Dear norit (Study Post #3):

1. About hopelessness and apathy: you started the first thread in July 31 2016 with “here goes nothing”- expecting nothing. You wrote in that first post: “it seems hopeless… often apathetic.. Things seem very hopeless in the long run”. But in that first post, there was also a little bit of hope within the hopelessness: “I am actually an individual, and not just here for my family’s sake… I would like to change.. to actually want to live a life for myself, but it seems hopeless”.

A few months later, that little hope was gone: “Still living with parents, yes. My mother’s addictions are getting worse I believe, and there are daily arguments between the rest of the family… as undesirable the situation is, I no longer feel the desperate drive I did feel to ‘escape’.. I’ve just lost all my drive and feel quite hopeless.. I feel overwhelmed by panic hopelessness”.

Your childhood home life was so bad, on a regular basis (and still is, to this very day), and you were unable to change it (no child can change an actively alcoholic adult woman, and a raging adult man), so much so, and for so long, that you had let go of any hope to change anything, or to ever witness a change happen somehow.

If the green leaves of a tree represent hope, you shed all those leaves and stand bare, a leafless tree.  Once in a while a budding green leaf appears, a few, here and there, but what chance do they have to remain on the tree, when the tree is in the habit of shedding any and all green leaves?

As I wrote to you earlier, this hopelessness and apathy, this lack of motivation, these are not at all your fault, but an indication of how bad your childhood home life was for way too long and on an ongoing basis.

Back to the image of the tree: imagine a tree living in a very dry and harsh soil, hardly any water, year after year after year- it has no choice but to shed its leaves. Let’s say, one year there happens to be some water in the soil, enough to grow a few leaves, so a few green leaves appear.. but by then, the tree is in the habit of shedding its leaves, so it sheds those few green leaves.

All  of us humans are creatures of habit, so the habit of shedding new hope again and again- is none of your fault either.

2. About turning against oneself: when a child grows up in a consistently, or repeatedly hostile home where she witnesses ongoing harm done to her parents, and by her parents, the following often happens: the child believes that she is the cause of the hostility and harm, that she has created it, or that she is supposed to stop it from happening but failed to do: “I just feel very guilty… I feel very guilty for not helping or standing up for her.. I feel I am being a horrific abusive person.. Everyone says I’m lovely, but it seems too good to be true”.

Feeling like a bad person, she turns against that bad person, that is, she turns against herself. She is motivated to hurt that badness/ herself, and at times, she is motivated to destroy the badness/herself altogether: “Putting myself down constantly… when I was younger.. my plans were suicidal… I feel like I should be punished.. I just want to shout and rage at myself all the time… I’ve started getting suicidal thoughts again”, summer 2020.

3. About fearing future harm: not only do you believe that you caused past harm, you also believe that being a bad person, you are likely to cause future harm. Regarding your mother, “I think mum will get worse if I leave. I don’t want to make things worse”, and regarding an ex boyfriend: “I’m already assuming I will ruin things for us”.

4. About a girl’s empathy for her mother: “my poor mum.. she is a victim of abuse and struggling with addiction”- It is natural for a suffering child to focus on her suffering mother. In your own mind, you and your suffering became unimportant, and the only important entity was your mother: “I thought I was just existing for my mum’s benefit.. I do not know how to make myself important in my own mind”.

5. About being a lovely person: my experience communicating with you is that as apathetic as you often are, you are also a lovely person. You were always polite and appreciative in your communication with me and with other members, conscientious about replying to everyone who answered your threads, not leaving anyone unanswered. In your life otherwise, you are nice and supportive of your mother (“I am the only person who is nice to her in our family, or supportive”), and you are lovely to everyone (“Everyone says I’m lovely”).

6. About who upset whom: you wrote about your mother, “I feel guilty for upsetting her”- I don’t think that you had ever caused her any upset, but I do know that she has caused you a lot of upset.

7. About “here goes nothing”, which you wrote in your first sentence, in your first post, more than 4 years ago. I can’t end this post to you with something like: here was nothing. I can’t end this post with hopelessness about you, about me, and about the rest of the world. I hope, norit. I hope.

anita