Continued:

I wrote above, “stuck in the absence of a mother“. It’s synonymous with saying stuck in the absence of love. Love for a person is like water for a plant. Without water, a plant withers; without love, a child withers.

In the absence of love, a vacuum is created, a vacuum that quickly gets filled with Anxiety. Here is a proposed definition: anxiety= the condition of being stuck in the absence of love.

I wrote that my mother was not a mother but a monster. It is interesting how similar these two words are.

I say monster because of all the people in the world, it is this one person who took it upon herself to personally and directly inflict massive pain on me. It was just me and her alone in the small apartment when she did that: the family members who abused here weren’t there, politicians and criminals who created wars and crime that harmed her.. these people weren’t there. It was just me and her alone. And so, in my life, she is the monster.

Notice I used the present tense: she is the monster, not she was the monster. When I write about her elsewhere I automatically use the present tense. Sometimes I go back and correct it to the past tense, but what comes out of me first, is the present tense. And that is because Anxiety prolongs the past, extending it into the present. The present and the past are one for the Anxious person.

About the massive pain that she inflicted on me personally and directly: whenever I told about it in the past, I told about it from a minimally-feeling, maximally- dissociated state of mind. As I now try to tell about it from a feeling/ associated state of mind, I feel an unbearable distress and a sense of panic. And so, I am scared to go there. But I will say, it feels like an internal collapse, a death approaching… if I re-experience it the way I experienced it then.

This is what I felt back then when alone with her, at 5, at 15, at 25 (and in-between), she told me with great emotion and theatrics that she was going to kill herself.. and that she was going to kill herself because I hurt her so much, because of words I said or didn’t say, acts I did or didn’t do, expressions on my face she said meant to hurt her, thoughts she said I had when I was silent.

You see, my monster suffered from a combo of Paranoid, Borderline and Histrionic Personality Disorders, which meant that she repeatedly suspected that I (as well as other people, practically everyone, at one time or another) was actively trying to hurt her feelings, and feeling victimized by me, she ragefully attacked me repeatedly, at length, and creatively, theatrically. In her mind, she was defending herself from me.

I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t the case (can you imagine a child trying to hurt a monster and bring rage-attacks against oneself?). Her response was always to argue against my claims of innocence by listing “evidence”: my past behaviors over months and longer that were aimed- so she claimed- at hurting her, and in so doing, prolonging the rage attack.

Her attacks and abuse included, but were not limited to the following: (1) shaming words and messages, going out of her way to deliver a shaming message in all ways possible, from every angle available, drilling it in thoroughly, for a long time per shaming session, (2) heavy-duty, at length guilt-tripping, (3) feasting on my empathy for her by describing in great detail, during long sessions, how hurt she felt by me and by other people, while insisting that I was a lucky girl with no valid hurt feelings, (4) using a loud, high-pressured voice, yelling, crying, never-ending theatrical expressions of her misery, (5) threats to commit suicide, (6) slapping my face with her open hand, and/ or kicking my body with her foot.

My Healing is about accepting that all the above happened, that it hurt a whole lot, that the damage she inflicted on me was real and severe (to no longer minimize it, as I have done). To give my feelings, my experience the validity that she took away from me.

To accept and acknowledge the severity of the abuse I went through, and to clear the present time from the abuse of the past: to no longer project her into other people (expecting them to do what she did).. to remove her from people in my life now.

To not accept the severity of what happened causes what happened to keep knocking on my door, so to speak, insisting to be fully seen and heard. The knocking is not just about what happened but about it re-happening in new forms, new contexts, new people. For example, as a teenager, I never worried about my knees failing me and not being ale to walk (I worried about other things, of course); as an older woman, the Anxiety took over a new area due to aging: my knees.

Anxiety is like glue that is keeping shame, hurt, and guilt in my life in the present time. Healing is about removing the anxiety from these feelings/ emotional-mental experiences, so to allow them to move to the past and stay there.

To be continued.

anita