Dear Mermaid/ Reader:

In May 2014, at 29 years old, you had a “kind of epiphany moment of wanting to totally change my belief system. I read ‘The power of now’ by Tolle and it all made sense, I felt I was awake and able to do the things he suggested, I felt so happy and alive” – the power of self-help and inspirational books is temporary, like watching an inspiring movie, you leave the movie theater feeling inspired, hopeful, powerful… but it doesn’t last long. “The Power of Now” too quickly becomes the power of then. It takes a lot of post-epiphany work, time and dedication to change a belief system and to experience a lasting change in the way one mentally and emotionally experiences life.

Inspired by your epiphany, at 29, you “said, ‘screw it!’ I’m just going to go and be with him”, so you moved in with the man in France, but alas, your mental and emotional experience of life remained the same as what you experienced growing up with your highly anxious mother: ““My Mum is highly anxious and has always worried what others think of her and whenever we have people round it’s always so stressful as if 50 were coming round when there were only 5!“.

This is what you experienced with the man you lived with as a 29-year-old: “I can’t feel at ease, I feel down and worry I made the wrong decision…  doubts and questions (are) 24/7 … I get extremely anxious and feel so guilty… I don’t feel settled… I am thinking and analyzing allllll the time, I just can’t BE… I have such tension in my head like it’s being squeezed in a vice“.

Growing up with a highly anxious mother means to grow up highly anxious yourself, (using your words in regard to your experience living with the man in France:), it means to grow up feeling uneasy, unsettled, to “feel down and (to) worry… extremely anxious and feel so guilty“, to “doubt and question” if you said the wrong things or expressed something in a way that upset your mother, feeling guilty for having upset her, for not being able to calm her, for not being able to fix things, “thinking and analyzing allllll the time“: what did I do to make my mum anxious, what should I do now, what do I need to do next to make her feel better, “I just can’t BE… I have such tension in my head like it’s being squeezed in a vice“.

When you moved out to your own flat in France, no longer living with the man, you still experienced the same imprinted mental and emotional experience of childhood:  “I have since moved into a small studio flat on my own to have some space and create my own life in France…. but there’s so much tension in my body… I have these feeling like a foreboding that ‘I’m just not right/me’… Like you’re living your life but floating above your body“.

Next, you moved back to your parents in the UK, but “thing is, the peace I was longing for hasn’t come… just feel STUCK… I am very sad… I just feel so lost… inside is deep emptiness and anger that I can’t ‘fix things’… I feel deeply depressed, anxious and lost…there’s the constant feeling that ‘nothing’s normal’… I feel like I’m going mad… depressed and anxious… so desperately low”.

An epiphany is only the very beginning in the years-long process of changing a distressing mental and emotional experience that was imprinted in us during the long years of our childhoods. An inspiration and will-power are not enough to make any change.

I think that becoming a devoted Christian at 16, was about trying to change your imprinted experience of childhood by sort of switching allegiance from your mother (parents), to God, hoping for a stronger parent to calm your anxiety/ to ease that vice’s squeezing hold on your head. But religion cannot change the mental and emotional imprint from childhood long-term any more than an adult romantic relationship can. You shared that while being a Christian, you experienced “never feeling good enough and extreme guilt” – just like you experienced growing up with your mother.

When you attended therapy, you wanted to deal “directly with the trauma of loss of (your) religion“, resisting your therapist’s efforts “to work with memories from the past… before religion came along“. Addressing the trauma of living with a highly anxious mother, especially doing so while still living with her at 29, was too threatening.

You wrote: “I feel guilty because I never had an abusive or neglectful childhood” – abuse and neglect create distress in a child, but so does a highly anxious mother. Let’s look again at what you wrote about the experience of living with her: “whenever we have people round it’s always so stressful as if 50 were coming round when there were only 5!” – in this sentence you estimated that your mother was 10 times (1000%) more stressful than what the external situation called for. That’s indeed a very “highly anxious” mother.

psych central. com has a 2009 article titled Life with An Anxious Mother, it reads in part: “When worrying becomes excessive, it starts to affect the people around you…. Daily life becomes more about avoiding risk and discomfort rather than having experiences. Like playing not to lose, not playing to win. A child with an anxious mother might start learning that the world is too dangerous to be explored much… An anxious mom can literally transfer her nervousness to her child. A child that senses tension will become tense themselves… Mothers tend to set the emotional barometer in a household… When a child is exposed to an excessively worried and anxious mother for years, it may take them quite a long time to see that as their mother’s problem”.

talk space. com has a 2018 article titled Raised by Anxious Parent? it reads in part: “It’s extremely difficult on a child to grow up with an anxious parent… Anxiety is a disorder characterized by constriction — it keeps people from living full and free lives, and often encourages ‘worst case scenario’ thinking. Here are some of the things that parents with anxiety may teach their kids, implicitly and explicitly: The world is dangerous. Other people are not to be trusted… Don’t take any risks, because it would be worse to fail than not to try…. Add to the mix that many highly anxious parents do not conceive of themselves as anxious at all, and see their behavior and thoughts as rooted in fact…”.

Back to your writing: “When I made the decision to not be a Christian anymore and believe in such an angry God, I felt euphoric and alive and so much better physically, I felt like a completely new person” – when you abandoned your substitute parent (God), you felt euphoric, alive, like a completely new person. This is how you would have felt if as an adult, you would have abandoned your real parents/ your highly anxious mother. But this euphoria would have been temporarily because of the guilt and the inevitable return of the imprinted mental and emotional experience of childhood.

You shared that while you were a devoted Christian, you “have done loads of things, travelled and lived abroad, studied, but all the time dealing with the guilt and turmoil that my faith brought with it“, and you therefore missed “the experiences of ‘freedom’… to go off and explore” –

– Your ongoing longing to be free is about your need to be free from your mother’s constricting  excessive anxiety, anxiety that imprinted in you he belief that the world is too dangerous to explore, as the first online sources states: “A child with an anxious mother might start learning that the world is too dangerous to be explored much“, and the second: “Anxiety is a disorder characterized by constriction — it keeps people from living full and free lives“.

Last you posted you were living with your parents in a house in a serene English countryside. In your various threads you never mentioned that any of your parents suffered from any physical illness or disability or any financial disadvantage, nor did you mention any material want on their part or your part.  You wrote: (I) have so many surface reasons to feel happy“.

You last posted, in December 2015- four whole years before anyone heard of Covid-19, the pandemic that negatively changed the world, and it was before the alarming escalation of climate change and political radicalization of later years, and before the current war in Ukraine, and the ongoing deteriorating economy… and yet, in what appear now as the good old days of 2015 and earlier, you were miserable.

“What about being young and free?“, you asked.

I will continue within the next 24 hours.

anita

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