Dear ninibee:

Welcome back to the forums. The following is mostly a copy of the post I sent you earlier on one of your previous threads because I was not able to post on this current thread.

Your first thread was in June 2019, your second, November 2019, third, January-February 2020, Fourth, February-March 2020, Fifth, April 2021, and sixth and current thread, February 20, 2022. In your last post on your 5th thread, back on April 15, 2021: “I start to feel great amounts of anxiety and shame around what I post. I feel like I never should have never should’ve opened my mouth… I worry I waste people’s time on here… that I am always spinning around in circles and being difficult and weird and unreachable”.

In your new, 6th thread submitted yesterday, you shared that you are in a relationship since December 2021: “I can see in his actions and in what he says that he cares for me. But I no longer feel his care. I feel fear, doubt, loneliness, anger, emptiness, distrust. I hate to admit it, but it feels like nothing he could ever do would ever be enough for me to feel okay or secure”.

Not surprisingly, you ended your original post with: “These past few nights I have wished I could undo this time of us talking to each other again altogether” – similar to wanting to undo your 6th thread right after you submitted your original post there.

I went over your previous threads, and I’ll get right to the point. I think that your emotional trouble, particularly your strong sense of shame, originated in the way your mother treated you starting when you were a baby. You shared that your mother has germaphobia. You wrote: “When I have watched her hold or interact other people’s babies, I feel like I can sense her nervousness and discomfort. She seems very unnatural with a baby, like she has not ever been a mother before. So, I assume it would’ve been the same when I was a baby… I was an icky and unpredictable object to her“.

You were particularly icky to her when on your very first airplane ride, as a baby, you vomited, following which you developed a fear of vomiting in enclosed spaces: “I only know of one traumatic incident with vomiting when I was a baby and that was when I was strapped into a car seat on my first plane ride, and I threw up all over myself…  My absolute worst fear is being trapped in an enclosed space with vomit“.

Your mother was uncomfortable when interacting with you as a baby and she was disgusted by your bodily fluids and secretions, including vomit. I imagine that during that too-long of a plane ride, she expressed her disgust plenty. As a result, you absorbed her disgust and grew up feeling disgusted with yourself and expecting everyone else to be rightly disgusted with you as well. You wrote: “my mom was not able to accept me on a bodily level from the time I was a baby“, and you wrote: “I am a quite disagreeable and dislikable person… I leave a bad taste in people’s mouths… I feel like it is something bad inside of me that people can sense… I feel… disgust with myself… all the times I made someone uncomfortable. I did not mean for that to happen” –

– your vomit, other bodily baby secretions (saliva, urine, feces) were very disagreeable and dislikable to your mother, left a bad taste in her mouth, and you felt, as a baby and onward, that there had to be “something bad inside” of you. You felt that you made your mother feel uncomfortable because of that something-bad-inside, and you were sorry, felt that you didn’t mean for that to happen: to secrete saliva and urine and all that babies naturally secrete, having no choice on the matter.

You wrote regarding your mother: “There is this feeling that you cannot get away with anything she wouldn’t approve of, so many things need to be kept a secret” – the beginning of her disapproval was for your bodily secretions and there was no way for the baby that you were to … keep it a secret!

Still regarding your mother, you wrote (you are referring to yourself here as an adult): “I would hide my dirty laundry… would feel anxious about her moving my clothes from the washer to the dryer” – even after your clothes were washed, you were still afraid that some secret will come out, some secret secretion that wasn’t successfully removed by the washing machine, a secret to be discovered by your mother if she moved your washed clothes from the washer to the dryer.

“I start to feel great amounts of anxiety and shame around what I post. I feel like I never should have never should’ve opened my mouth“, you wrote back on April 15, 2021, as if… when you open your mouth, something bad (vomit) comes out.

Regarding your current boyfriend, you wrote: “I hate to admit it, but it feels like nothing he could ever do would ever be enough for me to feel okay or secure” – nothing he could do, but there is something you can do.  I hope to read back from you, ninibee!

anita