Dear Tatjana:

I read your very first thread on the site, from December 2014, and your recent thread (before the Poems one). I was impressed, by the way, with the grace in which you responded to each and every person who replied to you. Back to the first thread: the issue of fear and love was brought up, and it was a meaningful concept for you on that thread.

In the bible, 1 John 4:18, it reads (one of the translations):

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love”

You were fearful in that relationship, throughout, as I understood it. More than a year after the breakup of that relationship, your eating disorder began. It is the same fear that changed context, as I understand it. Your lack of openness to love, which you mentioned on this post is probably a result of fear as well. The first relationship was such a torment (the word n the biblical quote), you fear more torment.

What do you think? If you agree about the power of fear in your life (it is most powerful in lots and lots of people’s lives), when and in what context did your excess fear originate?

anita 

Dear Tatjana:

You wrote: “I’m still a child within”- it is true: the brain you have this very moment is the same brain that developed and formed during your childhood. The multitudes of neuropathways formed in your brain during your childhood exist now. We shed our skin, not our brain, therefore we are still the children we were.

You wrote that you hurt yourself, that hurting yourself “is just mechanical”- when a parent hurts/ mistreats  us repeatedly, without correction, we proceed to hurt ourselves throughout life. it happens mechanically, without thought or intent. As a child, ready to be formed, we are not in the position to accept or reject our parents’ input. We accept it without question and perpetuate it.

You wrote: “The only way I’ve found of dealing with my parents is to be as far as possible from them”- that is definitely helpful, but you can never get far from your own brain that perpetuates mistreatment.

You asked: “Why do you assume my mother hurt me (and not my father)?”- I mentioned both your parents  (“Do you see, really see how you were hurt in your relationship with your mother? With your father?”), but I tend to look at the mother as the significant mistreating parent when there is mistreatment because in most families a child spends way more time (especially alone time) with the mother than with the father.

Also, you wrote yesterday: “My mother is too attached to my sister and I, whilst my dad has always seemed indifferent.”-

I believe that a mother who spends a lot of time alone with her child, and who is and acts “too attached” to the child,  is more harmful to a child than a father who spends way less time alone with the child and who is indifferent.

Would you  like to elaborate on the “too attached” and the “indifferent”?

anita

Dear Tatjana:

It is okay with me that you reply whenever you are able and willing, or not.

I re-read my last post to you. There I wrote: “As a child, ready to be formed, we are not in the position to accept or reject our parents’ input. We accept it without question and perpetuate it… (you can get far away from your parents, as an adult, but) you can never get far from your own brain that perpetuates mistreatment”.

The perpetuation of your parents’ mistreatment, I believe, is what is fueling the “depression, and self-destruction” you suffer from.

You asked for more of my thoughts, in general, regarding the harm a mother causes her child to whom she is too attached, and how that harm can be greater than an indifferent (very little input into the child’s life) parent: when a parent, a mother, is too attached to the child, it means that she needs something from the child, and desperately. She needs from the child, and so she takes what the child cannot afford to give. Let’s say, she needs the child to listen to her day, every day, to her every feeling, so the child, naturally, complies best she can and she listens, for hours. When that happens, the child is not voicing her feelings, and her life becomes about her mother. No one listens to her.

A competent psychotherapist can listen and listen to a client because she can afford to do that. First, there is a time limit that the therapist controls. Second, the therapist is an adult and does not need the client for emotional nurturing. Third, the therapist has acquired tools through education and practice so to not be overwhelmed by the client’s emotions, to separate her feelings and her experiences from the client’s.

In my example, a child has no control and will not dare to enforce a time limit; a child has very strong, valid needs from the parent to be emotionally nurtured (needs neglected by this role reversal), and has no education or training. The child is unable to separate her feelings from her mother’s.

An indifferent parent who says very little and simply ignores the child, no interactions, is harmful as well. Thing is, such indifference or absence makes the child more vulnerable to the too-attached parent.

anita

Dear Tatjana:

Those “insatiable needs” you mentioned, do you mean by it that at this point no matter how much listening (or attention otherwise) you get from another person, it feels like it is never enough? That it couldn’t possibly be enough?

anita