Sometimes when I have been driving and I have remembered something from my past, the words just come in my mind: “I wish I was dead” but now I catch myself and change the message in my head to something like, “I wish I could hide” or something like that.

I did have genuine suicide thoughts many years ago – when I knew my marriage wasn’t going to work and then more years later after another relationship ended.  So glad I didn’t.  Life got better and my family would have been very hurt.  Besides, I’m sure there is purpose to my life even if I can’t always see it.

Dear Helcat:

You are welcome and thank you for starting your own thread on this important topic. After my post to you yesterday, on my walk, I had more thoughts that I wanted to add on the topic of pain. I will add and develop them as I read your recent post:

“An emotional part of me does feel like pain from the past will last forever, simply because it has so far” – in my first post to you I was referring to emotional pain, and I still do (although as my former therapist said: everything is physical, emotions included). The pain I had, starting as a child, was intense, excruciating. I didn’t understand it then and wasn’t able to make the distinction until recently, a few years ago:

The pain I experienced as a child was about (1) how much my mother was suffering (intense empathy for her), and (2) how terrible of a daughter I was for causing her more pain/ for adding to her suffering (excruciating guilt).

My pain lessened significantly in the last few years when I became able to … peel off the second from the first.

I found out that almost every time I hurt over someone else’s pain, much of the pain was about my core belief that I am guilty of the other person’s pain. Since then, when I feel pain over another person’s pain, I asked myself, am I guilty for this person’s pain? And if the answer is No, I feel significantly better.

“The logical side of me differs. I do not focus on the pain. My attention comes and goes as I prefer to focus on my life” – when you experience intense physical pain, you can’t not focus on it, right? Same is with emotional pain. If it is intense, it is hard to focus on anything else, time has an eternity-feel to it, and you want the pain to stop any which way, whatever it takes.

But if the pain is less intense, if you peel off one part of the pain and it lessens as a result, it is easier to focus elsewhere.

“I am hopeful that one day those feelings will resolve. Perhaps this is a foolish hope, or a denial of the idea of living with it. Perhaps these feelings are something that I will need to accept” – don’t accept what is not yours. I reject my guilt in all instances where I am not guilty and I reject taking more guilt than is mine, in instances where I am part guilty.

I accept that hurt and anxiousness and other forms of emotional suffering are, unfortunately, the human condition in the world we are living in.

“It is comforting to learn that these thoughts might one day cease on their own accord” – not on their own accord, the thoughts of suicide have been almost non-existent to me because I feel significantly less pain.

anita

Dear Helcat:

You are welcome!

“I don’t believe it’s based in guilt for me… I blamed myself, as children do” – to blame is to assign responsibility for a fault or wrong, and guilt is a state of believing that you have done wrong… so you did experience guilt as a child, didn’t you? You are welcome to elaborate on it,if  you would like to.

“I have a bad habit of avoiding physical pain by focusing on anxiety. I have a habit of worrying about various stressors in my life as opposed to focusing on emotional pain from the past” – I wonder what you mean by avoiding physical pain, what physical pain? Again, if you would like to elaborate, please do.

I will be back to the computer in about 11 hours from now.

anita

Dear Helcat:

“I don’t believe it’s based in guilt for me… Perhaps guilt isn’t the right word. That would imply that I was at fault, when I wasn’t” – of course you were not guilty of (not responsible for) your mother’s abuse of you, it’s that you incorrectly believed that you were guilty and as a result, you felt guilty.

I don’t think that it ever happens that a child who is abused by a parent (and is not protected and rescued by another parent/ adult in the home) does not feel guilty: a child instinctively takes responsibility for the parent’s abuse, a responsibility that does not belong with the child at all.

“I felt overly responsible” – interesting that you used the adjective overly responsible for your mother abuse, as if some responsibility was valid. In reality, you were not responsible at all.

“Perhaps shame is more accurate?” – both are unfortunately accurate, and they go together: the abused child naturally and instinctively feels guilty (believing that you have done wrong and are therefore responsible for the abuse) and ashamed (believing that you are wrong, inherently a bad girl, and therefore, you called for/ deserve the abuse).

“My mother told me that after myself and my brother were born, she magically became a terrible person. She claimed to have been perfectly fine before” – your incorrect belief in your own guilt did not need the additional glue that she threw at it by this false claim.

I imagine that she hated the chores involved in caring for babies and young children, changing diapers etc., so she blamed her babies.

“Her temper could be triggered by the smallest thing, so at night I would analyse the day and try and figure out what I could do better to avoid it” – there is a natural, instinctive reasoning behind the child taking responsibility for abuse: if as a child, you believed correctly that the responsibility for the abuse was indeed all your mother’s, then you would have been aware that you were in great danger and that you were powerless about it.

When you believed that you were responsible for the abuse, you were still aware that you were in danger, but that it was not as great of a danger because you were not powerless about it, there was something you could do to make the abuse stop. The feeling of having some power over abuse makes the situation feels less dangerous.

And so, at night, as a child, you were in the habit of analysing the day and figuring out how to… not cause her to abuse you the following day. But of course, there was nothing that you could have done, like you said: “there was nothing I could do to prevent the abuse. If different children were born to her, they would have been abused too. It wasn’t my fault“.

“When I relax before going to sleep… when my muscles relax (the physical pain) can be overwhelming and there is little to distract me. Worries are easier to think about than allowing myself to be immersed in the experience of physical pain” – I assume that you saw medical doctors in regard to this chronic, fluctuation pain (?)

* I am not a professional, but maybe (?)… the cause for this pain is peripheral neuropathy, “which refers to the many conditions that involve damage to the peripheral nervous system, the vast communication network that sends signals between the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) and all other parts of the body… symptoms improve on their own and may not require advanced care. Unlike nerve cells in the central nervous system, peripheral nerve cells continue to grow throughout life” (ninds. nih. gov/ peripheral neuropathy fact sheet).

anita

Dear Helcat:

As I read your recent post, I felt that I am more aware of the rawness of your pain, related to your mother’s severe abuse of you, how raw and intense it was/ is.

“When I relax before going to sleep is often when I experience the most physical pain… I didn’t worry that I had wronged another person…  I was bullied into feeling that I had it coming, not for doing wrong. But for existing. I felt that I existed to be abused and expected only that” –

– is it possible that when you relax before going to sleep, when your body is letting go of doing, and is settling for just existing (into just being), it is then that you feel that you have it coming- “it” being the pain inflicted on you by your mother, for no other reason than you existing?

anita

Dear Helcat:

You are welcome. I would like to reply to you further in the morning, in about 11 hours from now.

anita