Dear Nar:

You are welcome, and thank you. I re-read your posts incorporating the recent post into my overall understanding. I will attend to one topic in this post, I call it Mothers and Fear.

In your recent post you wrote: “I have a feeling my fear and OCD runs much deeper than just my mom’s behaviour or the way she brought me up. I can’t blame everything that happened to me and issues I developed on my mother”-

– I agree that you can’t hold your mother responsible for experiencing fear because everyone experiences fear. But you can hold her responsible for your experience of excessive fear when her behavior generated excessive fear in you when you were a child.

You wrote earlier: “I know our relationship with our mothers or the lack of it is probably what shapes us most to be who we are today”- I agree. And when a mother generates excessive fear in her child, that excessive fear does not disappear when the child becomes an adult

Think of this image: the doe (female deer) feeds her fawn (baby deer) when the fawn is hungry. When it is cold and windy, the doe protects her fawn with her big, warm body, and at night, in the dark, when the sounds of coyotes or a mountain lion (predators) can be heard, the fawn is alarmed but quickly feels better as she snuggles against her mother’s warm, protective body.

For the fawn, danger is out there– where the predators are. Here, with her mother, the fawn is safe. She depends on her mother, and she trusts her mother: she knows that whenever she is in danger, her mother will protect her.

Now imagine this: one day, the fawn snuggles against her mother’s warm body, looking for the comfort she trusts to be there, but the doe moves away from the fawn. The fawn is in disbelief, she gets closer to her mother.. and yet, her mother moves farther away. The fawn is shocked, the fawn is traumatized.

Imagine the doe turning against her fawn one day, biting the fawn. The fawn is in physical pain. Danger is no longer out there, danger is also here! The fawn is now excessively scared of everything: of hunger, of the cold, of the dark, of the rain and of the sounds of predators… because the fawn can no longer depend on her mother to protect her, and because sometimes, the doe is .. predatory.

Luckily for fawns, does do not reject their fawns, nor do they turn against their fawns, so danger is always out there. In nature, traumatized in the way I described (if it happened), a fawn will not survive long enough to become a doe.

The fawn in my example can’t blame her mother for being scared of the sounds of predators (and of the cold and of the dark etc., etc.) because all deer are afraid of the sounds of predators, but she can blame her mother for her excessive fear of the sounds of predators and of every other potential danger.

anita