Dear Helcat:

“Well done on establishing those boundaries and protecting yourself, congratulations on breaking the cycle of abuse Anita. The circumstances you were born into were not your fault” – thank you, Helcat!

“I’m sorry that your mother wasn’t able to treat you with the love and kindness you deserve” – just the other day, I had a dental appointment, and as the dental hygienist used a sharp, mental dental scraper uncomfortably too close to my gums, I relaxed so nicely because I focused on her soft face (that which I could see above her mask), her soft voice as she hummed to a song, taking in her “please” and “thank you” as she instructed me kindly to move my head to the right or left, etc. And I thought to myself: oh, how I wish this was my mother!

“I believe that love is based on treating people with kindness and respect” – I whole heartedly and whole mindedly agree.

“I see that you are kind person and have helped many people” – thank you again. But I doubt that I help anyone, although I would like to think that I do. I am only words on a screen, and most people need so much more than words on a screen.

I’ve been reading your empathetic and patient replies to members, and I am impressed, if I may say so!

“My mother was institutionalised because she expressed a desire to harm myself and my brother to a doctor” – oh, how I wish my mother would have been institutionalised for the same. My mother often enough announced in a very l0ud, threatening voice, that she was going to murder me (that’s the word she used, translated), and sometimes in front of people (at other times the neighbors could easily hear), but… crickets. No interruption from the outside. In the culture and circumstances in which I grew up, children were the property of their parents, and it was considered inappropriate and impolite for others to interfere with how people handle their property.

“We were placed in short term care whilst she recovered in hospital” – It would have been a dream come true for me, to be placed away from my mother. I used to daydream of being away from her, never to return to her. One of the neighbors where I grew up was actively psychotic, for hours she stood in the yard right underneath the apartment where I grew up, being a military officer, in her own mind, giving loud orders to her soldiers. No one ever stopped her, no one intervened. Her psychotic episodes ended when she finally got tired and needed to rest.

“When she was released from hospital, I refused to return to her ‘care’ because of the abuse” – a child given the option to not return to her mother? Unheard of, when I was growing up.

“Initially, I gave the option of pursuing a relationship with my mother from a distance on the condition that she acknowledged her abusive… I chose to cut contact entirely. The state provided free access to child therapy for the abuse at home. This probably explains why I able to insist on setting boundaries as a teenager” -I am so glad that the state intervened and provided you with emotional and practical help, and that as a result, you made the right decision in regard to ending all contact with your mother!

I hope that you didn’t mind my comparisons above; it helps me sometimes to share my own experience as I read about a member’s experience. Please let me know if you’d rather I don’t share this way with you, in the future. Also, when I try to understand a member more than before, I am trying at the same time to understand myself more. And so, this is what I will attempt doing next.

First, I want to acknowledge that you are indeed not new to healing and recovery and that you invested lots of time and energy in the process with excellent results: “I have had a lot of therapy and done a lot of work on my mental health… The pain continues to get smaller… Generally, I am in significantly less emotional pain these days… Over the years I have made some progress with recovery, reducing the amount of physical pain I’m in… Thankfully, my therapist helped me deal with a lot of the emotional pain and break the cycle of re-experiencing that abuse. What I experience now is a fraction of what I experienced as a child“.

This is what you wrote about your love for your mother (I am extracting the core experience out of your added analysis/ commentary, no matter how accurate the analysis) “saying she loved me was like offering crumbs to someone starving… I did love her… I longed for her to be able to love me“.

You were terrified of her on one hand (“Her temper could be triggered by the smallest thing… I was terrified of her“), but you loved her on the other hand, starving for love, longing to be loved by her. And angry (“After many years of therapy, I feel that this was the first time I have been able to safely express anger about it“)-

– This is a powerful combination of emotions: starved for love, terrified, angry.

You wrote in your original post: “I have had a lot of therapy and done a lot of work on my mental health. It feels like this habitual thought is one of the last things to resolve“, in your recent post: “children are inherently bonded to their parents“, and you asked me two posts ago: “I would appreciate any advice you could give about processing my pain from the past regarding my mother seeing me as a mistake” –

– My thoughts and best attempt at an answer:

(1) Your suicidal ideation as well as worrying and catastrophising- are all habits/ tendencies of the mind (“these thoughts of suicide ideation are habitual… I have a habit of worrying… I have a tendency to catastophise”). These are physical habits of the brain/ body, involving connections/ pathways having been established between neurons in your brain as a result of your repeated experiences of abuse, nerve cells releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters and endocrine glands releasing hormones into the bloodstream, all happening as reactions to certain circumstances, such as stresses at work and arguments taking place.

These physical habits of the brain/ body are not unchangeable. “Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity, or brain plasticity, is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. These changes range from individual neuron pathways making new connections, to”, etc. (Wikipedia). What you learned in psychotherapy already caused some neural plasticity to take place in your brain, and what you learn further will lead to more neural plasticity.

(2) There is no stronger bond than between a young child and her mother, and when that bond involves severe abuse in childhood, the bond lasts and lasts into adulthood. My felt bonding with my mother also rears its ugly head once in a while, to a lesser extent than before and less frequently, but it’s still here. I think that it’s similar in your case.

It is a trauma kind of bonding, involving the traumatizing combination of feeling love for your mother and being abused by her. In your mental bonding with your mother, exists this belief that you are a mistake. The more resolved your mental bonding with your mother, the more dissolved the destructive beliefs held in that bond.

This may be a good time for some more quality psychotherapy, to take you the extra mile.

anita