Dear Girija:

I wrote to you: “your mother knows what sweet you like… but she keeps offering you bitterness“, and you asked: “are you speaking metaphorically?” – when I wrote to you that your mother knows what sweet you like, I was literal. It reminds me of my mother being generous enough to go through the trouble of taking a bus to a particular store that sold my favorite, expensive marzipan cake, and doing so repeatedly.

When saying that your mother offers you bitterness, I was metaphorical. My mother’s offered me painful histrionic displays of her misery, blaming me for adding to her misery (I was not at all guilty for such)- that was my mother offering me her bitterness, feeding it to me. If I was given the opportunity to choose, I would have easily chosen to see her happy over a million marzipan cakes!

“The fear of judgement that gets reactivated around people; how do I win over that? Both in the moment and long-term to ultimately not have it at all” – based on my personal experience, the first step to take is to no longer be in contact with your primary judgers (parents/ family members) who judged you when you were a child and who keep judging you still. Without no new contact with them, you stop to the ongoing stream of judgments.

Second step is to tackle the mental representative of your primary judgers, aka the inner critic. It’s the one that keeps projecting the primary judgers into other people, making you feel uncomfortable around people even when they don’t judge you at all (“once there are other people around, I just feel weird. Like I want to get away from them. That if I stay too long, they’ll judge me“).

I asked you if we covered the strategy of your mother controlling you by expressing that she is upset, and you wrote: “it just happened a moment ago. My mother brings up something about a cousin and what she is doing wrong, and I agree with her on some things and not others and my sister has to constantly interject like she is my mother’s attorney… They’ll have a conversation over me. My mom sometimes pretends I didn’t say the sentence I did and move on like I never spoke” – reads like your mother does not welcome your independent thinking, rejecting it, and your sister understands this, and wanting to please your mother, she sides with her.

“Why does my mom need backup, she is the strongest of the 3?” – your mother is not stronger than her two daughters. She abuses her power as a mother. This abuse doesn’t make her strong. It only makes her feel strong from time to time.

“I am going to reduce my interactions with them over time without catching their attention that I’m pulling away. It will help me see if I feel better away from them. I have trouble being by myself, the depression comes back but I’ll see what I can do to change that” – I have no doubt that if you move out and live away from your mother, when you do, it will not be an instant solution to your mental health challenges, and there will be plenty of times when you will feel worse, not better. This is why I am realistic about the process of healing. I know from personal experience how difficult it is. If I could go back in time, I would have looked for quality psychotherapy and I would have ended contact with my mother decades before I finally did.

anita