Dear Joanna:

You are making progress in seeing more and more of reality. Your inquiring mind is active, you are challenging what you thought you knew. You are giving up communicating with your mother and you agree that cutting contact with her sometime in the future is the right thing for you to do.

The voices: well, when working in the yard I cut and gather brush in piles, to be burned later (hopefully, got so many piles waiting). As I gather the brush on top of  pile, I hear a voice saying: You are doing it wrong, placing it wrong, making the pile messy. It will be impossible to burn it.

I hear these voices being spoken by a person I know, a person looking at me with angry eyes and angry voice, angry expression, accusing me of adding the brush on the pile wrong on purpose.

I didn’t recognize the latter for a long time. I just felt very distressed, suffering a whole lot and exhausted. Later, over time of paying attention to those voices, I realized that I was feeling like a bad person, guilty.

It is not only that I was doing things wrong (when I was doing them right!), but that I did it on purpose to hurt someone else.

Another example, I walk daily. There are sticks on the road. If I pick one, so to make the road better for drivers, I hear a voice saying: why didn’t you pick up the other stick, why only this stick? Next I feel that extra distress of: you did it on purpose, to hurt the drivers on the road, so that their car will be damaged!

The other day on the walk I came across a bottle of water, partly used. I thought to myself: if the bottle is made of glass, I will pick it up so to prevent a car from being damaged. I checked. It was plastic, so I left it alone (it won’t hurt cars and… I can’t pick up everything on the road, the idea is for me to walk not to remove trash and such!)- next there was that voice: you lazy you! You should have picked the bottle, And there was the beginning of that distress, that I am being a bad person for not picking up the bottle.

I found out that I suspect I have bad intentions although I do not. It is automatic. Because she accused me of what was not true- I believed her and accused myself of what is not true.

anita

Dear joanna:

Double posting. I relate to crossing the street, absolutely. If there is a chance, however far fetched, that I am doing something wrong, I panic, in a way, feel very distressed. It has been a terrible way to live. I speak here in present tense, but I am able to cut the distress short these days, sometimes avoid it. It has been a practice.

As a matter of fact, I felt like a bad person for thinking things, for feeling things… for not feeling what I was …supposed to feel. The guilt was thorough, frequent, ongoing.

anita

Dear joanna:

I was away from the computer for twenty minutes or so, swept the floor and considered throwing the sweeping to where I put the ashes from the woodstove- felt guilty about it, that I am a bad person, that I will be doing something wrong to someone by doing so. What I did then, was to throw the sweeping with the garbage instead. I then wet a towel so to wipe the kitchen floor. On the way to the kitchen a few water drops fell on the wooden floor. I felt guilty, felt that I was destroying the wooden floor, on purpose. And so it goes.

I am experiencing some distress today, from earlier on, don’t know why yet, so these incidents are likely to be more frequent.

What I do is when I notice the guilt I stop to think if there is a valid point to it. If I am about to cross the street not on a sidewalk, I stop and think: well, why don’t I use the sidewalk, there is a reason it is there. It is fair that I do, playing by the rules. On the other hand, if there is no valid point to it, for example, I left the plastic bottle on the road, I repeat to myself: it is okay. And I kept walking.

I didn’t mention that when talking to people I used to feel guilty again and again for saying this wrong, should have said that, etc., kept explaining and elaborating on what I said, to cover all possible misunderstandings.

My life was indeed… difficult. So is yours, reads to me. We share a lot in common.

It has been a long process and I made lots of progress, but as you read my examples from today, this core belief: I am guilty, I am a bad person… doesn’t die easily. I experience significantly less distress, by far less, but some days more than others and some… every day, still. The practice of noticing, then talking sense to myself, that is, saying to myself what is true to reality, is ongoing.

Soon will be away from the computer for about sixteen hours… will be going on that walk. The plastic bottle will still be there and … I will not be picking it up!

anita

Dear joanna:

I like what you wrote in your recent post. Being gentle with yourself is the right thing for you to do. It is the only way for you to make more and more progress in your healing. I would like you to heal, to experience a gradually improving well-being.

In all of my communications on the website, I believe that this is the first time, on your very thread, that I come across a case of a mother clearly refusing the daughter’s offers to correct what the mother complains about and accusing her daughter for having bad intentions. Other than my mother having done these two things, I did not read about another mother (or parent) doing these two things until I read your account yesterday, not that I remember.

Taking the things-in-the-kitchen incident. She told you angrily that it was wrong of you to put your things in the kitchen, going on and on about how wrong it was. But when you repeatedly offered to remove your things from the kitchen, she refused your offer.

But then she did something else, she accused you of being a shady, or a bad person for offering to solve her problem (being angry by the things being in the kitchen, the mess) and your problem (your distress at her going on and on about it).

You offered to do the reasonable thing, a reasonable solution to the problem, but her response is that your very reasonable solution (a win-win solution as it will resolve her anger and your distress), was an effort on your part to “show her (something)”, to hurt her somehow. She presented your reasonable solution as an intentional effort on your part to hurt her.

She took your sane win-win solution and presented it as  an intentional act of abuse on your part against her.

You understandably asked: how do you defend yourself against an accusation like that? I ask: how do you defend yourself against insanity, or in other words, when your logic is rejected, where do you go for a solution…

If your logical, clear, neat, sane solution gets chewed by your mother and spit out as an illogical, unclear, messy, insane goo, how do you communicate with that person?

I was wondering: did your mother accuse other people as well for having bad intentions against her, for trying to show her?

And what did she mean by showing her?

anita

Dear joanna:

I read your recent post but not as attentively as I need to- getting late in the day, a point when it is difficult for me to focus. Will re-read and reply when I am back to the computer, in about sixteen hours.

* If you want, if and when you are comfortable with it, can you tell me what your mother told you about her childhood?

anita

Dear joanna:

Responding to your post before the most recent one: you are welcome. You wrote: “You don’t even know me”- I don’t know how you look like but  I do know quite a bit about you, of what matters, that is,  don’t I.

* You mentioned diabetes, do you have diabetes?

You wrote: “I know she feels anger all the time so she expects me to. But I don’t”- she feels angry, so she thinks you feel angry too when you don’t.

“She.. feels this anger and she acts on it, that’s why she made a scene yesterday. So she did exactly what  she accused me of. Being angry and acting on it”- she made an angry scene and accused you of making that scene. Meaning, she inaccurately projected into you her anger and her behavior.

She accused you of “showing”, meaning “act…to bother or sting someone on purpose”

You wrote: “many times she accuses people” and you gave the following examples:

A co worker wore a new dress to work. Your mother’s interpretation: she wore the new dress because I wore a dress the day before so to hurt me, to show me that I am lesser than her.

Her brother is very busy father and employee. Your mother’s interpretation: he thinks I am too unimportant to call or visit.

There is a wedding of a person she is not in touch with and she does not receive an invitation. Her interpretation: they did not invite me because they want to hurt me, to let me know that they don’t like me.

A neighbor has a noisy party. Her interpretation: he arranged for the noisy party for the purpose of bothering me. (“she  says he does this specifically to bother HER, or us. Doing party only to bother us.”)

A neighbor’s kids didn’t say good morning to her. Her interpretation: their mother is  trying to hurt me (“their mother told them to not say good morning specifically to her because they want to revenge for when she did renovations and made noise, and they’re jealous she renovated the flat, and  they didn’t”)

A friend didn’t call your  mother when she was moving, following her divorce. Your mother’s interpretation: “she was afraid to get involved or have to  help in any way”

You are no  longer in frequent contact with a friend. Her interpretation: he abandoned you. You wrote: “for last 3 years she keeps telling me how HE abandoned me, keeps asking me: so he  still doesn’t text you or doesn’t want to meet? She knows perfectly well we are  not  friends anymore… she still won’t let  it go, and still reminds me that he abandoned me… she accuses  him of bad intentions and doing this on purpose”

You talked about having diabetes and you said that it is good that you don’t need a kidney so that you don’t turn to your father’s family for help. Her response: they won’t help you! (“She said: ‘they would never help you… she insisted they would never help and let me die”).

She  yells at you (“this happens all my life”) and you “just shut  up”. Her interpretation: you are trying to hurt me! (“So I have two scenes, one about something, and the second about being quiet and not talking…to specifically show her I’m offended… I speak- she yells more, I am quiet- she yells more”)

Regarding your most recent post: the only possibly helpful item, for my understanding of the topic of this post I am typing is the last part: “she always says her mother lost a child before her and was told to have another child (her) just to…She always accused her mother of this, it scared me how she says it, and how she believes it”-

Now  I will connect the two posts: all the examples you gave indicate that your mother believes that everyone is trying to hurt her, that their behaviors which are not about her, are all about her, and that the intention behind those behaviors is to hurt her. And you, in her mind, are one of those people. Every action you take(ex., placing your stuff in the kitchen because you don’t have a desk in your room), every action you don’t take (ex. not talking back when she yells at you for having your stuff in the kitchen) has the potential to trigger her false interpretation: you are trying to hurt me!

When your mother was a child someone did intend to hurt her and  proceeded  to do so. She  wasn’t wrong  then, her interpretation was correct (young children don’t have existing  neuropathways that distort their interpretation of reality). Maybe (and it is a guess taken from your recent post), her mother was  angry with her  and punished  her as a baby and  a child for not… being a good substitute for the baby that died.

That hurt and angered your mother repeatedly and  intensely.  She carried this  hurt and anger into adulthood, pushed down and  below her awareness. Without awareness, without insight and  without healing, she  keeps inaccurately projecting her real childhood experience into her adulthood life. She keeps seeing what did happen to her as happening in the present. And  that unresolved hurt and  anger keeps expressing itself.

Healing, for her, would be in long, long term quality psychotherapy where she  would bring her childhood experience into her awareness, gradually, slowly, and  in so doing free  her present from her past, peel off the past from the  present.

Not likely to happen, and so, she will continue to do what she does.

And you, joanna, are her victim.

anita