Dear Linarra:

I read a few words only from your most recent post, just enough to see that you are okay, and felt a relief, feels good to know that you are here, and that you are okay. I remember that you told me that you are patient, so I hope that you are patient as you read the following. What I will do is respond to your yesterday’s post first (parts I didn’t yet respond to), before reading your most recent post. I will attend to one part at a time in your older post before going to the next, and then when I complete going  through your yesterday’s post and then today’s post, part by part, I will not edit anything I wrote before. To me, it is an honest, reliable way to process information and reach the best understanding possible:

“She prefers a broken child, so she can brag about how she’s been saving her“- so, she ..breaks the child in order to show to other adults that she is fixing a broken child. This is cruelty, to break a child on purpose, for any reason.

“if her adult child makes.. a life of her own. And the mother will be alone. Really alone because everyone in her life left her“- I learned that my mother was as alone when I lived with her as when I didn’t, as far as her subjective experience goes. If she felt a togetherness with me (or with anyone else), she wouldn’t be as  miserable as she was.

When your mother suggested to you that she does not want you to leave her, it was after she has left you long ago, emotionally… (if she was ever together with you, which I doubt). Her subjective experience of being “Really alone” cannot be undone if you keep living with her for the rest of her life.

“Does purposeful harm invalidate the affection?“- there is a difference between affection and love. Mengele who played a big part in the Auschwitz deaths of millions, and who performed medical experiments on prisoners, causing those patients unspeakable and unnecessary pain and suffering, this same Mengele felt affection to one of the prisoners: a beautiful 4-year old gypsy boy. He liked having the boy around him, dressed him in nice clothes, fed him, and expressed affection for him.. and then one day, he led the boy to the gas chambers and walked  away as if nothing happened.

Leading the boy to his death did not invalidate the affection Mengele felt for the boy, but I wouldn’t say that Mengele loved the boy. If he loved the boy, he would have made an exception for the boy and arrange to move the boy outside of Auschwitz, to safety.

“her lack of control over her emotions“- there is a difference between being impulsive and lacking control: if I strongly feel like doing something, and I know that doing it will hurt an innocent person, but I do it anyway because it feels so good to do it, it doesn’t mean that I was out of control. It means that I wanted more than anything to feel good, and doing what I did.. made me feel  good.

“Honestly… I never ever considered the idea my mother could NOT love me. Love me in a twisted way, sure, not love me? Then why did I bear all these years of abuse for…”- the abused child has to believe that her abusive parent loves her. If a mother beats her child 20 times a day, but feeds her once, the child will believe that her mother loves her. A child will perceive her reality any which way, as long as it means that her mother loves her. Because to believe that she doesn’t, means death, in the child’s mind.

“I think I would be more alright if I lost her love by standing up and taking distance for myself“- how can one lose a love that’s not there. I mean, didn’t she provide you by now with adequate evidence of her lack of love?

“The idea she might have never loved me? It would question so much of everything… It would make me doubt so much things about love“- taking the concept of mutual love out of a context where it does not apply (your mother/yourself),  can lead you to a context where mutual love does apply (a future relationship with a man perhaps).

“If I can’t feel, recognize or trust love then how I am supposed to survive emotionally?“- like I wrote before, a child has to believe that her mother loves her so to survive, it’s instinctive. It is therefore not your personal choice to have believed so far that she loves you. The challenge, as an adult, is to believe what is true.

“I am scared“- please remember that you can end our communication at any time if it scares you too much. I am surprised every time you do post for me, thinking beforehand that you may not.

“there were times during her crisis she really seemed to lose touch with reality, enough to make us wonder if she weren’t on edge of a temporary psychotic breakdown“- it’s part of the histrionic performance: the Actress’s job is to make her chosen Audience to feel/ believe that she is losing touch with reality. And just as the Actress returns to sane behavior when she is off stage/ outside the reach of the cameras, so does the histrionic.

A histrionic person is mentally ill, of course. Thing is, being mentally ill does not mean being dishonest. But your mother/ my mother are dishonest. If she was honest, she would say: I always feel alone. I feel alone when you are with me and when you are not with me. I really need attention. And I often feel angry at you when you didn’t do anything wrong, etc.  But she is dishonest, so she says things like: I feel alone when you are not with me, don’t leave me. I am never angry at you unless you make me angry. I love you, etc.

It was very difficult for me to understand and believe that my mother was/ is dishonest. When I finally understood it, I re-evaluated what she told me before, which I automatically believed earlier to be the truth.

“My mother also knows what she does is wrong. I think it is part of her motivation for self-destruction“- if I understand this sentence correctly, then you are assuming that she feels guilty for doing wrong to you (and to your siblings). I don’t know if she does.

“Remember when my mother hit me last week and I was alright? I defended myself, just by putting my arm in the way to prevent her foot kicks to reach another part of my body. Just pure reflex. Her foot hit my elbow. She hurt herself by trying to hurt me.. But she refused to go see a doctor when I told her to. She said she had worse when she was a child, she said that “maybe she didn’t want to heal it as a way to punish herself… She is very confusing in her ways of doing things. Trying to make sense of actions, especially in times of crisis, was making me insane. She makes everything look unreal and insane“-

– she is confusing because a lot of what she tells  you is untrue. You can’t make sense of a story with a mix of some truths and a lot of untruths. When she suggests regret for her actions, she may be lying. Look at her behavior over time: does honest regret fit into it (?)

For as long as you automatically believe that what she tells you is true, you will remain confused. It is hard for a daughter to perceive that her mother lies a lot. We can perceive that other people lie, but not our own mother! But really.. why is it possible (in our minds) that people out there lie a lot, but it is impossible that our own mother lies a lot (?)

“I will never know if there could have been any truth in her regrets“- you said it yourself (as I told you in the beginning of this post, I answer part by part, so I wrote the above paragraph before I read this sentence).

“We are (the children only) the owner of the house we’re living in, not her. That was the heritage of my father, it wasn’t very legal of him to disinherit his wife so she could have opposed it, but she let it happen, playing the self-sacrificing heroic victim“- does this mean that you can legally evict her?

“Long after, we discovered she secretly stole a lot of money from my brother’s heritage while he was a minor. While she was doing so and we ignored it..”- you wrote earlier that she is not materialistic. Stealing money from her son points to being materialistic, among other things… (Maybe she told you and your siblings that she is not materialistic and you believed her).

“She has been afraid she would be thrown out by us. Probably because she’s aware of her wrongdoings… she has been the one to make sure we knew we couldn’t legally throw her out as long as she paid the bill of this house we own. And well, legal possibility or not, we aren’t heartless enough to throw her out”- to choose to live with her, if it is a choice, would be a heartless choice for you and for your siblings.

“Even if we were heartless, we aren’t able to function without her yet. And she knows it. And she uses this power to keep the abuse going. But, you know, not too much, because she fears the day we’ll be able to function without her. She fears an act of revenge from us”– if she feared revenge, she would try to make things right for you and for your siblings, so to de-motivate revenge. I doubt she fears revenge from her adult children.

“Whether the empathy and love she expresses sometimes are genuine or fake, twisted or inexistent“-

– regarding separating the truths from the lie in regard to what she has been telling you all these years, as well as separating her genuine expressions of emotions from fake expressions, think of it like this: you are presented with a chocolate cake that has (sorry for the image, but I can’t think of anything more fitting), pieces of human feces in it. Will it be worthy to break the cakes into small pieces and separate the chocolate from the feces in order to eat the chocolate parts? You can never be sure that any piece of chocolate is free from a smear of feces. Better throw away the whole cake.

“in the end, she broke the relationship and the trust to a point of no return“- but part of you is still waiting for her to regain the trust (?)

“I am okay, I will be. The hurt cannot be avoided, it has to happen at some point. And it is helpful to have your input to help me think and I appreciate you’re keeping me company during this exploration, it would be harder to cope alone, the distress would have been greater I think.

“I am mature enough to take those things, but I am not guarded enough to be above getting emotional or vulnerable (not during this conversation, not with you). If someone else had given me this input, in other circumstances, I would probably had been too focused on controlling my reaction to give the input a real thought. But I’m allowing it with you. And emotions like fear, pain, or distress can happen. But I trust you, and I trust myself to be okay once the emotions are done expressing“-

Right now, more than 2 hours since I started this post, I read the above for the first time, and I am touched by the sentiment there, that you trust me. It means a lot, to me. That you trust yourself feels even better!

“The idea of being loved by her, even unhealthily, was among the few good things she brought to me. Even if it was for wrong reasons or an illusion. The idea some part of me could be lovable was reassuring, and I chose to believe that and built confidence in that. It is a bit shaking, to remove some foundations/reinforcement of these beliefs. But I guess it doesn’t make them untrue. I can be lovable, her feelings about me shouldn’t be more relevant than anyone else’s, or my own’s“-

– amazing, just as I wrote above: a child has to believe that her mother loves her. You developed what I just stated to: as an adult, it is possible to believe otherwise, and be open to someone else’s love

“I can be okay with the idea she never loved me. But the act and the deception are scary. I guess I can still learn to recognize better, to not see what I would prefer to see in order to not risk being endangered again by an illusion of love“- again, amazing! You and I developed our thoughts in parallel ways although at different times (you six hours ago, I .. a few hours after you submitted your recent post), coming to a meeting place at the end, the same conclusion.. as if we had a conversation at the same time.. amazing!

anita