Dear Anita,

Grateful for your message 🙏 🙏 🙏

you’re very welcome!

Yes, it did. Problem was I kept going back to her, flying across the world to see her and be with her which killed my joy every time. So, going back to the U.S., eventually, was not joyful anymore.

Every visit with her was retraumatized me, and every return to the U.S. took longer and longer to recover from time until there was no recovery (many years of depression). My healing process started in 2011. Shortly after I started therapy back then I ended contact with her, no more visits.

Good that you stopped those visits.. if each visit made you more and more depressed, if it killed the joy in you, then of course it’s better to stay away. The problem is – and you know it too – that even if we move thousands of miles away from our abusive parents, the emotional bond is still there. We’re still enmeshed with them, we want them to love us, our sense of self-worth still depends on how they see us…

Sometimes no physical contact doesn’t mean no emotional attachment. Not at all. But of course, it’s easier to let go of that toxic emotional bond if we stop visiting the toxic parent and stop getting more of the same abuse. As you said, it only retraumatized you.

However, the problem is that your emotional attachment to your mother still remained. Your inner child still wants her to love you. You still need her love and validation in order to feel lovable and worthy… And that’s a trap.

The goal of healing is to start feeling lovable and worthy even if our parents weren’t able and will never be able to give us what we need, i.e. to meet our basic emotional needs. They gave us physical life, but many of them were not able to give us emotional nurturing, which is a precondition for a healthy personal development.

So we’re stunted in development, basically, because some basic building blocks are missing. But the good news is that we can make up for what’s missing by getting those basic emotional needs met later in our lives. It’s never too late for that…

But to return to your question about your mother:

Why can’t she see me, Tee? Why can’t she hear me?

Because she herself was/is a wounded, traumatized child. She never received love and care during her childhood, and someone “seeing” her and appreciating her. And so she couldn’t give that to you either. She parented you from her wounds and defenses, rather than her true self.

And, which is also important – she never stopped to ask herself: “why, there must be a better way to live. There must be something I can do to help myself. Perhaps if I change, I could have a better life. Perhaps I am contributing to my own suffering”.

That’s something a person with narcissistic traits never does. And so she didn’t either. In her mind, it was you who were making her life miserable – it wasn’t anything that she did. She saw you responsible for her internal terror. She had no awareness of her own wounds, her own trauma, nor was she interested in learning about that. Instead, she projected the badness on you, blaming you for causing her pain and suffering.

You were an innocent, precious little girl, whom she unfortunately used as her punching bag, as a way for her to relieve her internal tensions and keep deluding herself that she is not the problem.

I think that’s what happened, Anita. She was someone with a lot of unresolved mental health issues, and as such, she was totally inadequate to be a parent. But she still became a parent and had two beautiful children, whom she didn’t know how to parent. You two became the victims of her untreated mental health problems.

That’s what I believe happened. I wonder how you feel when reading this?

Oh my God, Tee.. I am speechless. You’re happy about me opening my heart and mind, happy about where we’re now?

Of course I’m happy 🫶 It’s a good feeling to be able to talk to someone honestly, with an open heart, with vulnerability, and see that openness in the other person too. And I’m very happy that our interaction took this turn… it’s definitely something I cherish ❤️

P.S. I like our 🙂s too 😊

Dear Anita,

glad it was helpful 🫶

Yes, I know now more than I knew before. Actually, for the longest time, I didn’t know at all. I was too enmeshed with her to see anything clearly.

Yes, I myself only learned about emotional enmeshment with my mother in the last few years. I didn’t know it either for the longest time… I was still hoping for something from her, her opinion of me was important to me.

I didn’t realize I was actually hoping for her validation. I was hoping she would see me and understand me, and that she wouldn’t judge me. But then I’ve realized this would never happen… and so I let go of the need for her to see me in a good light. To approve of me.

Also, I stopped trying to make her happy, because I’ve realized she is the kind of person who doesn’t want to be happy. And so me trying to cheer her up and comfort her are futile attempts…

It doesn’t mean I have no empathy for her, e.g. when she has some health issues, I’ll always try to help and comfort her. But I’m not attached to how she would receive it – and I’m not attached to making her feel better. In other words, I’m not attached to changing her emotional state – because that’s impossible. She is responsible for that, and only she can choose to look at things more positively… but refuses to.

Yes. I am feeling it right now, this moment. It feels like love, undying love for her. I need to keep the love, remove the object of this love. To love the wrong person, a person that’s eagerly tries to destroy you.. me, is indeed a trap, one of the prey sacrificing its life so to please the predator.

Yes, we as children have a huge love and need for our parents, specially for our primary caregiver, which is often our mother. It’s like we’re holding our arms stretched towards our mother, wanting to be taken into a nurturing embrace, wanting to be comforted, soothed, protected…. in that embrace, we would ideally get all of our emotional needs met.

But we often don’t get it… instead, we get rejection and abuse. But our arms keep being stretched towards our parents, and we keep thinking that if we only become a better child, our mother will finally take us into her loving embrace… We’re trying to adapt, to become more “lovable”, thinking that we’re not lovable enough…

Our love remains unchanged and equally strong, and we’re trying to change ourselves to become more lovable. Which with toxic parents is of course a dead end…

Now thinking about it, it’s not that our inner child should let their hands down (as in give up on love), but rather, we, our adult self, should pick up our inner child and take it into a loving embrace. We should be that loving parent to our inner child. We don’t give up on love, but we don’t seek it anymore from those who cannot give it to us.

It’s worth it, to heal at a later age. It doesn’t feel like it’s too late. It feels very good.. It’s about time for me to feel good about me being/ becoming me!

I’m happy you feel that way, Anita! Yes, it’s never too late to heal and become the fullness of who we are meant to be ☀️ ❤️

W.O.W, I couldn’t have said it better. No one has ever said this to me, anything like it. So clear, so exact.

Thank you, Anita. It’s probably watching hours and hours of youtube videos on childhood trauma and narcissistic abuse – I kind of picked up the gist 🙂 But in all seriousness, it’s my personal experience plus the explanations by experts that helped me wrap my head around what I’ve been through and what others in a similar situation might be going through. In any case, I’m really happy it is helping you 🙏

To me, our conversation is life-changing. From suspicion, distrust, hostility on my part to => softening, trusting (because you are trustworthy!), a shift. Feels like I am rejoining the human race, the Togetherness lost so long ago, dissolving the separateness.. Because of you, Tee, because of your very intelligent input and understanding, because of your grace and forgiveness, and my ability now to receive it.

I’m so happy you feel this way, and that the distrust and fear are slowly melting away ❤️

You’ve made a major step towards that opening: you’ve let go of your defenses and mustered the courage to hear even painful things about yourself, which is not an easy thing. You had the spaciousness, the openness, the vulnerability to say “I see your pain, even as I am feeling my own pain.”

And that I think is your True Self in action – a part of us that has compassion both for ourselves and others, that is willing to listen with an open heart and mind, that feels togetherness with others… I think you’ve stepped into your true, authentic self and this is the shift you’re experiencing… and to me, it is beautiful to behold and be a part of ❤️