Dear Ravi:

You are welcome. As I took my long walk today I tried to put the different elements you shared here together in my mind and this is what I came up with as a possibility for your consideration:

Your grandmother is driven by fear: not the fear that something bad will happen to you, but that you will abandon her through loving relationships with others. Her MO is to possess you by discouraging you from going out and developing intimate relationships with others. She discourages you from talking on the phone to a potential friend all the way to discouraging you from attending college where you can make friends.

When she is aware that you are in the process of making a friend, she tells you that the person you are interested in has bad intentions toward you, that he or she is untrustworthy and so, he or she will hurt you. She takes your pure hopes for love and companionship and contaminates them with distrust and assumptions of ill will on the part of the others.

This is her MO with you as well as her MO with her children before you came along, and maybe still with them now, as well. Incapable of loving relationships herself, she discourages you from having it elsewhere and so, you are home in her presence and so, her fear subsides, for as long as she knows you are her, under her supervision, under her control.

What do you think?

anita

Dear Ravi:

You may be wondering about the relevance of your grandmother to your relationship with Jerry. I see much relevance and believe that looking into it will help in your relationship with Jerry and otherwise. I need to go back to page one of our correspondence and quote something you wrote there into this post, comment on it, then on a second post today quote something else you wrote on page one and comment on it. Maybe do so a third time.

Here is the first quote: “Recently another close friend got somewhat jealous of my bond with the girl I love. And when she expressed it to me, I don’t know how but my temper flared up and I told her, ‘So what do you want? Do you consider her an obstacle, do you want that *censored* to die so I will be with you only?’ I truly have started hating myself for such behaviour.”

Your temper flared out recently with a girl. You didn’t understand it and hated yourself for the expression of your anger. As I wrote before, there is a valid message behind your anger. If I am correct about your grandmother, and you indicated that I am right to a good extent, then what happened in the incident of the quote is that you projected your grandmother into the girl and you talked to her as if she was your grandmother, saying to her something like: you want me all to yourself, so you want to kill anyone who may take me away from you!

Understanding your anger at this girl, where it comes from, will make you see that there is nothing wrong with you, that you simply angry at something wrong done to you by your grandmother.

anita

Dear Ravi:

Third quote: “In the past, many of my arguments with Jerry used to go like this:

Jerry – Look, they were just defensive about their favourite actor since he’s a veteran and understandably deserves most attention. They spoke well of her in the past too. Your reaction was out of line.
Me – If they respected her, they wouldn’t have said things like (insert quotes of those people). But yeah, after all she’s just a useless piece of *censored*, what does it matter right?
Jerry – Don’t you use such words for her! Even they didn’t do it! And you’re not the only one who cares for her, even I do! I don’t like you behaving like this.
Me – Of course, you don’t like anything about me. I’m just a *censored* and I hope I don’t wake up alive tomorrow..”

And here is where your anger at your grandmother is affecting your relationship with Jerry, and therefore your relationship with your grandmother is very relevant to your relationship with Jerry. She told you above and has observed correctly that “your reaction was out of line” – as you said yourself previously, your anger being exaggerated.

In the quote above she said: “I don’t like you behaving like this.” And you answered something like: I don’t like how I behave myself, and I hope I die.

And this is where the relationship with your grandmother affects not only the relationship with Jerry, but your mental health. Not understanding the message of your anger, being confused and puzzled by it, you wish ill upon your own self.

This is heavy duty stuff, Ravi. Not easy to confront this. If you talked about this to your grandmother or your parents, they will invalidate you. At least your grandmother surely would, and your parents are likely to do so. And so, you are alone with this.. except here, on this forum with me.

This stuff is not convenient or comfortable to look at, but not looking at it, you will continue to get angry like you have and in so doing, you will continue to pay the price for the reality you are not willing to see.

Please review our correspondence when you are calm and post again…

anita

Dear Ravi:

Your appreciation has touched my heart and I am grateful for it, thankful to you for expressing it the way you did.

As to what you wrote in your last paragraph: I agree that you are responsible to how you treat Jerry and others in your life at this point, being the adult that you are. It is correctable though. And I will do my best to help you in correcting this. I will come back to you and Jerry soon.

As to your grandmother: I know this emphasis on food, nutrition by a mother or mother figure. She cares so much that you eat well and yet she hurts your admission to college, and she is causing you anxiety and depression. So.. see the absurdity of it? Would you rather eat something less wonderful, and have mental health? Have peace of mind over the best food? Be content with who you are and comfortable, not anxious and not angry around people?

You love her a lot. I understand. Children love their parents and parents-like no matter what, no matter who they are and what they do. It is the way it is, we are born to love our caretakers.

You have way more information about how you feel in different circumstances than I do. Listen to the messages behind your feelings. If you listen to the valid message behind a feeling/ emotion, you will find out that the feeling makes sense and the message makes sense, always. Don’t assume you are a despicable person for feeling this or that. Trust that there is a valid message which means you are a worthy, reasonable person with a message to hear.

Love your grandmother as you will, but please love yourself more. Side with yourself, not with her and not with your parents. Your grandmother is not acting lovingly toward you and neither are your parents. It is not loving to manipulate through guilt and unreasonable control (grandmother) and it is not loving to tell you to “just be quiet and accept everything” (arents). These things they do to you and teach you are harmful to you and therefore, by definition of being harmful, these are not loving acts.

Unfortunately the loving acts they do- in between the harmful acts and teachings- do not neutralize or make up for the harmful things said and done to you.

Back to you and Jerry, the online/ texting relationship you have with her: As you ponder these things, here in our correspondence, you will be able to sincerely apologize to her- not the same way as before, but coming from a deeper understanding. That kind of apology, different from any in the past, can make a difference.

All this is heavy duty stuff, and I am here to continue our communication for as long as you need and want it to be. Always be sincere and honest with me: no manipulation on my part and my message to you is: do not be quiet and do not accept everything.

anita

Dear Ravi:

Will be back in a bit more than an hour to read your latest post.
anita

Dear Ravi:

Change of plans, still here, will soon leave.

You can stop thanking me now and in the next ten posts.

You wrote that you want to “root out my anger from the core”-

For this purpose, your purpose, you have to look at your upbringing and your past and see where the roots of your anger are. For the purpose, your purpose, of rooting out your anger from the core, it is necessary to look at your past: the roots were put in place a long time ago.

You can try all you want to use will power to change your behavior, and to a limited extent you may succeed but only in a very limited way and often not at all.

The roots are in the past. Do blame those who harmed you then. It is necessary so to heal yourself from that damage.

You are responsible for your behavior now AND (not or) you need to look into the past (that is keep happening as you live with the same people.. still). You did not develop in a vacuum. You developed in response to interactions you had all your life with your parents and grandmother. This is why the roots are there.

anita

Dear Ravi:

The anger in you, triggered like it has been, that anger to weaken needs to be acknowledged, understood… respected. If you condemn your anger as something bad that needs to be eliminated, it is not going to work. There are two things here:

1. Controlling the expression of your anger, your behavior when angry at another, controlling what you say and do to another. Not abusing another when you are angry, that cannot wait for until you heal, until you look into the past and heal. This has to be done now and there are techniques to do that.

2. While you are doing #1, you do need to look into the past, like I wrote in my previous post to you. You need to do that so to weaken that powerful energy of anger that gets triggered in you.

To do # 2, best is to do so in competent psychotherapy. I don’t know if such can be available to you. There is this protection of parents (and their parents, grandparents, that is) in society, not only in India but everywhere and many psychotherapists do that too, and so they are of little to no help.

When you protect parents by denying they harmed you, the price paid for doing that is that you make it impossible for you to heal. To keep seeing the parents (and grandmother in your case) as all good and loving, you have to see yourself as the bad and faulty one. Not only that, but you pass on the harm to innocent bystandards (like Jerry) and worse, to the innocent children you may have one day.

If you would like to work on #1 and/ or #2, let me know.

anita