Dear Nar:

You are welcome. I hope you keep enjoying Hungary!

You shared about your former friend that her father “watched her being beaten as a kid and did nothing about it”, and yet, she “gave all her love to her father who she still deeply admires”- that’s because she needed to be loved by someone, so she made-believe that she was. Her father was there not hitting her, so he was the one.

You asked a few questions regarding my cutting contact with my mother: “did you try to make her see how much she hurt you?”- she already saw how much she hurt me too many times to count, “did you try to.. change your relationship?”- too many times to count, failed for decades, and then I cut contact. “Did she ever apologize”?- there was a vague mention of something one time that may have been meant as a kind-of an apology, “offer to change?”- no.

Back to you: “I need to see if my actual parents now are able to accept that they did hurt me and my sister.. and apologise for it, so both of us can heal”- apologies have time limits. If a parent hits a child and apologizes soon after, there may be healing power to that apology, but not years later. Parents have a lot of power over their children when the children are young, not when the children are adults. In other words, a parent has the power to make a child sick, but the same parent does not have the power to heal the adult-child.

When a parent apologises to the adult child- if the apology is sincere- it may be a beginning of a sincere relationship with that parent, but the apology does not undo damage done in childhood, it does not heal.

“in my nightmares I often try to wake up and I shout. I call for my mother when I shout and try to wake up… some of my dreams also suggest.. I was scared for my mother and wanted to protect her as well as was fearful of her”-

– for a young child, when the mother appears to be in danger, the child instinctively feels that she/ he is in danger, same as a baby deer being in a safe spot, watching her mother being attacked by a lion. The baby deer does not think: this is terrible for my mother, but I am safe. The baby deer is scared: who will feed me? Who will take care of me? Without my mother, I will die!

“I am still quite confused about this and trying to work out my childhood fears”- you are welcome to share more about it, if and whenever you want to, it may help.

anita