anita,

I would like to start by saying, I do not know if I ever saw you as cold and unempathetic. Perhaps I just default to thinking any possible sign of an issue must be something I did. Either way, I am glad it is okay and feels better now to both of us.

You have covered a lot in your post and talked much about my mother/childhood. I forgot how much I have posted on here. Quite clearly I have been stuck in the same patterns and ways thinking…

You said:

Fast forward a year and a month, April 2021: you live with your mother, living “with unrelenting shame”- it is no surprise.

I had an inkling that that this may come up,  but it is also true I have lived away from her for 4 years prior to now, and still experienced great amounts of shame, so I wonder how much her physical presence matters in that. I was told by my therapist (who I think you did not approve of for some reason, but I still have virtual meetings with) that moving home would bring up many old patterns. He described it as walking into a vortex, where much of the progress I made gets thrown out as soon as I walk in this house. I have had some moments where it feels like this. I also want to add that my older brother moved home about 6 months ago as well for financial reasons (I have only been here 2 months), and my dad works from home now. It is both better and worse to have them around. I do prefer it to being alone with my mom.

Clearly, you need to get far, far away from your mother and use your parents’ money to live away from them and to attend quality psychotherapy.

Both my therapist and my friend have said to get far, far away from her as well. I sometimes feel that way. But sometimes it seems fine. My friend tells me “It is like you know you are living with a rattlesnake under your bed, but tell me “oh it’s fine, it hasn’t rattled in a while””  ..and I think about that a lot.

You say to use my parents money to live away from them. This is tricky. That’s what I was doing, and they didn’t want to do it anymore because I was going nowhere in life. They will pay for me to live somewhere else if I am going to college… I don’t know. I feel lost.