Dear Joanna:

“One time I met a neighbor when taking out the trash and she said ‘Hi’ and I immediately thought: ‘is she mad at me? Do I look funny?’“- when you heard her Hi, you immediately heard your mother saying a big, scary Hi. The projection of your mother into the neighbor was immediate. Living with your mother, you had to be hyper vigilant, so to detect her anger and mocking (in her voice, in her facial expressions, in her behavior) before it got worse, so that you could emotionally prepare for it, and so that you can figure out how to respond so to lessen the damage to yourself.

When the neighbor said Hi (in your anxious, still hypervigilant brain), it was your mother’s voice, and you reacted as usual when you heard your mother: is she mad at me.. what should I do now…? (detect her anger, prepare for it).

“and then I thought ‘oh my god, am I crazy?… she just said ‘Hi’! for god’s sake..’“- you were not crazy. When we are spaced out (not focused on the here-and-now), we drift to a time of no-time: no separated past, present and future.

“My mother used to tell me: ‘when someone is a young mother and has a baby and this gets overwhelming and there’s this anger, this.. urge that you want to almost throw your baby out of the window’. She used to tell me this over and over through the years, those exact words. I never thought about this until recently that this is how she felt towards me… Isn’t this amazing.. how I never actually understood this is how she feels about me, even though she specifically told me this“-

– When she told you these scary, disturbing words the first time, you were very scared and disturbed.. but then, over time, you got so used to these words, that you .. forgot about them. This is what dissociation is about: either forgetting words and events altogether, or forgetting what you felt when the words and evens took place. Personally, I have very few memories of my childhood (I forgot a ton of scary words and events), and of what I do remember of the scary words and events, only recently did I start to remember a bit of what I felt back then.

I wrote to you yesterday: “I had some memories (very few) but it was only a visual image of me in those memories, not me, the actual person“- the feeling gives memories a 3rd dimension. Without feeling, memories are 2-dimensional. (A visual image  is 2-dimensional, an actual person is 3-dimensional).

“I imagine myself in my bedroom, my parents yelling, I was shaking and having tics. I am trying to imagine it is me… But.. not sure what I should do next with this and whether I understand it. Maybe I need more time to read or perhaps you would like to explain it in a different way, maybe it would help“- you felt lots of fear when that event took place, an overwhelming amount of fear. The anxiety you feel now on a daily basis is .. what it takes to keep that amount of overwhelming fear below your awareness. There is no way to intentionally make yourself re-experience that overwhelming fear, nor would it be a good idea if you were able (it’d be too much). It takes a very gradual process to feel it in small increments, small amounts that you can endure.

What I wrote right above is true to me: I feel anxiety on a daily basis, I am still pushing down fear that threatens to overwhelm me. It’s instinctive.

anita