Dear Joanna:

I am fine, thank you. “‘She indeed celebrated and bragged when she ‘destroyed’ someone’- she felt powerful, and her felt-power intoxicated her!” That is scary. I can see it being true, sadly. Scary! I feel sorry for her“-

– scary indeed, particularly for the person being destroyed.. and how troubling it is, for the person being destroyed, to feel empathy for the destroyer (“I feel sorry for her“). I felt empathy for my mother for ages. Imagine a deer feeling empathy for the mountain lion: oh, poor lion he must be hungry, he needs to eat... Q: How would the deer express that empathy? A: By either offering itself as a meal, or by offering someone else for the lion to eat.

“I still recall your words Anita, (may be paraphrased) ‘We all make assumptions .. Paranoid believes it’s true‘. I wonder if it’s curable – from what I researched not really, because of….paranoid. That makes sense!“-

– when the only source of the feeling-of-power for a person is to attack and destroy another person, healing would mean… to no longer feel power: people are not motivated to give up their only source of the feeling-of-power (their only opportunity to take a break from otherwise feeling powerless). Add paranoia as a personality disorder, and the chances for healing are none or very close to none.

“All excitements- positive and negative- are uncomfortable for me. All excitements trigger my tics!” Exactly. Parties and celebrations make me nervous. I prefer meetings where I have something specific to do, like work meetings: I need to say particular things, present, submit, be official, have my part to play. Gatherings where I can ‘just’ be happy, loud, excited… make me uncomfortable. I used to go to parties though, I was just quiet“-

-Sticking to a daily routine is very important to me, having a new day that is the same as the day before, in regard to what I do, when and where. It keeps me calmer. This intolerance for excitement happened when my mother’s excitement (when attacking me) permanently over-excited my neurons (nerve cells), so much so, that they over-fire commands to the muscles to move (causing tics). Chronic neural over-excitability is very uncomfortable, so we need structure, predictability and routine to keep the excitement down.

When my mother attacked me, she lowered her neural excitability during the attack, releasing tension, which led her to  be relaxed for a few days… then her tension grew and she needed another release. When she repeatedly attacked me, she transferred her neural excitability to me, overly and permanently overly exciting my neurons.

“I have been thinking about this, what are the chances. Me, living through all my misery, and you, in a whole different part of the world, living through yours. Can I say it makes me feel less lonely now. I wish circumstances were happier though“- I was always a big believer of nurture over nature. Even though we don’t share familial genes (nature), we share a very similar mother (nurture) and so, we reacted to her similarly. If we were genetically sisters, even identical twins, but having two very different mothers, we would have been very different from each other.

“I also remember that story about my birth was similar to yours (leg issues), as well as our mothers’ stories about it and aftermath“- I think that you were a breech baby (?) and so was I. You were very (and are?) skinny as a child, and I was very skinny, the skinniest and smallest of my classmates in elementary and junior high.. at the least (I never had to think about gaining weight- no matter how much I ate- before I was close to 40 years old).

“I had this tic, where I used to shake my head (like in gesture of saying no, but much more quickly)“- it is like I wrote this sentence!

“I even thought I was faking it at first, but no, turned out I wasn’t, and it didn’t go away“- I thought that when I tic-ed in front of my mother, that I was faking it or exaggerating it (so to make her stop venting to me, or attacking me), and I felt guilty for it.

“…Now I struggle with blinking too much, moving my eyes but it might have been worsened by the fact that I needed glasses for years and did not have them“- through my decades-old history of tics, I performed all possible simple motor tics (I contracted all voluntary muscles over the years, in the form of tics). As far as vocal tics, I hummed… still do (no coprolalia though, which is saying profanities involuntarily, an infamous part of Tourette’s but not at all necessary for the diagnosis).

“I read those are changes in the brain and they cannot fully go away“- tics (although the types of tics change over the years, and they wax and wane) are a result of permanent, chronic neural over-excitability (I didn’t read this term, this is how I personally experience it and believe it to be)

“My..  (grandma) is narcissistic too but my mother admires her, wanted to be like her“- my mother admired her violent, abusive father.

“My mother was a victim too but grew up to be an abuser, very pleased of herself, living her life angry-excited. What I got is tics and trauma for life. She does not have tics“- my mother was a very good cook, she used to treat me with tasty foods. I would have easily given up the tasty, fancy food for… a tic-free life.

“Snow is coming here too. I look forward to it… it’s nice to wake up and see snow first time this season“- it’s nice to look at, even to walk in it, as long as it’s fresh. But when it freezes and creates those flat, slippery surfaces, it creates a serious danger for walking and driving, so many people around here slip and fall, I did too… it scares me.

anita