pasted into your post, what I mean by it is the following: when a child experiences the lack of love by her mother, that experience involves a great fear. The fear is instinctual, same that which a fawn feels when separated from her mother deer, because in nature the fawn will die without her mother’s care and protection. When a child experiences lack of love by the mother, the danger is the same: to be abandoned by the mother. The fear is instinctual, animalistic (A young child doesn’t compute that there is such a thing as social services or charity organizations that will take care of the abandoned child).

The child, unable to endure intense fear for long, makes believe her mother loves her after all. For an example, and it is an extreme example: a child beaten by her mother repeatedly throughout a day will believe her mother loves her because she has fed her in the middle of that day.

Adult relationships cannot work out for as long as the now grown child does not correct what she believes to be true: for as long as her vision so to speak is obscured by the false belief that her mother loved her, she can’t see what is happening otherwise, can’t trust that anyone does love her, can’t tell the difference.

Once I personally understood thoroughly on the emotional level, later in life, that really, my mother didn’t love me, it was calming. Painful but calming because it was the truth. There is a saying: the truth shall set you free. It happens to be.. true in this context: free from that paralyzing fear, free from confusion, free from all kinds of delusions/ false beliefs. Free to see what is true and what is not true.

That hole in the heart stops being so scary, it becomes tolerable, something you can live with and move on from, experiencing life a step beyond being stuck in what was lacking all along.

Let me know if my answer to you is satisfactory. I will be glad to elaborate further and continue to communicate with you.

anita