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Fear, Anxiety and Healing

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  • #428319
    anita
    Participant

    Dear Reader:

    I want to use this thread as my place to journal about this topic, with this ambitious goal in mind: to significantly-  and on an ongoing, long-term basis- lessen my significant anxiety.

    I invite you to use this thread for the same purpose, to share your thoughts, feelings and experiences with Fear, Anxiety and Healing. Fear is.. a scary topic to look into, and therefore, I would like the participants in this thread (if it’s going to be more than just me submitting posts) to respect and encourage; to be gentle and patient with ourselves and with each other.

    About my experience, I will start with this: for the past 10 years, I’ve lived outside the city limits and most of the roads around me are private roads, not busy roads.  I’ve taken a daily 1+ hour walk in my area every day since Jan 2014. It was during the Covid lockdowns of 2021, that I noticed that no vehicles were passing through the private roads for longer periods of time than usual, and wild animals seemed comfortable spending their time on the roads. I remember on a few occasions on my walks at the time seeing brown bears crossing the road, or staying on the road, taking their time, a far-enough distance from me. I waited until they left into the brush before resuming my walk.

    One afternoon, on my usual walk on a private road that seemed deserted, I heard panting behind me, a panting that was getting closer and closer to me. Looking to my left, I saw a beautiful grey and white dog running, passing me to my left. I noticed that the dog didn’t have a leash on, and I wondered where the owner was. The dog then made a sharp turn and situated itself solid, facing me, a big and beautiful dog. It didn’t bark though.

    It didn’t bark or growl. It was very quiet, looking at me up and down, checking me, studying me, and it was then that I realized that it was not a dog, it was a big, strong-looking coyote, a predator studying its prey, trying to figure out if I am strong enough to fight it, and the rest of its pack, likely hiding in the brush and observing.

    I’ll take a break from the story and tell you about the fear I felt at the time: I can’t really describe the feeling well, it was so new to me: it must have been an intense adrenaline rush. It felt like a high, an extreme alertness, feeling strong, capable. It was as if time stopped. Later on, I thought how different that experience of fear (the emotional and physical reaction to a real and present danger) was from anxiety as I knew it day in and day out. When anxious, I am aware of my distressed breathing, muscle tightness, muscles twitching (I have tics); I am aware of my thoughts and I am physically uncomfortable. But when facing the coyote, I was not at all aware of my body or my thoughts, there were no thoughts really, or very few.. no time to ruminate, that’s for sure. I was not uncomfortable, I didn’t suffer. I felt.. strong and alert, focused on the coyote facing me.

    I will post again later, a day or days from now. It is not easy to look into these things, and I don’t expect people to be inclined to do this kind of work, particularly on a public forum. But if you are inclined, you are welcome to do so here.

    anita

    #428330
    anita
    Participant

    Dear Reader:

    Because I was reminded of the coyote incident yesterday, I talked about it with someone last evening (irl), someone who grew up on an Indian reservation, close to nature, and who was himself the intended prey of a pack of wolves. He said that (1) sounds like the coyote I encountered, by its looks (having blue eyes and grey/ white fur colors) was a mix of coyote and Siberian husky (coydog). Or that it could have been a wild Siberian husky. Indeed, looking at images of Siberian huskies online, these images look very similar to the animal I encountered, and still, scary to imagine an encounter with this animal.

    (2) He said that it is unlikely that there were coyotes from a pack hiding in the brush, observing the encounter, because if they were there, they’d make their characteristic sounds, howls or yips. He said that the coydog who confronted me was probably a maverick, an independent, one who is not part of a pack.

    (3) He said that indeed coyotes (unlike wolves who attack from the back of the intended prey) confront their prey from the front (like it happened in my case), and that the way for a person to react when attacked by a coyote (or a coydog, or a dog) would be to cover one’s neck with one arm and insert the hand of the other arm into the coyote’s mouth, grabbing its tongue. I asked: wouldn’t its tongue be slippery? And the man said, No, it’d be like sand paper.

    Back to the 2021 incident: facing the coyote (or coydog) who was focused on me and looking at me up and down, the ditch to my right was in the periphery of my sight. I wanted a stick to hold and use to protect myself. (I live in a  wooded area and there are lots of sticks lying in the ditches on the sides of private roads, many are thick and strong). I knew that it wasn’t a good idea to lower my height by stepping down into a ditch, but I felt that I needed to do it anyway, so to get a weapon/ stick. I remember allowing myself to look away from the coyote and direct my eyes to the ditch, looking for a stick to grab, not having the coyote in my sight, and wondering if it was already approaching me for the hunt. It didn’t. I grabbed a stick or sticks, and I threw one at the coyote: it moved back a little but remained in its location, focused on me still. And then, a vehicle drove by and the coyote ran away. I remember feeling relief seeing the coyote running away along the road in front of me and then disappearing into the brush. I walked the rest of the way with a stick or sticks, afraid but confident enough to complete the walk.

    The day after, I didn’t take my walk, but the day after that, I said to myself: I’ve been taking this walk every day for years, what happened the day before was a freak occurrence, what’s the chance that it will happen again? And so, I went on the same walk again, and at the same stretch of private road, I heard panting to my left, and there it was, the same coyote running to my left.

    That’s the whole story: thing is, I don’t remember if the vehicle drove by and scared the coyote away on the first day or on the second, or in both days. Following the two encounters, and since, I carry bear spray with me on most of my walks (sometimes I carry a thick stick, but there were times I carried nothing with me).

    Okay, that was my experience with Fear. Now, Anxiety is a different animal, so to speak: Afraid, I felt strong and capable; Anxious, I feel weak and helpless, Afraid, I had only a few thoughts and all of them were of a practical nature; Anxious I have many thoughts and not of a practical nature,

    Afraid, I was not aware (not thinking of) my body and its sensations at all; Anxious I am too aware of my body, I focus on it (it’s called body vigilance), worrying about and getting alarmed when noticing pain or sensations that I am afraid will develop into pain,

    Fear did not stop me from taking my daily walks; Anxiety stops me from doing lots of things, every day I continue (still) to procrastinate tasks that cause me anxiety, tasks that very much need to be done, Fear was followed by a practical, proactive solution (carrying bear spray); Anxiety was followed by helplessness/ paralysis.

    * I will continue in the next post.

    anita

    #428332
    anita
    Participant

    Dear Reader:

    Fear in my childhood accumulated and turned into severe anxiety, and by severe, I mean, I got caught in OCD and Tourette’s Syndrome from an early age, sometime in the middle of my first decade of life. By my mid-thirties, I managed to resist the OCD compulsions and I no longer fit the OCD diagnosis. That’s Healing. There are other mental health diagnoses that I received but no longer fit (Healing there!).. but the anxiety and the tics persist. No Healing in this category, and every tic is associated with anxiety. These tics (vocal, sounds of loud breathing, shoulder/ face twitching) are my anxiety physically vibrating through my body, twitching it. Every day.

    I want Healing in this area of anxiety vibrating through my body (right shoulder is hurting right now, from twitching it), and I will work on it in this thread.

    anita

    #428333
    anita
    Participant

    Dear Reader:

    In childhood, anxiety grew based on a combination of (1) the coyote/ predator in my life was my mother, a person I loved and was depended on,  a person whose love (and care) I kept pursuing, (2) it was not a single occurrence of emotional predation, but a recurring one over many years; overall, being I was stuck living with a predator, nowhere, no way to run away (Flight), and no chance to win a Fight, (3) being alone facing the predator, no one with me, no one together with me facing the predator, (4) feeling/ believing that I was the bad guy, that I was very faulty and very guilty for making her so miserable, that she “had” to attack me; seeing her as my victim, and myself as her victimizer.

    More, tomorrow.

    anita

    #428357
    anita
    Participant

    Continued:

    From urban child institute. org: “In contrast to tolerable stress, toxic stress refers to persistent, unhealthy amounts of stress caused by chronically stressful conditions without the protective benefits of healthy caregiving… babies are affected by stress even in the protective environment of the womb. Since maternal cortisol levels affect the developing fetus, a mother’s level of stress is directly related to the well-being of her baby. Positive and tolerable stress levels are safe, but toxic stress increases the risk of preterm delivery, low birth weight and other complications. It is also associated with impaired mental, behavioral and motor development in infancy”.

    From Psychology today: “Newer research on this topic has involved scanning fetuses’ brains through their mothers’ pregnant bellies to examine the neurobiological consequences of chronic stress. In general, this research has shown that… stressed-out mothers had fetuses with decreased functional brain activity when compared to mothers who were less stressed. Importantly, infants of the stressed mothers were also born sooner, consistent with previous research linking prenatal stress to birth complications”.

    From NIH National library of Medicine: “When faced with an acute stressor, the brain initiates behavioral and physiological adaptations to protect the body and prepares for a fight-or-flight response. These physiological adaptations are referred to as allostasis… In the short term, allostasis is adaptive, and physiological systems return to baseline in the absence of threat. However, repeated or chronic exposure to stressors can lead to allostatic load or overload, in which prolonged release of primary mediators (glucocorticoids, catecholamines, and cytokines) disrupts development and functioning of the brain and neuroendocrine, immune, metabolic, cardiovascular, and respiratory systems. These physiological disruptions, referred to as secondary outcomes of the stress response, can lead to diseased and disordered tertiary end points that affect mental and physical health across the life span…

    “For the purposes of this article, I define chronic stress as the process by which any stressor leads to a prolonged release of primary mediators and places children at risk of secondary outcomes and tertiary end points associated with allostatic load and overload. This concept is distinct from that of acute stress, which includes a temporary allostatic response with a return to homeostasis after the resolution of a single psychologically or physically threatening event. In childhood and adolescence, chronic stressors may include extreme experiences, such as abuse, neglect, or institutionalization, as well as more prevalent stressors such as exposure to poverty, food insecurity, interpersonal violence, parental mental illness, racism, discrimination, unstable foster care placement, or unsafe neighborhoods and community violence”.

    These quotes give me a better understanding of the effects of my mother’s high stress levels on me when she was pregnant with me (leading to birth complication/breech birth, and low birth weight), and the effects of growing up with her expressed high stress level, and with her abuse of me, leading to a variety of my disorders: a quite severe ADD and other cognitive deficits, as well as OCD, Tourette’s Syndrome (TS), and emotion regulation deficit.

    I have no doubt that my Healing, as I continue to heal, cannot be complete, given the nature of the damage. My future healing, journaled here, will be guided by the principle outlined in The Serenity Prayer: “god, grant me the serenity to accept the tings I cannot change (the damage that can’t be undone), the courage to change the things I can (to undo/ lessen the damage that can be undone/ lessened.. neuroplasticity and such), and the wisdom to know the difference“.

    – To be continued…

    anita

    #428373
    anita
    Participant

    Continued, a note: Fear is short term experience, it makes a person feel strong, capable and powerful; Anxiety is a long-term experience, it makes a person feel weak, incapable and powerless. This is an important distinction.

    Are you afraid or are you anxious? If you feel strong, capable and powerful.. you are afraid. if you feel weak, incapable and powerless, you are anxious.

    Fear is followed by a return to a healthy, calm and alert baseline; Anxiety is followed by a loss of a healthy baseline. The baseline becomes.. anxiety.

    anita

    #428403
    anita
    Participant

    Continued, this is my new understanding:

    Fear is helpful and necessary when facing real-and-present danger. There is a real positive association between fear and survival. Fear makes a person strong and capable. When a person is Anxious, he/ she is suffering from fear-gone-haywire, a diseased-fear, if you will. Anxiety makes a person weak and incapable.

    The anxious person believes- without necessarily being aware of the belief- that anxiety (like fear) is helpful, that there is a real, positive association between anxiety and survival. Therefore, the anxious person worries and ruminates on and on and on.. sort of, extending the anxiety, thinking that the extended anxiety will pay off.

    Fear promotes survival, fear is helpful;  anxiety is never helpful, it never promotes survival. While anxious, the person is less likely to do what needs to be done to survive/ improve his or her situation. It is very important for the anxious person to distinguish between fear and diseased-fear, aka anxiety, and to remove the deep, false belief that anxiety is helpful.

    anita

    #428427
    anita
    Participant

    Continued:

    I noticed an improvement (not the disappearance of, of course) in my level of daily anxiety since I started this thread, and last night I had the best night sleep I had in the longest time, what an improved feeling this morning!

    The improvement I am experiencing makes me hopeful as to the process of (partial) Healing the dis-ease of Anxiety. I am crediting this improvement to first, my hope that there can be long-term Healing of Anxiety, that it is possible, and second to my most recent realization, an understanding I didn’t have before: that in Anxiety, there is an instinctual belief that Fear helps one survive, or be better equipped to effectively manage life.

    Fear, as I experienced it when I faced the coyote, my first 1-to-1 experience of a natural predator/prey kind was not a distressing experience, there was no lack of ease (a dis-ease). It felt good! Now I understand why many people enjoy scary movies (I used to). If scary movies caused people anxiety (dis-ease), people wouldn’t keep watching them. I suppose this is why many people seek scary sports and activities like rock climbing and jumping off a plane: if those activities caused the people who did them Anxiety, they wouldn’t do them again! Fear feels good.

    Fear is part of Anxiety, but there is more to anxiety than Fear, and that more makes anxiety a bad-feeling experience. Anxiety never feels good. Fear led me to focus on the coyote and the world around me; I was one with nature/ the world around, I felt elated, capable, powerful. Anxiety leads me to focus on the inside of me, in a negative way, being turned inward, separated from nature/ the world around, feeling depressed, incapable, powerless.

    Because Fear is an ingredient in the mix that makes Anxiety, our instinctual belief that Fear HELPS is carried into the Anxiety experience, and we support and maintain that which we believe is helpful, or will help. But this belief is a false belief: anxiety is never helpful.

    What’s more to Fear in the experience of Anxiety?

    My answer (to my question): damage that was accumulated over years and longer.

    To explain the Damage, I will go back to my experience with a predator, but a different kind of predator than the coyote of 2021: my mother, my personal emotional predator. Looking back at the 2021 predator-prey moments, I didn’t and don’t feel anger at the coyote: for one, I did not suffer any injury, no negative consequences, second: the natural job of a predator is to prey on species smaller or weaker than itself (and if very hungry, considers preying on a bigger/ stronger species). it wasn’t personal. My experience with the coyote did not interfere with me continuing the same daily walk after the 2- days confrontations.

    But with my emotional predator it was very personal. And very unnatural. A mother is not designed or supposed to attack her own child. It is not in her instinctual job description. I bet it never happens in nature unless the mother is deranged, and is in very abnormal circumstances.

    * It happens in human society, it happens a lot, that people, including mothers, are deranged and life circumstances are indeed too often abnormal.

    Back to my emotional predatory childhood experience: unlike the short-term (a few moments) of my experience with the coyote, two days of a few moments of encounter on each day, my experience with my mother lasted days, months, years.. an eternity (with breaks, of course). At first, I am sure there was Fear, but that Fear- over such a long, long time- metastasized into something else: Anxiety.

    Facing the coyote, I knew the danger, and when he ran away, I knew the danger was gone. With my mother, I didn’t want her to run away, I needed her to.. (change and be what a mother is supposed to be), and I had nowhere to run, too needy to run, no way to fight, too guilty to fight because I believed (falsely) that I deserved her attacks.

    And so, what happened, over time, to the instinctual need within me to run or fight my personal predator?

    The running and fighting turned inward: “running” inside of me, creating that sickening rush that characterizes anxiety; “fighting” inside me, creating this disquiet/ distress/ dis-ease that characterizes anxiety. The natural, helpful Fight-Flight Response to Fear turned inward, repeatedly, over a period of years, unnatural and harmful, creating damage: TS, OCD, ADD, cognitive and emotional dysfunction, in my case.

    To be continued.

    anita

    #428477
    anita
    Participant

    Continued:

    When I was confronted by the coyote less than 3 years ago, it felt like time stopped. But Time resumed on that same afternoon, some time after the confrontation was over (the coyote ran away and into the brush). I haven’t been significantly afraid of being confronted by that coyote or by any other coyote since, and resumed my regular walk- including walking through the same stretch of road-  a couple of days after the confrontation (although with some weapon in my hand, pepper spray or a stick). It all seems so far away now, a memory that is secure in the past.

    On the other hand, even though I didn’t see my mother (who lives in another country) in close to 13 years and didn’t talk with her for 11 years (my choice), I am still significantly afraid of her. I’d be afraid to be in the country were she resides in fear that I will find myself in her presence, accidentally. My memories of her are far from being secure in the past. Time has stopped in this context, past is one with the present. I indeed lived in the past for too long.

    Fear stops Time for a little while; Anxiety stops Times for decades; too often, it stops Time for a lifetime.

    It is beginning to get dark as I am typing this, sitting in bed, looking at the stillness of the outside through the window, alone. Whenever alone, at this time of the evening, I feel anxious, fearing that my mother will die. Not because she is old now, but because when she was 25, and I was 5, she said (in a very emotional, convincing way) that she was going to kill herself. I am re-living now what happened decades ago. In my mind, I am still that 5-year-old, afraid that mother will die.

    Anxiety extends the past into the present, and the two are one. Healing is about securing these memories in the past; removing these painful/ scary memories from the Now, and seeing a Now that doesn’t have her in it.

    anita

    #428482
    anita
    Participant

    The reason I feel this anxiety whenever I am alone in the evening, is because she used to work and I was waiting for her alone, in the evening, anxious as hell, worried that she will never return, that she is dead and (my) life would therefore end that same night.

    Notice I use the present tense: she is… Past indeed extends into the present, decades later.

    To be continued.

    anita

    #428496
    anita
    Participant

    Continued:

    I slept well and shortly after I woke up, I noticed an elated feeling (I still feel it now, 20 minutes or so later) that I don’t remember feeling in the longest time, for decades. It may be, this youthful elation (a mild elation but oh, so very pleasant), what I felt at times (rarely) in my 20s… when I felt hopeful. This may be what Happy means, a mildly happy feeling.

    Still in bed, before getting up, I thought: is this the day after? As in, the day after the decades of my life frozen in time? Did I leave the past in the past and woke up to.. the day after the past?

    I definitely don’t want to be carried away with this and expect what wouldn’t be realistic to expect (any happily-ever-after kind of expectation), but it’s nice, and I am definitely motivated to continue my work here.

    anita

    #428503
    anita
    Participant

    Continued:

    The coyote scared me, but he (or she) did not hurt me. He considered it.. but it didn’t happen. I vividly remember him looking at me up and down, assessing me as potential prey. I’ll never forget it.. it was clear, in his eyes, that it was strictly business, the business of nature, nothing personal. But he didn’t prey on me. Following the two encounters, on two different days, I resumed my walks, there was no pain and injury left over from the encounters.

    On the other hand, my mother- my emotional predator- did hurt me. And it was very personal. There was pain and injury carried on from one day to the next, and to the next. It was emotional pain (hurt, shame, guilt, loneliness, despair), and it was physical pain and distress: there were occasional beatings, but mostly the physical pain I am referring to involves a whole lot of physical discomfort and distress aka anxiety which is my experience almost every moment of every day, when I am awake. Like right now (right shoulder twitching and in pain, being sore from the tics, breathing interrupted, unnatural).

    My mother was my monster, not a mother. She or it.. was not for me; it was against me. She didn’t kill me, but it would’ve been less painful to me if she did. And throughout it all, I craved- deep inside- to one day make her a mother. This craving, this hope kept me close to the monster, forevermore craving her absent love… stuck in a vacuum of love, stuck in the absence of a mother.

    To be continued.

    anita

     

    #428519
    anita
    Participant

    Continued:

    I wrote above, “stuck in the absence of a mother“. It’s synonymous with saying stuck in the absence of love. Love for a person is like water for a plant. Without water, a plant withers; without love, a child withers.

    In the absence of love, a vacuum is created, a vacuum that quickly gets filled with Anxiety. Here is a proposed definition: anxiety= the condition of being stuck in the absence of love.

    I wrote that my mother was not a mother but a monster. It is interesting how similar these two words are.

    I say monster because of all the people in the world, it is this one person who took it upon herself to personally and directly inflict massive pain on me. It was just me and her alone in the small apartment when she did that: the family members who abused here weren’t there, politicians and criminals who created wars and crime that harmed her.. these people weren’t there. It was just me and her alone. And so, in my life, she is the monster.

    Notice I used the present tense: she is the monster, not she was the monster. When I write about her elsewhere I automatically use the present tense. Sometimes I go back and correct it to the past tense, but what comes out of me first, is the present tense. And that is because Anxiety prolongs the past, extending it into the present. The present and the past are one for the Anxious person.

    About the massive pain that she inflicted on me personally and directly: whenever I told about it in the past, I told about it from a minimally-feeling, maximally- dissociated state of mind. As I now try to tell about it from a feeling/ associated state of mind, I feel an unbearable distress and a sense of panic. And so, I am scared to go there. But I will say, it feels like an internal collapse, a death approaching… if I re-experience it the way I experienced it then.

    This is what I felt back then when alone with her, at 5, at 15, at 25 (and in-between), she told me with great emotion and theatrics that she was going to kill herself.. and that she was going to kill herself because I hurt her so much, because of words I said or didn’t say, acts I did or didn’t do, expressions on my face she said meant to hurt her, thoughts she said I had when I was silent.

    You see, my monster suffered from a combo of Paranoid, Borderline and Histrionic Personality Disorders, which meant that she repeatedly suspected that I (as well as other people, practically everyone, at one time or another) was actively trying to hurt her feelings, and feeling victimized by me, she ragefully attacked me repeatedly, at length, and creatively, theatrically. In her mind, she was defending herself from me.

    I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t the case (can you imagine a child trying to hurt a monster and bring rage-attacks against oneself?). Her response was always to argue against my claims of innocence by listing “evidence”: my past behaviors over months and longer that were aimed- so she claimed- at hurting her, and in so doing, prolonging the rage attack.

    Her attacks and abuse included, but were not limited to the following: (1) shaming words and messages, going out of her way to deliver a shaming message in all ways possible, from every angle available, drilling it in thoroughly, for a long time per shaming session, (2) heavy-duty, at length guilt-tripping, (3) feasting on my empathy for her by describing in great detail, during long sessions, how hurt she felt by me and by other people, while insisting that I was a lucky girl with no valid hurt feelings, (4) using a loud, high-pressured voice, yelling, crying, never-ending theatrical expressions of her misery, (5) threats to commit suicide, (6) slapping my face with her open hand, and/ or kicking my body with her foot.

    My Healing is about accepting that all the above happened, that it hurt a whole lot, that the damage she inflicted on me was real and severe (to no longer minimize it, as I have done). To give my feelings, my experience the validity that she took away from me.

    To accept and acknowledge the severity of the abuse I went through, and to clear the present time from the abuse of the past: to no longer project her into other people (expecting them to do what she did).. to remove her from people in my life now.

    To not accept the severity of what happened causes what happened to keep knocking on my door, so to speak, insisting to be fully seen and heard. The knocking is not just about what happened but about it re-happening in new forms, new contexts, new people. For example, as a teenager, I never worried about my knees failing me and not being ale to walk (I worried about other things, of course); as an older woman, the Anxiety took over a new area due to aging: my knees.

    Anxiety is like glue that is keeping shame, hurt, and guilt in my life in the present time. Healing is about removing the anxiety from these feelings/ emotional-mental experiences, so to allow them to move to the past and stay there.

    To be continued.

    anita

    #428550
    anita
    Participant

    Continued:

    Anxiety is about being afraid of what already happened. Again, anxiety keeps the past in the present, and the present in the past. The two (past and present) are one. So, no wonder we are afraid of what already happened… as if it didn’t happen. For example, I am afraid of being shamed as if it didn’t already happen, but is about to happen.

    Fears of childhood, over a long period of time, transform into Anxiety. Anxiety solidifies past, present and future into one, and it seeks new topics to inhabit (example: fear of feeling pain in my knees, later in life), but it’s the same Anxiety inhabiting different focus points at different times, or more accurately: anxiety inhabits different focus points in the continuum of one time.

    I need to place the intense, original fears of my childhood in a designated area: the past.

    To be continued.

    anita

    #428585
    anita
    Participant

    Continued (warning stated after typing the below): reading what follows may be upsetting to some readers):

    I need to place the intense, original fears of my childhood in a designated area: the past” (right above in yesterday’s post)- fear that she will die, that she will kill herself (she said she will), that I will be alone without her,

    and fear of being with her, fear that she will kill me (she said she will)-

    – it did not and will never happen: she will not kill herself, simply because for 40 years she threatened, but didn’t. She will not kill me because I am not there in her presence, therefore, she can’t, it’s not something that’s possible for her to do: I am not there with her!

    There is a sense of victory right there, in the above: I made it impossible for her to kill me, I have this much power, here and now!

    “I will murder you!”, she said, she promised; no, mother-monster, you won’t, because you can’t. I am not there with you!!!

    I can hear her in my mind’s ear right now saying that I am crazy to believe those long-gone words of hers, that “everyone says words they don’t mean when angry” (she had said that which I just quoted). But oh, mother-monster, you said those words: “I will murder you!” with a voice, an emotion, an alarm that sounded like you were about to do it!

    I would distill my original Fear to this one fear: that my mother-monster will viciously kill me, murder me.

    Oh, mother… please don’t.. please don’t!?

    Oh, mother.. please..

    When the person you need most is a monster.

    Oh, mother, please be a mother to me, take me in gentle arms, tell me in a gentle voice, tell me I am safe with you, I’d do anything…

    I hear her in my mind’s ear saying: you stupid thing, you bad thing: “you know that no one means when they say things out of anger”, you make something out of nothing!

    But oh, mother-monster, how many people were murders every day ever since you said those words to me, for the first time.. how many people said “I’ll murder you!” and then did the deed..

    I am trying to talk sense to her (to my mother-monster) right now.. still trying to make her understand, trying to make the monster-mother be a mother.

    Oh, how much I need, how much I still need a mother.. where can I find a mother for me?

    There isn’t any.

    And with all due respect, my “inner mother” cannot parent my “inner child”, not any way close to what I needed then, and still need from a real mother: a person outside of me to hold me dearly and take care of me gently, so that I can be.

    I hear her still: you coward, she says, you terrible creature you are, to vilify me…

    Oh, mother-monster, we will never have a meeting-of-the-minds, will we?

    To TRY to reach out to the monster-mother for so long, make her hear me, gently, so gently ask her to hear me… with absolutely zero chance for success. To keep chasing her, pleading: hear me, hear me, be my mother..?!

    To be continued.

    anita

     

     

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