Dear noname:

In your previous thread, “How to FEEL love?”, on July 29, 2017, you shared that you told your mother that you didn’t feel loved as a child, and she admitted that indeed it was true: she didn’t show you affection, left you alone a whole lot and so on.

“After this conversation”, you wrote back in July 29, 2017,  “I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of me.. I finally have the permission to stop blaming myself, and to really begin to love myself through empathy.. It finally feels like it’s not all my fault”.

Later on, in March 2020, you shared that conversations with her were “always criticism of what I’m doing to hurt her and never about the abundance of things I’ve done right… she is always complaining about us and how  we treat her. I’m sick of it and don’t feel like defending myself anymore against her opinions of me”.

Those conversations did not start in March 2020, but way closer to March 2017. The relief you felt following the March 2017 conversation did not last long because she did not change her behavior, she kept blaming you and guilt- tripping you after allegedly taking responsibility for hurting you throughout your childhood. Her alleged admission of Feb 2017 served only to confuse you and delay your healing.

Her words and that bit of crying in Feb 2017 was not significant enough in her mind and heart, to motivate her to change her misbehavior toward you. To me, this means that she was not sincere back then or since. Your ongoing contact with her keeps hurting you because you are dealing again and again, and yet again, with an insincere woman who doesn’t really care for you or about you, not enough to stop hurting you. Every time you communicate with this woman, you are hurting yourself more.

True, ending contact with her is far from being a magical solution, but it has to be a beginning. Also, you can’t see yourself as you truly are before you see her as she truly is. The truth shall set you free from sickness based on.. false thinking and false beliefs.

Backing away from the topic of your mother, regarding hope and depression: you keep comparing yourself unfavorably to other people. When I was most depressed and comparing myself unfavorably to everyone else, at one point, I let go of hoping to have a better life/ to catch up to others. Once I gave up the hope, my life didn’t improve as a result, but I felt much better. It was a great relief.

Connected to this, a certain story made an impression on me at the time: someone asked, how do you free yourself from a jail cell? The answer was something like, stop wanting/ hoping to get out. For a person in a jail cell, the desire and hope to get out of the cell is a source of suffering. Once a person accepts an unfavorable circumstance, the torture lessens a whole lot.

I hope you are okay, noname. And this hope is not causing me suffering. It makes me smile as I imagine you smiling, carefree, if only for a moment.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by .