Continued:

This morning, I read a 6- page communication I had with a member back in 2020. In this post, I want to paste all that I wrote to the member that applies to me, changing the pronouns from you and your to I, me and my, and some other minor editing:

When my mother threatened to leave me, I was very, very sad and scared for a long time, so depressed that I lost the spirit to live. That darkest time is still there, not gone, not erased. Often how I feel is not a reaction to what is happening now, but a repeat-reaction to what happened then, the resurfacing of the emotional- cognitive experience of childhood. What we feel intensely as children, we keep feeling as adults.

When a mother leaves, or otherwise betrays her young daughter, she leaves behind a hole in her daughter’s heart. For a child, her mother is Everything, and when that Everything goes away, it feels like you lost everything indeed, and the emptiness in the child’s heart is massive, a whole lot of aching emptiness.

That need of long ago is a person-sensitive need: I needed that one person- my mother. It is a time-sensitive need- I needed her when I was a young child, back in those years in the past. It is a place-sensitive need, I needed my mother back then and there, in that home were I lived as a child.

No man, no woman can take me back to the there-and-then and be the mother I needed.

Better deal with that emptiness inside me, the emptiness born in childhood. My original pain will lessen once I express it, once I let it exit me, some, through words and tears, if they come. When my original pain lessens, so will my projection of it into people and circumstances here and now.

That original pain was so intense that I pushed it down. But that pain is not gone- it awakens in context of the present. The old pain that is still alive in me, it wakes up and takes over.

Being loyal to my mother, I showed her that I hated the people she hated, together in her hate for others. I wanted more than anything to be in the same team as my mother, me and her together against the hostile others. I was loyal to her, but she betrayed my loyalty: she hated me.  When she was angry, she said very hurtful words to me, words that caused me pain. I couldn’t trust her, I couldn’t trust anyone.

To be continued,

anita