Hi Starlight1 🌟

I am glad you did some spontaneous art and that it helped you!

I reread all your posts in this thread, so this reply is about everything you shared here.

In your most recent post, you wrote: “these issues have become confused or conflated… sometimes forgiveness becomes confused with reconciliation with the other person(s).”-

Please let me know if my thinking in what follows is true to you, or not exactly (I’ll use upper case for the different issues that became conflated)

* FORGIVING OTHERS has become tangled with FORGIVING YOURSELF — as in, you have to forgive others if you ever did anything wrong yourself.

* RECONCILIATION got tangled with FORGIVING OTHERS- as in, forgiving others means you must reconnect and interact with them.

Your CREATIVE BLOCK got tangled with EMOTIONAL HARM (by your mother and the woman in church). Both experiences made you feel that you and your creativity existed only to serve other people, not yourself. Because of that, when you think about art, you may also be thinking about guilt, pressure, and being used.

And underneath all of this sit RELIGIOUS MESSAGES that taught you that you must forgive others in order for God to forgive you. Those teachings got mixed with your personal experiences of being used, pressured, and guilt‑tripped (emotional harm)

This may create a loop where you want to protect yourself by not forgiving, but you also fear you are doing something spiritually wrong.

About emotional harm: when a parent expects a child to support their needs, dreams, or emotional stability, the child learns that their own desires are secondary.

Instead of being supported in exploring art, you were told to give up your path so that your mother could pursue hers. That kind of role‑reversal teaches a child to silence their own feelings, to feel guilty for wanting things, and to associate creativity with obligation rather than freedom.

Over time, this can create a deep internal block — because every time the child reaches toward their own creativity, the old message returns: “Your needs don’t matter. Someone else comes first.”

Your mother’s voice (as well as the church’s) sounds like guilt, pressure, duty, and the idea that you must sacrifice your own needs.

Your own voice is quieter — it shows up in your spontaneous art, your curiosity, your desire to understand yourself, and the longing for creative freedom. One helpful way to connect with your quieter voice is through small acts of creativity that have no purpose except expression, just like the spontaneous art you shared about in your recent post. Over time, you can learn to treat the others’ voices as an old echo, and hear your own, authentic voice clearly.

Anita