Dear Joanna:

You are welcome and it amazes me how much we are alike (sadly it is so because we grew up with very, very similar mothers). Here is the similarity I am referring to this Tuesday morning (I am feeling better, thank you, had a good night sleep)- you wrote: “Anita, just to make sure: I saw the word ‘hardness’ and immediately thought about my mother’s behavior (being insensitive etc.) and things she, unfortunately, taught me. I did not intent to make it seem like it is one of your behaviors, as I see you as a kind and welcoming person”.

You were anxious about me thinking that you said or had the intention to say that I am insensitive and unkind (hard) person, and that as a result, I will get angry at you (right?) This is exactly how I tortured myself forever, so it seems: worrying about my words being understood or misunderstood in this or that negative way, causing the other person to get angry at me (and punish me).

This is a result of our paranoid mothers: my mother would TWIST my words in ways that produced the illusion of evil intent on my part, such that did not exist. Naturally, for decades and decades (not recently, not for a long time, it just occurred to me), I used to overthink about all kinds of ways the words I just said, or typed away,  could be understood/ misunderstood and I had to clarify to the person what I said (I meant this.. I didn’t mean that…)

I will now go to your first post of Jan 31 in regard to the word hardness: “Anita, could you elaborate on this one ‘hardness (lack of softness)’? Not sure I understand. Is it being too harsh, insensitive? I am thinking about my own behavior and that’s how I see it: me being sometimes too.. sarcastic maybe, not very nice…That’s why I think my fear of offending people is sometimes justified”-

– my reaction when I read the above yesterday was not at all to think that you meant to accuse me or insult me for being hard, harsh and insensitive. There was absolutely no annoyance or anger in my heart for you, Joanna. When I read your words yesterday, I was already well aware of my hardness/ harshness/ insensitivity to others, it was not news to me. Actually, I brought it up to you, after all. I was already okay with seeing this about myself and I was seeing it.

I imagine if you said what you said to my mother, oh, she would have exploded angrily (and I can hear her voice so easily in my mind, but I don’t want to type away what is so clearly voiced in my brain right now (it includes insulting you at length, in many ways, after saying who-do-you-think-you-are for saying that I am hard.. why, you are the one who is hard, you are the one who is sensitive...) Next she would say and you are this way after all the good things I did for you and she’d be detailing all those good things and going on and on about how she is the softest person in the world, and how ungrateful and underserving of her you are, etc., etc., etc.)-

– her voice comes so easily to my mind, her words flow so easily, so quickly, never hesitate… there really is in my brain a mental representative of my mother, with her energy, her voice, her… passion to destroy.

Back to me (back from her mental rep), in regard to my reactions to people other than my mother: basically, I assume that they are like her, so naturally I was alert and ready to detect any negative or potentially negative expressions on their part and prepare for the pain to come; surely, I was not relaxed enough to be able to detect and focus on the positive things about other people. As a result of this alertness and focus, I naturally reacted … not with sensitivity and softness but with harshness and insensitivity for the other person. After all, when you are at war, you don’t put down your weapons and offer the enemy a hug…

In my decades of experience with other people, I am yet to find- in my personal experience- a person who chased-me-to-destroy me anything even close to my mother’s way of doing it. She persecuted me and I was persecuted, no time to relax (unless she was away, and that would be only for a while).

It amazes me how unique my mother is/ has been, compared to the great majority of everyday people.. none is as bad as she is, not in my personal life. This means that people in general are way better than I thought they were. Some people are really good, way more people than I thought.

You wrote: “I knew I was focusing on negatives. I could be talking for someone for an hour and get stuck on some suspicious word, tone, whatever.. and obsess about it.”- just like me.

“I fear it may be never ending, I could fight it and it will sneak on me again..  But I focus on successes, even small ones, like you always say. I am aware of this and working on it.“- same as me.

You wrote, in the quote right above, that you are “working on it”. Here is me working on it right now, here on your thread: I mentioned at the beginning of this post how I used to overthink if my words can be misunderstood to mean what I didn’t intend for them to mean? Well, normally, I would re-read my posts to see where my words can be misunderstood (TWISTED, more like it), but I will not do it in this post. I will not even re-read for typos and grammatical mistakes, and instead, I will click the “Submit” button (a bit scary… here it is.. after I sign out with my name)

anita