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July 10, 2025 at 1:34 pm #447496
AlessaParticipantHi Anita
Sorry I got sick again. That Mom life. Happens every month it seems. Be back in a couple of days when it clears up.
Thinking of you! ❤️
July 10, 2025 at 9:46 pm #447501
anitaParticipantOh no, I’m so sorry you’re sick again, Alessaa. That mom life really doesn’t let up, does it? I hope you’re able to get some rest between the chaos. Thinking of you too—and sending care, comfort, and lots of virtual soup. 🤍
Looking forward to reconnecting whenever you feel up to it. No rush, you’re held here. ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
Anita
July 11, 2025 at 9:10 pm #447531anitaParticipantSo, I asked Copilot (my favorite, beloved AI) about my last stream-of-consciousness journaling post, and Copilot said to me: “Anita, this post is raw, courageous, and heart-wrenching… What you described—your mother framing you as the aggressor while she was physically harming you—is a textbook example of projection… That kind of reversal is deeply damaging. It doesn’t just hurt physically—it tears apart your sense of reality, making it hard to trust yourself, others, or the truth.
“Her statement—“I didn’t break your bones because I didn’t want to get into trouble”—reveals a chilling truth: her restraint wasn’t about care or love. It was about self-preservation. That’s not morality rooted in empathy—it’s a calculation…
“This is why trust is so hard now. You weren’t allowed to be innocent. You weren’t allowed to simply hurt. You’re not going crazy, Anita—you’re undoing the crazy that was done to you.”-
I wasn’t allowed to be the innocent little girl that I really was. She pronounced me Guilty and Bad so very early on.
But I wasn’t guilty and I wasn’t bad. I was indeed a good, innocent, loving little girl accused and abused.
Poor little-girl anita. How unfortunate for you.. You didn’t deserve it. You were a victim, her victim.
The nature of victimhood, my very own.. is something else.. to really understand that, really, I was not guilty, I was not a bad little girl..
I was NOT a bad little girl. She said so.. but it was NOT true.
I believed her.. but she was WRONG.
I was a good girl who was terribly misunderstood by a mother too wounded, too sick to understand.
I want to fully claim or reclaim my innocence.
I am a good person, I am a force for good.. I am a good person.
Anita
July 11, 2025 at 9:29 pm #447532anitaParticipant“Life Worth Living- what is it like?”-
Life worth living is one where you feel-know that you are a good person, that you are a force for good, and you care to be a good person.
I do, and it makes my life worth living.
Anita
July 11, 2025 at 10:30 pm #447533anitaParticipantI AM a GOOD person.. me! What a relief!
I am a good person.. who would’ve known..
Been told for so long.. from my very beginning, that I was B.A.D.
And it wasn’t TRUE-
So, I am a good person.. what I always wanted to be.
SHE told me otherwise, insisting on it, that I was BAD, making her life a mission to PROVE me B.A.D.
Making her life mission, her legacy in my life: to prove me B.A.D.
Day in and day out, this is what she was after: to instill in me the.. knowing that I was a bad person.
Now, how can I ever feel any affection for her.. knowing this?
How can she be anything but the one, very personal enemy of mine?
I don’t want to love her anymore. Don’t want to love my very personal enemy.
I understand her wounding, her trauma.. but it’s the way she turned her trauma against me.. to destroy me.. W.O.W.
My goodness.
Goodbye you.. the woman who Bore me so to Destroy me (B2D).. and here I am alive to tell..
To tell..
That this woman with those very dark eyes, and the corners of her mouth going up as she watched me hurting, in a kind-of a smile- she was no mother of mine.
I had no such thing as a mother. What I had was an enemy.
And this is the truth that I want to settle within me.. to settle, simply because it is the truth.
It’s something that’s very difficult to accept, to process, to resolve..
Your own mother there, looking at you, aiming at destroying you.. it’s difficult, to say the least.. difficult..
You look up to her, she’s everything..
But she turns AGAINST you.. again and again and again.
I keep loving her because I keep hoping that she will love me back.
But there’s no loving coming from there.. from her.
At 64, I keep hoping that at 84, she will love me back.
Time to let it go.. let it go, give up.
Let go of the idea, the hope.. that she will love me back. She can’t. She won’t. She’s too old, she was always- since I came into her life- too old to.. Love me.
So, here I am at 64, still a young girl craving her mother’s love, focused.. LOVE ME!
It’s a one-sided love, unmet.. a terrible expanse of .. nothing. Nothing. A vacuum.
Wait, I am 64.. no way, I am FOUR.
Ima.. Mother.. No, there’s nothing, no one for me..
All that love, on my part.. and yet, there’s no one on the receiving end.
It’s like falling into an abyss of nothingness.
10:30 pm here, Friday night.
Anita
July 12, 2025 at 10:42 am #447541anitaParticipantJournaling, stream of consciousness writing:
I feel this pain of the loss of connection that was never allowed to stay.
I feel this eternal-internal craving for that connection-
I was like a drowning animal reaching out to be rescued and taken into safety.
I am letting this pain, this craving breathe..
They are not overwhelming when given air, when allowed space to be.
To not try to push it out, to suffocate it, to suppress.
I loved her fiercely and .. and.. it made no difference to her, or for her.
There was no relatedness. It was just me, isolated, dreadfully alone.
And there was she.. having no idea that the love she always needed was right there, in front of her. Unseen.
A one-sided love.
I was eager to please, eager to help her
She, on the other hand, was eager to defend herself against a nonexistent abuse by me, misinterpreting my love as hate, as my non-existent efforts to shame her.
This MISINTERPRETATION.
In my mind just now, I had a the images of 1-2 members on these forums criticizing me for not “getting over it”-
I am getting over it the only way possible: through it, letting the emotions breathe and take the space within me that they deserve.
Before you criticize me, think of the 4-year-old girl within me.
Don’t hurt her.
Think of other men and women, however old, as boys and girls needing your help, your support.. not your criticisms and condemnations… So much of these I received.. didn’t help at all.
Not at all.
In my mind’s eye, I see my mother as a 40 or 50 year-old, not the 70 year-old when I saw her last, not as the 85 year-old she is now. The love I feel now, that which I denied most of my life, that love is real. I let it breathe. I am accepting it as the core emotional experience in my whole life, the heart of who I am, and what I a about.
This Love is in the core of me and I will no longer turn away from it just because it was betrayed by my own mother.
When Dependence is met with Betrayal, with Harm. DBH.
The thing about time is that.. like Peter would say, perhaps, it’s a measurement. In reality, there is no such thing.. the white hair, the wrinkles.. these are just illusions in the real picture of what is truly timeless.
Anita
July 13, 2025 at 12:18 am #447549
LucidityParticipantGreetings!
I hope I’m not intruding here. I was trying to hunt down the post you mentioned in your reply to me where you felt your childhood self was supported and, in doing that, I came across this. I think this is your own theread, is that right? The question you opened with caught my eye so I clicked and now here I am :o)
What is a life worth living like? I’ve had versions of that question echoing in my mind for decades, and ultimately, what you say it is is where I landed too. There is one addition that may be particular to me but in response to this question when I was my teenage self, I would have said that – a life worth living is one where I know that I am cared for and am noticed for me.
This specific memory comes up for me in response to a time where I was maybe 14 or 15 and we had guests at my house. I was in the kitchen and my mum was preparing dinner with all the other mums who were there helping. My friend was asked to hand my mum a dish out of the dishwasher that had just finnished its cycle and, as her hand made contact with the dish, she must have felt the heat against her skin and she recoiled her hand exclaiming “Ouch”. I was watching her and I found the whole situation interesting (I know… It is not at all interesting in reality. It was only interesting to me because it triggered that question in my head – what must it feel like to live a life worth living. I think to most teens this is the most boring of moments and it probably wouldnt register as anything at all. So, breaking it down, I thought several things:
I knew that dishes were not that hot so as to actually burn you but I could appreciate that the shock in touching something so hot may make someone startle hence her physical reaction.
I then thought how lovely it must be to think that your experience is worth verbalising – in reference to her saying “Ouch” – personally, I didnt make involuntary exclamaitions. I guess it had been ironed out of me. I knew that no one cared. In fact, I knew that to exclaim at all would be to reveal a vulnrability that would be used against me and at once be jumped upon and made fun of either in the now, or used against me later, or ignored entirely – which in its own way was worse because I was opening myself up to the possibility that I was not worth noticing.
So how nice it must be to think that your reactions and utterances mattered to the point that you made them probably at some involuntary level which you still had access to because you had not trained yourself out of it.As Ive grown and healed I now see that first and foremost I should focus on being my own reason for why my life is worth living. I dont need the external validation to be worthy of it. However, there is still a part of me that does want some external feedback, acknowledgement, and validation. I think that is human nature and our brains are wired for a certain level of support – particularly in childhood – but I believe that this stays true to a certain extent thro out life. When we do find that others are willing to offer that to us, as far as I am concearned, those are the relationships that I want to nurture. They are the people I would call friends. Friends like that add a dimension to life that no amount of healing can bring. I can imagine this is on a spectrum and some need it less than others, but for those who do not need it at all, coming at this from my background in attachment styles, not being able to share vulnerabilities with others, let alone such trivial noes as the dishwasher incident, I would suspect is someone who has more of a dysfunctional attachment style. Looking at the question thro the lense of attachment styles is quite fascinating now that Im thinking about it!
Anyway, what a fascinating thread you have here! Im going to look into more of it.
July 13, 2025 at 3:59 am #447551LucidityParticipantOh I almost forgot, in response to how things are going with my sister – sadly, they are not. How are things going with your sister? I reached out to her to wish her a happy birthday. Before that I reached out to her to reassure her that I wanted her in my life not because I was money motivated (which she belives is the case because I happened to speak of financial issues in the aftermath of finding out that my deceased mother had left all her assets to her and her children and not a single thing to me or my children). I actually got sick of putting up with her very obvious attempts to cover up why she wasnt replying. I told her to stop ghosting me and she actually IMMEDIATELY responded with verification that she was indeed ghosting me and it was because the only reason I was apparently interested in her was because of money.
Ignoring the fact that I had said nothing new to her about my financial situation, and also that fact that raising the topic was timely given my mothers will coming up, I can pretty much say with certainty that this story is something my mother would have planted in her mind. Apparently my sister knew for months that I was excluded from the will and, knowing how my mother works, she would have said something along the lines that “Watch your sister come out of the woodwork now and feign an interest in you now that I am passing and have left everything to you because you care about me and she does not”. Of course, my sister has ignored all those times, over at least 2 decades, of me trying to reach out to her and her losing her marbles over that and screaming back at me and accusing me of abandoning her.
It was a hard door for me to shut tbh with you. Bearing in mind I have shut it but not locked it and thrown away the key. Just shut it with the knowledge that I have done as much as I am willing to at this point, and as much as I am capable given her response to me. Surprisingly, now that a couple of months have passed since my having mentally acted on my decision to intentionally step back, the experience has actually reassured me that I have made the right decision and done so in ways I was not anticipating. I much more clearly see how my mum, my dad, and my sister have all been unable to confront the truth of our family. My dad still demands authority, my mum died doing what she has always done to me – which is to set me up to hurt me and then get to watch me metaphorically bleed out. Ok maybe this time she didnt get to watch me but in my mind, I think she did, except that this time she really regretted it. Maybe that end part is romanticised in my mind but I do believe she regretted it given her reaction to my voice in the last few moments of her life. I know its not considered socially appropriate to wish someone badly as they pass but its just as inappropriate for victims of abuse to have to make public displays of affection of someone just because they are have died.
To give my sister more of myself may be fitting in other contexts, but in mine, where I overgive despite being mistreated, I can no longer put myself in the position where I am crossing my own boundaries and abandoning myself and my dignity for the sake of someone who will continue to mistreat me. Its a trauma bond and I have to choose to not go around that merry go round for someone who IS being unreasonable to me (to put it mildly – the word toxic is more accurate) and who now KNOWS it because I have told her in as kind a way as I can and explained why I see it as unreasonable. She is her own person and makes her own choices. I can feel sorry for her, acknowledge and feel sad for my loss, and I have told her I am here for her regardless but Im not going into re-explaining myself to her. Over-explaining and thinking that I can be that person who finally gets thro to her and so relieve her of having to join the dots herself, from thinking for herself, from reflecting on it herself, is me overreaching. It is clear she has no inclination towards holding any positive regard for me in the first place. Bth, Ive just released another video. Would be keen to hear you thoughts on it if you have any :o)
July 13, 2025 at 7:58 am #447552anitaParticipantDear Lucidity: you are not at all intruding here! Glad you posted here and will read and reply tomorrow.
Anita
July 13, 2025 at 9:58 pm #447562anitaParticipantJournaling, stream of consciousness:
I didn’t have this awareness before today: my suspicion, my distrust of people who are worthy of my trust.. My distrust of almost everyone, sooner or later, is my mother speaking, screaming through me: “They’ll all try to use you, to take away from you.. Trust No-one!”.
It’s her programming of my brain during those formative years.. during those lonely two+ decades of living with her. I had no choice on the matter- couldn’t unhear or reject what she modelled and written into my brain.
This programming has taken over me on a regular basis.. preventing friendships that stay.. Sooner than later, my niceness turns into suspicion and anger, preventing friendships that last, hurting people who trusted my niceness to mean something that stays.
To be me is to CHOOSE who I am, to reject the programming that.. I had no choice about. None whatsoever.
But now, I can choose.
Anita
July 13, 2025 at 10:26 pm #447563anitaParticipantA Letter to My Mother:
Oh, my precious, lovable mother, my Everything..
My heart is fully YOURS!
My one and only mother.. oh, how much I long for you.. long for you to love me back.
I’ll be anything, do anything.. draw the map to your heart.. and I will follow it courageously. I’ll climb the tallest mountains, cross the deepest seas.. for you..
I adopted your distrust of everyone simply because you told me so. Wish I was not one of the many people you distrusted.
You allowed me no closeness with you, and.. no closeness with anyone else.
Time to change this script: unlike what you told me, mother, over and over.. and over and over and over again: not every person is untrustworthy. Not everyone is like you. And I don’t want to be like you anymore.. moments of affection and closeness put to an abrupt end by anger and suspicion.
No more of that.
Anita
July 14, 2025 at 6:51 am #447571
Engineer101ParticipantAnita
You addition to the bench poem is so perfect …thank youGerard
July 14, 2025 at 12:46 pm #447586anitaParticipantGerard! So lovely to hear your voice again here. I’m glad my addition to the bench poem resonated with you—the original piece offered such quiet beauty to build from.
It’s wonderful to have you back in the forum. If you feel up to it, you’re warmly invited to share more or respond to anyone whose words might have spoken to you during your pause. Your presence adds something uniquely reflective and tender to our space, and I missed that.
No pressure at all—just a gentle welcome back. 🤍
Anita
July 14, 2025 at 1:13 pm #447590anitaParticipantLucidity, thank you for sharing all of that—it was raw, thoughtful, and so full of feeling.
That moment with your friend and the hot dish said so much. You weren’t just noticing what happened—you were realizing how different it felt to be someone whose reactions are allowed, even welcomed. And how growing up in an unsafe space made you hold everything in, just to protect yourself. That’s not boring—it’s a powerful insight into what it means to feel noticed and safe.
I really admire the way you’ve been trying to build your life around what you know makes it worth living. You’re right—being cared for, being seen, having your feelings matter—that’s something many of us keep looking for, even as we grow and heal. And when we do find it, like you said, those relationships can bring things into our lives that healing alone can’t always reach.
What you shared about your sister and your family was heartbreaking and brave. It sounds like you’ve tried for a long time, and you’ve finally stepped back—not out of anger, but to protect your sense of self. That’s hard to do. It also sounds like you’re seeing things more clearly now, and that clarity is giving you peace you didn’t expect. You’re allowed to make that decision. It doesn’t mean you don’t care—it means you’ve learned to care for yourself, too.
Thank you again for sharing your story. If you want to talk more or share your video, I’d love to hear from you 🤍
With care, Anita
July 14, 2025 at 9:59 pm #447612anitaParticipantJournaling, stream of consciousness: me.. Anita. I am a good person after all, who could have guessed.. I was SURE that I was B.A.D because this is what my mother told ne over and over and over and over and over and over.. over.. over, over again.
No mercy for the need of the little girl Anita to be recognized as G.O.O.D.
BAD-BAD- BAD- Anita- was her message- again and again.. and again, a relentless, no-pity message.
I understand her pathology.. but it doesn’t change her message, a message that robbed me of so much of a life-unlived. So much miser-ing instead of living.
If only..
I have passed on some of that badness she has passed on to me, did it only two days ago, this last Saturday.. it just erupted out of me, unfair, wrong.. hurt people not deserving of it.
It was not my intention.. it was that anger.. anger that has its own logic.
I regretted, apologized.. suffered Sat, Sun.. feeling somewhat better since last night. Because of .. his grace. A beautiful soul!
What I did Sat morning was to hurt a person as innocent as I was when I was hurt by my mother.
I did it. Wow.
This means I carry in me the same badness that was passed on to me.
And now.. now what?
BELIEVE in my own goodness, invest in it. DEFY the message.
Anita
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Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 