Dear rainbowmystica:

Significant, ongoing fear (anxiety) creates havoc in all kinds of ways, partially releasing itself via all kinds of symptoms. My first symptoms of anxiety were those fitting the Tourette Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder diagnoses at age 5 or 6.

You can and will heal, as I have and am continuing to heal, once you are living away from your mother, in a group home or a small apartment financed by your father, and whilebattending therapy with a competent, empathetic therapist.

These symptoms you experience will weaken over time, and new energy will be available for you, energy to be you, to create and to love and be loved by a loving future partner. This energy is now blocked by anger; suffocated by self denial, that hiding of the real you, your true feelings.

It will take time and patience, but it can and will be done. Take the right steps, take care of your living situation, talk to your therapist Tuesday about your mother. And don’t give up on healing no matter how long it takes. Be patient. Post anytime.

anita

Dear rainbowmystica:

I understand and your mother should have understood and not taken your cookies. See the anger, your anger at your mother- this is why you need to move out and away. Take deep breaths when you get anxious or angry and tell yourself that you soon will be moving out and living apart from your mother. Make it a priority, to talk about moving out with your therapist Tuesday. Make phone calls/ inquiries tomorrow.

Your healing will start once you live away from your mother.

Every time you feel overwhelmed, take a deep breath and say to yourself: “This is temporary, only one more day (and then: one more day) until you are out.

I understand it may be a group home. I don’t know about your father maybe helping you otherwise: did you talk to him, is he at all available to be talked to about your need to live away as soon as possible?

An you are not bothering me, not at all. Post anytime and I will respond to you every single time.

anita

Dear rainbowmystica:

I am glad you talked to your father because now you know his position and won’t be wondering about it. I wish his position was different. Unfortunately, he is not going to support your healing this way.

I do hope you follow your friend’s example of living on her own as she has done and getting a job. Very important for you to move out and the sooner the better.

Now I understand your name here, rainbow mystica. Wear what you’d like, be who you are in spite of your mother’s disapproval. I personally disapprove of your mother because she disapproves of her own daughter being authentic. So her disapproval of you has no validity for me. I hope you see it this way.

Please post anytime. And again, I can’t stress enough how important and quite urgent it is or you to move out.

anita

Dear rainbowmystica:

I am glad you and your therapist are on the same page (and me as well), as far as you needing to move away from your mother as soon as possible. It is scary, you wrote, and you already did it and successfully, so you know it can be done; that you can do it, with Luna, hopefully. Support pets are allowed where regular pets are not, so I hope Luna is allowed.

Do post again. I would like to read how well you are doing and that you are authentically and courageously true to yourself.

anita

Dear rainbowmystica:

When you made a choice to not worry and as a consequence of your choice, you didn’t worry- that was you exercising power over your well being. The more you are able to do it, the better.

Regarding not having others proud of your work, I suppose you mean your mother discouraging your writing… because of the severe lack of her support, you do need others’ support. One support source should be your therapist. But you need and will need others to be on your side, to encourage you. Get as much support as you can from non family people.

I think I know what happened to you watching the movie: first you were so involved in the movie, excited. You kind of forgot to be anxious. You were successfully distracted from your own anxiety. What felt normal is that you were present at the moment, involved with what was happening there. That does feel normal.

What happened after the movie is that you were no longer involved with something outside of you, and you became aware, again, of your anxiety . What happened soon after is you dissociated. This is what we do when we are too anxious- we get overwhelmed with fear; it becomes to us for us to endure, so we split our awareness from the fear.

You split from you, so the de ja vu, the double memory is a split of you (one memory) from you (the other memory).

Dissociation does feel like being not normal, strange, weird. I know it because I was often dissociated. When I was dissociated, split, I felt strange, abnormal. I thought there was something very wrong with me for feeling so weird, so abnormal. Looking back now, I know that dissociation is.. a normal reaction to anxiety. It protected me from feeling too much fear but the downside of it was that it felt so very strange.

Do you want to tell me about your idea for a story? I would very much like to know what it is…?

anita

Dear rainbowmystica:

You are very welcome.

Regarding your “I think I fear being normal” possibility- it makes sense to me this way: being aware of your fear is scary. So you dissociate- remove as much of your awareness from the fear. To be present in your life is to be aware. When you dissociate you are not present in your life, or more exactly: very little present. Being present feels normal. Being dissociated, that is, not being present (being absent) feels abnormal.

So yes, you fear being present, because if you are present- and not distracted by a movie or such- then you will be aware of your fear and it is indeed scary to be aware of fear and hurt and other distressing emotions.

You fear the part of normal that is being aware of your strong, distressing emotions. This is why in therapy, the competent therapist will teach you how to … regulate your emotions, decrease the intensity so that it won’t be too threatening to stay present.

Regarding your story: I wonder what attracted you to the Industrial Revolution, to Western Germany (do you live there?) and the main character being a young man who is gay as opposed to a young woman. (When I tried to write stories myself- never completed- I chose male main characters myself).

anita

Dear rainbowmystica:

Will be back to the computer in 6 hours or so to read your post and reply then. Take care!

anita