Dear Juanita:

You are welcome and I am sorry that you’ve been experiencing acute stress. It is positive that your cat is feeling better, reacting better to a new medicine. You wrote that you know that your cat’s sickness is not your fault, but you feel guilty anyway. You feel that your best is not good enough because it is not perfect (“as if I would be so terribly to blame if I am not able to make her perfectly healthy and perfectly happy”). You asked: “Is this also from my childhood do you think?”-

I am guessing that as a child you tried hard to be perfect for your mother, so that she will love you (?)

If  you did, you experienced that your best efforts failed to get the result you wanted (her love)-> the emotional experience of impotence. You took responsibility for her not loving you-> the emotional experience of guilt.

You currently experience “a big internal struggle to keep calm”. If you thoroughly understood, on the emotional level, that your mother didn’t love you because she was selfish and unloving, and not because your best was not perfect, then you wouldn’t feel guilty or impotent. It is about redefining the problem and the solution. The problem was not that you were inadequate and unlovable, but that she was unloving. The solution you tried then, to become adequate and lovable by being perfect didn’t work then because it was based on the wrong problem.

Fast forward, your cat is sick because of a chronic immune disease she has and had before she came into your life, not because you are inadequate. You didn’t cause her disease and you can’t fix it. You are good to your cat. You are not guilty. You deserve to be calm. You deserve to feel good about yourself.

anita