Dear Gijira:

I knew it would happen, of course I knew because I’ve been in this process, what I call the healing process for years, since 2011. Let’s see what happened:

-less than two days ago you wrote: “I just needed to allow myself to risk feeling pain- .. Fearing the pain and staying as I am will keep me away from the joy I could experience. I am starting to believe in the adventure and the blue sky you described anita. I am finally able to admit to myself that the nest is suffocating, I just needed to know that my wings were strong enough. I do now, and would also not mind falling as I try to reach the sky. It gives me hope”.

-less than two days later: “It’s back- the hopelessness- I don’t know what to do… I am sick of never getting it right. I don’t want to engage in the world anymore. My life is so pathetic, happiness is so easy to break, it hurts more than before. I feel like a loser, trying too hard to make my life work, and I am reminded of what I really am.. It is too hard. There is nothing to cling to”.

A bit about me very recently: I had a good day yesterday, felt calmer than ever, but then, maybe I was tired, a thought occurred to me, something in my body felt uncomfortable and… fear went up a bit, next thing I knew I felt the need to wash my hands (an OCD compulsion) and such. And I gave in to the compulsion, at night I slept poorly and here I am at the computer, tired, not refreshed. But I told myself earlier in the morning, before getting on the computer: the old pathways were activated a bit yesterday. But I built new pathways, many heathy pathways and made a lot of progress, a whole lot of healing (that is new pathways), that I am not like I was before. The old pathways don’t disappear but the new pathways added make it impossible for me to go back to the way I was before. Therefore I expect to have a good enough day today, to  not sink back into OCD rituals. I will continue to heal.

Back to you: “I just needed to allow myself to risk feeling pain”- unfortunately there is a lot more pain for you to feel, feeling it once does make it weaker. Now that it is back, feel it again, don’t try to run away from it and don’t make decisions when in the midst of this pain.

Healing and spreading out your wings is a long term projects. I am guessing that if you persist and you don’t give up, you will be able to fly when you are still in your twenties!

Don’t be discouraged by how you feel today, it is a necssary part of the healing process and it is not possible to magically heal. In order to really heal, work needs to be done now while you are in despair. This work cannot be done unless you feel despair, this is why it is a necessary part of healing.

The work that needs to be done now is to examine your regret, these pathways of regret that were triggered at work (“Should I have been working parallelly on the new thing to protect it from getting snatched”) –

Tell me about the origin of this regret, what did you regret so intensely in  your young life?

anita

Dear Girija:

“It is like I am in a washing machine, and someone else is turning it on and off as they wish”-

– the way I see it, there is this beautiful bird who lives in a washing machine called “home” and her mother turns that machine on and off as she wishes: she wakes you up in the morning when she chooses to, she decides where you sleep (in one room with her and your sister), she decided that you should take on a life insurance policy, she decides when she talks to you and about what she will talk to you (not with you, but to you). She is currently deciding who you will marry.

This washing machine turning on and off without your consent, without your input, your yes-or-no, is messing up your wings, they get flattened and wrinkled with each on-cycle and once they get a long breath of fresh air and gain their volume and strength, she turns on the washing machine and your wings once again get wrinkled and weak.

anita

Dear Girija:

Make a plan: work for the purpose of saving enough money so to move out of your home-or-origin/ the washing machine, out of the area altogether, so you no longer visit your home-of-origin and move far away, perhaps to another country where you can make much more money than you are making now, a place where you will start making your own decisions.

“I don’t think it is limited to my home.. the whole world feels like a washing machine”- well, once you find a place in the world where you no longer live with your mother (and sister) in the same room, not even in the same house… or country, that will be a start.

You can’t .. find a different kind of a world for you while you sleep in one room with your mother who controls your life. Don’t you think?

anita

Dear Girija:

You are welcome. Test for yourself “what else is out there”, look at the bigger picture. I used to be very afraid of people and the world, expecting people to hurt me. It wasn’t long ago that I realized, and it was a surprising kind of realization, that in my personal experience, the scariest part of the world was living at home with my mother.

No other individual was as scary, as hurtful and as damaging to me as my mother, not even close. Other people have been less cruel to me and often quite nice. If I wasn’t scared of all the nice people, I would have benefited from them appearing in my life.

anita

Dear Girija:

“the bad side is vicious and it comes out any time things are not going well”- this is your experience with your mother, it is her bad side that is vicious and it has repeatedly come out unexpectedly, in your own personal experience with her.

“There is no nice person in my opinion”- in your personal experience, your mother is not a nice person. And she is not a nice person from all that you shared.

anita