Dear Linarra:

In your original post, July 13 2021, you wrote: “I had a difficult childhood”.

Yesterday,  Aug 27 2021, you wrote: “today she came into my room to speak about the anxiety she was feeling about my brother… This week she also called the cops on him an evening (and disturbed the peacefulness of the house, waking me from my sleep)… she went crazy to believe he was kidnapped… she was screaming all over the place and was telling to my sister and me that she would kill us if anything happened to him…My brother had to go home after 2 hours of hanging out with his colleagues after he discovered she called the cops, and everyone’s evening was wasted while my mother went to bed without an apology for any of her actions….Yesterday, as I was showering, she came in and started talking to me..  she invited herself as I was showering, breaking intimacy… but intimacy doesn’t exist in this house”

Clearly, you are having a difficult childhood. Your difficult childhood is not in the past. It is still happening. Three children (2 girls and a boy) are still living with their mother, living the lives she allows them to live.

Back to what you wrote in your original post: “I had a difficult childhood, even if it took me a long time to acknowledge that. It was neglectful, humiliating, shameful, and sometimes violent’-

– your childhood still is all these things: it is still difficult, it is still neglectful, it is still humiliating, it is still shameful, and it is still sometimes violent.

In the last couple of days she entered your room and the bathroom while you were showering naked, “breaking intimacy… but intimacy doesn’t exist in this house”. Question is, why isn’t there a lock on the inside of your bedroom door so that she cannot enter your room whenever she wishes, and why is there no lock on the inside of the bathroom door, so that she cannot enter the bathroom while you are showering.

I looked for the answer in our Aug 14-16 conversation in regard to why you don’t have a lock for your bedroom (I didn’t know at the time that she enters the bathroom while you shower when she wishes). Your answer was: “I don’t feel the need for it, I don’t feel distress at being invaded by my family usually”, and you added that your anxiety is about “people of the outside world”, as opposed to your mother.

I then asked you: “no fear of your mother entering your room.. meaning you don’t feel she is a source of danger”? You answered Aug 16: “if my actions and emotions are under control, this environment is… manageable. My mother leaves me alone most of the time because I behave right enough… I fear not for me… my brain is currently too broken and exposed to this environment to feel or care for myself”.

What I am understanding today is that in the past, as a young child, when you asserted your need for privacy, she reacted by abusing you even more, so you stopped asserting yourself with her: it was less painful to allow her to invade you than it was for you to try and stop her from invading you. Fast forward, as a woman in her 20s, you are used to allowing her to abuse you.

Taken from the quote above: “if my actions and emotions are under control, this environment is… manageable”, Aug 15: “I had been nothing most of my life, I was just a thing adapting to chaos, a thing that had somehow learnt to not want anything, to not need, to not expect anything for my future, to not be a person… just an empty shell who genuinely didn’t care about most things”-

– She was and is an unpredictable storm, moving fast, then resting, then (you never know when, why or how) she erupts again into a storm. You adapted to her by becoming the opposite of a storm: motionless, unmoving, stationary, standing in place.. being a thing, or a nothing, an empty shell. A nothing, or an empty shell doesn’t get hurt much when the storm hits. If there was a living-breathing-feeling person inside that shell- that person would get hurt badly when the storm hits.

You wrote yesterday, Aug 27: “For long, I felt guilty for not being able to empathize, for yelling at her when she was hurting me”- an empty shell doesn’t have the right to defend itself because.. there’s nothing within the shell do defend. She was (and is) hurting you but your empathy is for her because in your mind, she is the Person, and you are the Nothing. A nothing does not deserve empathy.

Still yesterday: “As I was in the shower, calm but still wondering if I was an abuser, I wondered what you would think of this. To be safe, I acknowledge the fact the might be mutual abuse going on, that way I keep the door open to learning and becoming a better person. In the end, I told my mother ‘If I am bad to you, you would agree it would be better for us to not live together, right?’ I don’t remember what she answered or if she even answered, because she often doesn’t answer”-

– Your mother enters the bathroom while you are taking a shower; you don’t enter the bathroom while she is taking a shower. She invades your privacy anywhere, anytime, touching your private body parts, hitting you at times- you never do these things to her.

She screams, you sometimes scream back, you sometimes talk back (you are not a perfectly empty shell after all) and you don’t know who is abusing whom. Because in your mind, to not abuse, you have to be a perfectly empty shell: no feelings, no needs, no wants, no voice.. no thing. To never talk back, to never raise your voice.. to be a perfect victim.

In your original post, July 13, you wrote: “I am not able to get a job (and honestly don’t even want to if it isn’t meaningful…). I struggle when I have to go out of my home for about anything… don’t feel comfortable outside my home. Especially in unknown places, or with people around”. On Aug 21, you wrote: My mother saw me as I prepared to go out this morning. She said ‘You’re going out? Alone? Where does this idea come from? It is dangerous to go out alone you know‘”-

-you adapted all too well to your mother, so much so that you feel that the danger is outside your home, when really, it has always been inside your home. Your mother brought five new people  into the world, turned them all into her victims,  proceeded to inflict much harm and destruction on each and every one of her victims, telling you, one of her victims: “It is dangerous to go out alone you know”.

My summary today: The danger for you has been and still is inside, not outside. Your adaptation to the inside of your home has been so effective that the danger for you feels like it is outside. The empty shell is not completely empty, but it/you need help to fill that shell with more of you.

The title of your thread is: “Healing and becoming functional”. You are seeking to heal from abuse that is still happening. Every day and every night, you are living with a woman who is either abusing you, or is about to abuse you at any time, you just don’t know when, why or how: will she next scream at you from the living room or from the kitchen, or will she storm into your room or into the bathroom screaming? Will she hit you, will she touch your private parts, what shameful, accusatory, threatening thing will she say next, etc.

“Healing and becoming functional” is not possible when living in these abusive circumstances.

anita