Dear ninibee:

“it is also true I have lived away from her for 4 years prior to now, and still experience great amounts of shame, so I wonder how much her physical presence matters in that”- very good point. If the solution to shame was as simple as no longer being in the physical presence of the person who shamed us-  oh, how wonderful life would be!

Problem is, we carry her shaming, blaming voice with us and we hear it outside her physical presence. Her voice gets replayed in our brain, again and again, and we hear her tone, her words in what other people are saying, projecting her into others, often inaccurately.

“Both my therapist and my friend have said to get far, far away from her.. But sometimes is seems fine”- yes, sometimes it seems fine, I know. Not because things changed and are better, but simply because we get used to Bad, numb ourselves to it best our brain is capable of, and sometimes we feel fine, even joyful-

– not because things are better, but because no one can suffer all the time: the brain takes its breaks from misery and manufactures joy, be it by daydreaming and otherwise.

“They will pay for me to live somewhere else if I am going to college.. I don’t know. I feel lost”- I think it’s time to enroll in college, choose a subject matter that feels most interesting, something most likely to trigger some passion in you, and enroll, I say!

anita