Der Linarra:

I will answer your recent post the way I did yesterday, part by part:

I wrote to you: “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., and you responded with: “These words are a relief. While this statement seems obvious (from an intellectual standpoint), my emotions are still making me doubt sometimes“- you can see that the statement in bold is true, but you doubt yourself because you still believe that she loves you, that she is capable of loving. So, on one hand you see cruelty, on the other you think/ feel something like: she can’t be cruel, she loves me!

“I am, unfortunately, prone to self-gaslight… when I do tell my side of the story I almost never fail to fall into the trap of gaslighting myself. What if the thing that I say isn’t true? What if I am being dramatic? What if this accusation is me abusing my mother? A most dreadful thought that nourishes my anxiety every time I speak about it. And it is absolutely born from my mother acting like she was abused every time I… pointed out what she was doing was abusive“-

– it is as if I wrote this paragraph (with two exceptions: I never pointed to my mother that what she was doing was abusive, and I learned the term gaslighting later in life, and never used it). It is recent that I no longer doubt/ gaslight myself. It feels heavenly to not experience THAT mental torture! Like I wrote above, it happens because we believe what is not true and so, we get confused and we keep questioning ourselves. We also confuse ourselves with our mothers. We are not clear about who-is-who: who is the abuser, who is the abused; who is the one who loves, who is the one who doesn’t love, etc.

* Talking about mother-daughter love: my mother loved her mother, I loved my mother, my mother did not love me. Same with you, isn’t it, according to what you shared.

“she denied/didn’t listen to my suffering so much I started doubting I was suffering“- parents are like mirrors to their children. You suffered and you needed to see your suffering in the mirror: in your mother’s eyes, in her facial expressions, in her voice, in her words. You didn’t see it in the mirror= you didn’t know that it’s there (you still suffer but you doubt that you do). You still doubt your suffering.. are you still looking for it in that mirror (?)

“There’s a memory that comes into my mind…I was trying to make my mother understand I was suffering… her immediate reaction was to express how much (more) SHE was suffering. I was frustrated and after my words failed to make her understand I wasn’t trying to deny her feelings there but she was denying mine… I slapped myself, in front of her and I told her ‘That’s what you’re doing to me.’ I was crying, I was overwhelmed. Her reaction: she looked at me with strong negative emotions and left the room“-

– this makes me think of the who-is-who I mentioned above: who is whom and who is doing what to whom. You were trying to explain to her that she was the one hurting you, not the other way around, but she reacted angrily, expressing to you.. once again that.. it was you were hurting her.. not the other way around. Similar to my mother hitting me and saying that I was the one who hurt her arm.

I suppose I kept waiting for years and decades for my mother to finally tell me who is whom and outside that one sentence she said about her doing wrong to me, there was nothing coming my way from her, as far as clarity. I had to get my clarity away from her.

“The lesson I learned from this time was about the impossibility of communication“- I think that I waited for my mother to give me clarity long after I gave up on communicating with her.. meaning, I didn’t really give up.

“The woman who was worried for me for things I didn’t want her to worry, wasn’t worried“- when my mother passionately protected me from other people (ex. hitting and yelling at the teacher that called me “auntie” which offended me for some reason, I don’t remember), didn’t do so out of love for me, but (confused with who-is-whom and who did what to whom), she rushed to protect herself from someone long ago who hurt her, or she rushed to punish someone in her past that hurt her.

“I am allowed to… not care about her feelings as I take some distance“- in your mother’s subjective experience, there’s always been a distance between her and you. She felt close to her mother, not to you. You felt close to her and you imagine that she feels close to you and that she will hurt if you take some distance. All along, not realizing that there is no distance to take, it’s already there as far as she is concerned.

“While I am at peace when replying to you. The peace easily turns into anxiety once the response is sent. ‘What if it is too much? What if I am too much? What if something I say might make her want to leave the conversation?’“- the length of our posts are sometimes too much for me. We both respond to multiple items in each other’s long posts.. creating more long posts that take a lot of time and energy out of me. Maybe we can produce shorter posts. But I have no intent to no longer communicate with you. It’s the other way around, I hope to keep communicating with you for months.. or for as long as you want to.

“I am overwhelming myself, no doubt with that if the anxiety is any hint. I do not know if it is the challenge of my thoughts/beliefs, if it is because this conversation is powerful, if it is the amount of vulnerability I am allowing with you… I don’t know yet.  But, wow, it’s been a long since had so many lasting and intense freakouts… It is frightening, but it isn’t negative”– I wish I answered you first this morning, in case you’ve been anxious waiting for my reply. I answered you last because I wasn’t looking forward to the length of your post and the one I expected to put together, particularly given that the content of our conversation is indeed powerful for me too, and exhausting.

I’ll tell you what, I will submit this post next, just in case you are waiting and respond to the rest of your post in the next post.

anita