Dear Lea:

You are welcome and thank you for expressing your appreciation.

“just like every adopted children I have this inner and extremely strong fear of abandonment”- not like every adopted child. Children who are adopted by good, consistently attentive, calm and comforting adoptive parents as babies are very unlikely to experience a strong fear of abandonment.

“If I don’t fit into my mother’s expectations, she will stop loving me”- your mother’s love for you is not really love (no empathy= no love). What it is, is a conditional approval of you, that is: she will approve of you at times, disapprove of you at other times, depending on her mood and what she perceives at the moment.

“As you could have seen in my two previous posts, I’m not afraid to speak my mind when she decides to literally attack me”- I noticed and I was impressed. Problem is that at times expresses her disapproval of you dishonestly/ passive-aggressively, with the tone of her voice, with suggestive, vague comments that are difficult to detect and confront.

Here is an example that I am coming up with: let’s say you successfully asserted yourself with her about her telling you that you are fat. As a result, she no longer uses the word “fat”, but the two of you watch a movie with a lean, attractive actress in it, and she says: how beautiful and lean this actress is!.. as she says it, you hear the message “you are fat!”, but you are not sure and if you bring it up to her, she will easily deny it and accuse you of nit picking on what she says. (It is exhausting to deal with a dishonest, indirect person, not being able to know for sure when you are attacked, not being able to trust that person to tell you the truth).

“Obviously she never apologized and she never tried to understand more”- since this has been her pattern, expect it to continue: don’t expect her to apologize or try to understand you, and let go of hopes that she will.

You told her: “Listen, they make their choices, you make your own.. You’re a grown-up person, I’m not here to pamper you, I have already my own issues, go see a therapist”- excellent assertion. But remember what you wrote a little before this sentence: “she never tried to understand more”- so she is unlikely to understand what you told her, or see a therapist to understand more about herself.

“Sometimes I can see that I’m being extremely rude and brutal. But.. I feel like she doesn’t let me the choice”- correct, if you are in her company for too long, you are going to react to her ongoing assault on your sanity.

Solution: don’t spend much time with her. Best would be (if you are to have contact with her) is to see her once a month or so, in the presence of other people (never alone!)  In the presence of other people (extended family, friends, strangers), she is likely to stop her “continuous flow of negativity” because she cares what the other people think of her. Here is another idea: bring someone with you when you visit her, so that she is not comfortable to be her negative, critical self in the presence of your companion.

I agree with you that as a woman in relationships with men, your reference/ influence can be your mother- the reference is not gender specific.

“Him, he’s different, he’s the contrary, my own choices. Could it mean that I’m finally and definitely disassociating my own desires from my mother’s”?- yes, you are doing just that. To do it even more, see to it that you don’t spend alone time with your mother (so to protect yourself, so to not exhaust yourself, so to not regress), and continue to make your own choices, from small choices to bigger choices.

Regarding the guy, you wrote him a very long letter and he didn’t mention it to you during the 1.5 hour chat you had with him the other day- a very long letter is way more difficult to respond to than a short letter. Keep that in mind.

“if he truly didn’t care anymore/ moved on, why then making last a conversation for that long?”- could be because you met by accident, vs. purposefully, as in having a date, therefore, he was relaxed and in the flow of the conversation. The long conversation does not indicate, to me,  that he is interested in you romantically. I figure he enjoyed talking to you in the casual setting of the meeting (his anxiety was not pronounced at that casual, unplanned setting).

He told you that he didn’t feel comfortable being in a relationship, the he is not ready for something serious and yet he spent 1.5 hours talking to you recently, and he “spent so many hours talking through the whole summer”. You are wondering what this means regarding his feelings- or lack of- for you.

My guess is that he enjoys talking to you in casual settings, such as meeting you randomly, most recently), and in the casual setting of talking to you on the phone (where he is not with you in-person). In these settings, he is not anxious and therefore,. able to be in the flow of the conversation.

“I told him that I clearly love him… why doesn’t he stop me and say ‘yeah sorry, thank you for the letter, I value you but as a friend’ or something like this? It’s not that complicated and he knows that we can be straightforward together”-

– I am guessing this: the two of you are anxious people but your individual anxieties express themselves in different ways: you get into a topic directly and at great length, and he avoids it altogether.

anita