Dear Reader:

I just posted in another thread:

” I need to practice the principles of Buddhism every day.. all day, everywhere, with everyone: Right Mindfulness (Practicing awareness of thoughts, feelings, and actions), Right Intention (Cultivating intentions of goodwill and harmlessness), Right Speech (Speaking truthfully and kindly), Right Action (Acting ethically: refraining from taking life, from stealing, from harmful speech, speech that deceives or otherwise hurts, unsettles or harms others..)”.

I want to elaborate on the above here, on my thread, so to promote what I boldfaced in the quote above.. all day, everywhere, with everyone:

I need to be more mindful of my thoughts and feelings, such that lead to speech and action that is fueled by wrong intention. I look within this morning (and I feel distress doing so), and I see that I carry anger  within me that has not been resolved, and at times of carelessness, it expresses itself and harms others in one way or another, like it did last evening in a real-life situation.

I feel blocked right now, not open to the intended mindfulness. I feel the tendency to .. go intellectual, so to speak, to explain things rationally so to circumvent the emotional.

I have deep-seated anger at having been left out/ ignored.. left behind in life, starting early. Life was happening elsewhere, for others, not for me, not where I was. Life was happening for others, not for me. By life, I mean joy, companionship, friendship, comfort, togetherness, love, romance, interest, passion.. For me, these happened in my day-dreams, and oh, how lovely those were.

But the daily and nightly experience was that of acute loneliness and isolation, jealousy of others who knew a different kind of life. The insult I felt (and by the way, I am typing as I think-feel, with no editing), for being left out by those who were fortunate was acute: the why me not being them? Why am I not included? Oh, how I craved associations and socializations and being treated like one-of, like.. one of them.

I remember, I think I was an older teenager, watching people my age walking hands in hands, boyfriends/ girlfriends, wishing I had a boyfriend too. But I was always alone. Alone, because I had something they- the others, the fortunate ones- didn’t have and that was my mother, the emotional vampire who feasted on my blood/ my life (I feel the anger building within me as I hit te keyboards with more force). I had a woman-mother-monster vampire whose primary message to me was: anita, your life is not your life. It’s MINE! You must live FOR ME.

I envied those whose lives were not owned.

My every word, my every act (and those were minimal) had to have her in mind. I was watched, ready to be criticized and ostracized and punished at any time the expression on my face didn’t seem right to her, anytime my voice wasn’t right in her mind, anytime I said something wrong in her evaluation. I was not free to be.

I feel that I am approaching going intellectual again, explaining all the ways she was harmful to me. Don’t want to do that.

I was just thinking about all the many people who are suffering terribly, and a voice in my head said to me that I shouldn’t complain and to get over it, over my mother.

I need to get over it, by going through it adequately, so that it stops fueling words such as the words that flew out of my mouth last evening (not name calling or threats and such, but harmful words nonetheless), so I continue:

Anger at my life being STOLEN by my mother, life that includes my whole youth, life that I didn’t get to have.

The above is the Core of my Anger.

I feel quite intense right now.

Last evening, I sat close to two people, one of them is someone who I feel likes me very much. How good it feels to be liked, oh how good. The other person sitting near me, I haven’t seen her for a long time. I’ll call the person who likes me L and the one I didn’t see for a long time, I’ll call her H. So, I am talking to both, H says something in regard to her boyfriend, and I feel the need to challenge her so (in my mind) to get L to keep liking me, taking a position in regard to her attitude toward her boyfriend, that I thought L, who is a man with traditional values, will approve of. That was my harmful talk last evening, which caused her to get upset with me. I ended up apologizing to her.

I don’t know how anger fits into what I wrote just above (and again, I am typing as I think, no editing). Maybe it’s not anger, it’s my desire to be liked, to be included- by L, such an intense desire to-be-approved of, to be accepted, that I .. that to have him on my side, I sort of had to sort of attack her.

For this was how it was at “home” with my mother: there was always someone to be attacked. When she appeared together with someone else, like a sister of hers or an acquaintance, it was always about hating someone else, gossiping about someone else, a 3rd party. Closeness between 2 people meant the two bonding over the demonization of a 3rd party; talking badly about that 3rd party.

Only my mother and her sister, let’s say, attacked the third party outside the 3rd party’s presence. I do this in the third party’s presence.

I’ll continue later. Oh, and if you are reading this, please do not comment at this point. I need to not be distracted or feel criticized by a comment that may be kind, yet, I may feel otherwise.

anita

Continued journaling:

The feeling of being completely alone, with no one to turn to for support, is a central theme of my childhood and much of my adulthood. This loneliness was synonymous with a sense of being trapped in a sort of death. In this acute loneliness, having a mother who placed me in a …box titled No One, I felt fragmented, as in having no sense of individual, recognizable  identity.

I longed for connection and understanding, but none was there for me to have as a child, and as a teenager and an adult, pervasive suspiciousness and distrust of people prevented me from connecting with people who were (although I didn’t know it) worthy of my trust. I resorted to fantasy and imagination as a way to cope with the overwhelming pain and loneliness.

I did not develop social skills. Instead, I developed neurological and behavioral disorders of all kinds (Tourette’s, OCD, ADD and more), which created more suffering.

Fast forward, increasingly over time, I connect with people and there is no experience more delightful than connecting!

But still, the lonely child within me needs more validation, more understanding of her long, too-long life of unnecessary, accumulated suffering, and consequences that are still there. The measure of fragmentation/ self-alienation that still exists, needs to not be there anymore. I need to be .. integrated, all of me being one person.

anita

Continued: what about the people who no longer long for home, for love.. people who gave up, or are giving up.. losing heart/ caring for other people..

anita

Dear Jana:

Thank you for asking. I’ve been listening to the Thich Nhat Hanh YouTube link that you sent yesterday, realizing how difficult it is for me to breathe in and out mindfully while listening, because being in the present (not distracted by thinking) brings me back to being a scared child. It’s the fear that fuels my escaping the present moment. Deep inside, I am still a scared child.

anita

Dear Jana (J):

“By the way, did you enjoy Thanksgiving Day? Do you have some traditions you follow on this day? 🙂 I’ve always been interested in American culture.“- yes, I did. Traditions: turkey and good people. I was around good people yesterday. Not perfect (including myself, lol), but good.

“This is really perfect for EFT… try to tap the feelings connected to the specific memories away. It does take time and it can be emotionally difficult, but it really works”-

– okay, let’s take a specific memory: she (my mother) is looking at me with those eyes of hers, no bit of green in those eyes, no bit of yellow, no color, no bit of softness in her face. She is looking at me with those hard, hateful eyes, not a hundredth ounce of empathy in them, and she says, with a harsh tone, the harshest, blood-chilling harshness: “I will murder you!”

And there I am FROZEN, Fear-Frozen. Now, tap, tap, just tapped the center of my head. Tapped the face, but nothing feels right other than tapping the center of the head: Tap (Thaw the fear), Tap, Thaw the fear. Tap, tap, tap, I feel a bit sleepy, an unexpected sleepy feeling.

“I understand this that we have to accept our fear, it is a part of us, and we should try to offer peace and comfort to our fear. By accepting the fear, it becomes smaller“- tap, tap, tap, my fear is falling asleep.

“Sometimes when I feel fear or I am unsure of myself, I imagine myself as a little girl, the scared child (yes, I have her in myself, too.) and I hold her and kiss her and tell her something sweet and nice in my head… I have a picture of me when I was about 5“- little girl anita, little forgotten girl: I remember you now. I remember you at five, I remember you!

“I remember you wrote that you used to see a therapist. Do you still see him/her?“- no, I left the state where I had therapy with him, and so the therapy ended. I don’t plan to see any other therapist in the (new) state where I’m in. My therapy is right here, in these forums of tiny buddha, and right now.. you are my therapist, Jana (not a professional one, I understand). Because I trust you to be a good person.

“What also helps me now is that I have someone who respects me and loves me the way I am. I am trying to shift my focus from those who didn’t give me love in the past (or now) to those who give it to me. I was wondering if your husband can be this support and love to you now?“- I keep expecting him to scream at me, although he never did. I keep seeing disapproval in his beautiful blue eyes, although he has been most supportive.

I used to hear loud screaming. Now it’s quieter. All a reminder of who has been the most powerful person in little-girl anita’s life: “I will MURDER you“- was her promise.

Tap, tap, tap, center of the head. Tap, tap, tap..  sh… sh..

I can’t help but feel this ANGER at her, an anger silenced throughout the years by people who repeated the biblical command: you must honor your father and your mother.. no matter what.. a strong cultural command, if not a religious command (where I grew up, grew in, that is).

Yes, honor her desire to kill me, to murder me..

No.

Tap, tap, tap, center of the head is the only place my tapping feels like it’s working.

Oh, I forgot to share this with you, Jana: none of my efforts to help her, none of my love for her stopped her from passionately running toward me, not so to hug me gently (gentleness was not the name of her game), but running passionately to hit me, arms extended forward, hands preparing to hit. Nothing stopped her but on that one occasion: I was in my 20s, she ran toward me, in the small living room, in the small apartment, running with.. suffering in her face and passion too, passion to hit me.

I extended my arms toward her, for the first time, and I grabbed her hands in mine (what an icky feeling, to have her hands in mine), and I extended my arms  just enough force to stop her moving toward me.

Suddenly, and unexpectedly, her hands melted in my hands, becoming weak, and she withdrew, never attempting to hit me again, never again.

See, it was not Love that made her withdraw and no longer try to hit/ murder me. it was Force, my physical Force that made her stop.

With some people, with  a lot of people, it’s not love that makes them stop their aggression.. it’s force.

Tap, tap, tap. Thank you, Jana. I hope that this is not too intense for you. It’s just that life is such that.. confronting the true nature of things is necessary.

anita

Dear Jana:

Thank you. I appreciate your sensitivity, this is indeed a painful topic and I feel some pain this very morning because of an event that happened last evening in real-life. I will elaborate on it later on, in this post.

“I can feel (and this is only my subjective feeling from the text) that you cannot leave her in your thoughts, let her go away from your life for good. Is it true?“- I used to think about her a lot. She used to be .. my center. For years now, I’ve been thinking about her very, very little. So, no, it’s not that I cannot leave her in my thoughts. What I can’t leave, because it’s impossible to leave/ undo/ reverse, is some of the damage she inflicted on me, with which I struggle.

I’ve suffered from Tourette Disorder since I was maybe 5 or 6 and have suffered from it every hour, every day of my entire life. Imagine feeling this physical tension in your body day in, day out, all day long, finding this or that muscle moving when you don’t want it to move, and the feeling is that of trying to stop the move (tic) and failing, so there’s a fight within/ tension. Imagine growing up being made fun of, because of these tics, feeling ashamed and wondering why I was such a freak of nature.

Although I tried my whole life, I wasn’t able to undo this disorder and there is no reason for me to believe that it is possible: my neurological-muscular connection has been irreversibly damaged. If you do a research, you will read that stopping tics for someone with Tourette’s is not possible.

So, although I left her in my thoughts, my neurological-muscular connection hasn’t and will not leave her. It was done and it can’t be undone.

More damage that was done and can’t be undone is ADD or ADHD as well as learning disabilities (often associated with Tourette’s), that although can be managed better and somewhat improved.. these too cannot be stopped/ be reversed.

Glad to report that my 30 years of OCD, in regard to physical compulsions, is over with (Yeah!) Also, I no longer fit the Major Depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Anorexia I was diagnosed with over the years. Although I do.. obsessively count calories in- calories out every day. So, healing was done and continues to take place, for which I am grateful.

“with my lone wolf personality and tendencies to run away from bad people I would completely reject her and wouldn’t give her a space in my mind or heart“- this is an important point that I will be making here, and it is important for me that you understand, so please try.. Here it is: she inserted herself into my brain-body before I had the ability- and no child has this ability- to reject her/ protect myself.  I don’t think about her, I suffer the consequences of what she did to me when I didn’t yet have a self separated from her.

I don’t think I ever shared this much as I do today with you (on a public forum, I know): parents damage their children, more often than I wish it happened.. I wish it never happened, but this one thing I am telling you, which I have never told anyone in my whole life: the extent of the damage, the extent of the physical discomfort (Tourette’s) and emotional pain (shame, guilt, acute loneliness, acute interpersonal/ social deprivation was so acute, so immense. that I don’t know how a person can still be alive after years of this.

There are certain books and movies that clicked with me, as in telling my story: Stolen Lives is one. The movie Awakening is another: people waking up at an older age from being catatonic for decades. The movie Seven, when the bad man said, as far as I remember, paraphrased: I am not allowing him (the character played by Brad Pit) to live, I am allowing him to live the life I allow him to live.

What happens to a child, to a little girl, when her mother finds pleasure in hurting and harming her little girl? When it’s not her ignorance alone, her lack of education, her limitations that hurt and harm her daughter, but her own desire to hurt and harm?

I don’t think that people normally understand this point, The Pleasure Factor of a mother hurting her daughter.

I am trying to weaken the power of this factor by expressing it here, by elaborating on it, if I may, more than I ever did (and I don’t even know what I am about to type next, trigger warning just in case it’s needed)-

– for her, I was not a child, I was an adult,  a combination of all the adults that have hurt her. The name of her game was not parenting, but taking revenge, while appearing outwardly, like a good, kind person.

So, she’d be a great hostess for others, she’d buy me toys and my favorite cake, show me some affection.. until it came time for Revenge: acidic words thrown at my face, feasts thrown at my body, hitting, saying: “You think I am stupid? I will not break your bones so that evil-you you can get me in (legal)  trouble!”

“You think I am stupid? You think that I don’t know that I am (doing) wrong? But what can you do? You have nowhere to go!”

In her two sentences above, there was no empathy, do not be mistaken: she was angry at me for thinking that I was thinking “my mother is stupid!“, which I was not thinking because all I was.. was terrified. But see, I have to explain myself right here, to defend myself from her accusation.

These experiences, right above, are not such that I am normally thinking about, it’s things I bring up (again) because I am trying to heal further.

“But I feel that she really hurt you so bad that it is very difficult to let her go. (?)“- it’s not about letting her go, it’s about me trying to heal from the damage she had caused me.

“When you faced her, how did you feel? Was it liberating?“- when I stopped her from hitting me (in my early 20s), it wasn’t liberating. I was upset, disappointed as I thought to myself: that’s all she got? This is all I had to do all these years to stop her from hitting me? It was that easy, and I didn’t do it?

“Did you ever tell her how you feel/felt about her?“- my last gift of mercy to her is to not let her know. If it’s at all possible for her to hold in awareness anything I say.

I will now tell you about last evening: I was at the local taproom. The server poured me a third glass of wine before my bod could handle it. Before I knew it, I drank it and .. I remember little of what happened next. I was told this morning that I became belligerent and used the F word repeatedly, something that I NEVER do, something I criticize others fordoing. I was mortified to hear it, couldn’t believe it. My ANGER, my decades-long suppressed anger erupted to the surface.

In more details: there was a competition for a gift basket that including some hats and whatnot. This guy won the basket, and I gave him a hard time, saying something like (I am paraphrasing from what I was told I said): I never get to win anything! Why don’t I get to be a winner at anything!!!

Next, the guy gave me one of the hats in the basket he won, and I said: So, now I am a F*** winner!”

Next, I was taken home feeling sick, closing my eyes, trying to not feel sicker than I was already feeling (this I remember). Next, I went straight to bed, couldn’t brus my teeth or change clothing or anything. Next, I woke up remembering nothing, wondering what happened, if anything..

And all the above, my post yesterday about my ANGER, it was part of what was to take place.. the anger, such a powerful emotion that is difficult for me to encounter, to address.. to.. what do I do with it, with this anger at having been mistreated sadistically, of my life stolen, all the years, decades of loneliness, uninterrupted acute loneliness and pain.

anita

* “My insight into the complexity of my relationship with my mother”- initially, I wrote this in the 2nd person, as if I was hearing validation from a 3rd party, someone speaking to me.