Dear Gaia:

You didn’t answer my question in my last post to you yesterday.

Regarding your recent post, you mentioned “my toxic shame and embarrassment”- you mean sexual shame and embarrassment, and if so, will you tell me more about that shame and embarrassment?

anita

Dear Gaia:

I re-read again all your posts since you were 18. Regarding your recent post about your cousin long ago: “He forcefully  kissed me and wanted to kiss me in other private body areas… now I’m taking into consideration that it’s the main source for my toxic shame and embarrassment”-

– did this happen only once and was your cousin your age or very close  to your age?

Often people, when looking for the reason of their emotional troubles, fixate on any sexual  experience in childhood, such as sexual play by or with other children of similar age, as … The Reason, because it is sexual. Most often the reason for a child’s- and adult’s- significant emotional troubles is in the home life, day after day, month after month, year after year, and not in an incident or a few incidents of short sexual encounters with other children.

Also, you “don’t feel much sexual shame”, so no shame attached to sexuality- not an indication of the cousin’s forceful kiss attaching shame to kissing.

Here is what I did learn about the main source of your shame: it is in your years long experience living at home where you did not belong.

A child needs to feel that she belongs with her family. Belonging to her family that makes her feel comfortable, “at home”, at peace, not distressed about being like very different people at different circumstances (an identity that “changes and turns around depending on the environment and on the people”). Not belonging at home leads a child to not develop a stable sense of who she is (“I watch my friends and they have a stable sense of who they are”).

You therefore didn’t find peace or a comfortable sense of identity in the context of your Family. You found your peace and identities (plural) in Fantasy: “fantasy worlds felt so good to me, like my soul was at peace. I felt in my soul like I belonged to some Narnia, or sailing with pirates, or up with aliens, I craved to be there living adventurously and magically. I called it ‘home‘”-

– see, you said it yourself: you were/ are at peace in Fantasy, you belong in Fantasy, you call it home, and you crave home because you don’t have it irl.

It is when a child feels at peace and that she belongs, that she can live “adventurously and magically” instead of anxiously and troubled, not alive, “wandering aimlessly with nonsensical racing thoughts”, feeling like “a zombie” stuck “in a state of non life”.

When those musicians showed up in your country, you “needed something in real life that could motivate me to feel alive“- because you felt dead at home.

“I never belonged fully to a certain identity or center, or group of people”- starting at home, you didn’t belong with your family. You felt “like an outcast or unable to really shine”.

And why did you not belong- not because there was something wrong with you but because your parents were not there for you. Your mother worked a lot but when she was home she didn’t notice you being a person. For her, you were a place where she dumped her thoughts and her emotions and her life experience, not noticing that you have your own thoughts and your own emotions (“she also  made it about her parading how she works hard for us… crying and  making it about her“)

You were like an object at home (“almost being like an  object”), “an outcast”, someone who doesn’t even exist (“I fear I don’t exist”) because you didn’t belong at home, at least not as a person. “I had a overall smooth home life”- as an object, not as a person.

Being so painfully alone as a child and onward, at home, not belonging as a person needs to belong, you were and still are angry, experiencing “extreme feelings”- even an adult who finds herself or himself trapped in a prison cell, gets angry and experiences extreme feelings. A child trapped in a home where she doesn’t belong also feels angry and experiences extreme feelings.

The simple solution is for you to move out of the home-where-you-don’t-belong and finally live a good life elsewhere, free of that home. Problem  with this simple solution is that you carry with you the anger, the extreme feelings everywhere you go.

Unless a person heals from a significantly distressing childhood, over time and work, the person  keeps re-living the same experience everywhere she goes. Problem is that staying in the same childhood home prevents the healing process from beginning or moving on beyond the first or second step forward.

anita

Dear Gaia;

I understand that it wasn’t sexual play, between you and your cousin, that he forced some kind of sexual activity on you, that you didn’t give him your consent, and I learned reading your recent post that it “happened a lot” – I wish it didn’t happen at all and I am sorry you experienced this sexual abuse.

I understand that your experience at home was different when you were very young from what it became later on, as an older child. It was not always the same.

I do remember your story in your 2016 thread, and that you had negative experiences with peers,  classmates, and teachers. And that “being is social situations trigger (your) self loathing”, that you “can’t like yourself” when you’re around others.

Problem is you need healing social situations and relationship/s so to heal from the sickening social situations and relationships that you suffered and still do,  including the social/ sexual situation with your cousin, the social situation with your peers, classmates and teachers, as well as the social situation at home.

anita

Dear Gaia:

About being “cursed for life”- yes and know. I will explain: I have no doubt that in the center of your troubles in life is not that cousin you mentioned and not the peers in school who made fun of you, or your teachers. In the center of your troubles is your mother.

The most important person in a child’s life is the mother. In the young child’s mind there is no separation between child and mother: the two are One. And the mother is like god (Dio, le divinita, il idolo)- all powerful, all knowing, all loving- a Perfect Being. What happens next is that when things go wrong between mother and child, the child believes: it must be child’s fault, something is wrong with child (Mother is Perfect).

It is within early childhood, through the first decade of life that a person’s brain is formed. Toward the second decade and during the teenage years, the now older child forgets a lot, and the older child feels too guilty to point to the mother as the main reason for her troubles. She points to some problem with the mother, then feels guilty and kind-of forgets again. She prefers to think: I was born defected, there is something wrong with me, my problems are because of a cousin, and peers and teachers.. not my mother.

It takes seeing the mother as she  is before you can see who you really are. Protect the image of your mother and you keep yourself sick. This is how your life is cursed- when you don’t see her as she is.

Separate yourself from your mother in your own mind and heart by seeing her as she is, and you will free yourself from that curse: life of suffering and dysfunction.

I am not going to argue with  you or fight with you over this. It is your life and you are free to choose to … free yourself from your mother, or not. If you want to start a new thread and receive other members’ input, but not mine, please let me know and start a new thread. You will not receive my input there, it is this easy.

anita

Dear Gaia:

You wrote today: “the truth is that me trying to protect my mother image has stopped a few years ago”. But twelve days ago (Sept 13) you wrote: “I’m careful about the words I use cause I don’t want to make my mother look like some kind of evil narcissist that she isn’t”.

My question to you: didn’t you try to protect your mother’s image 12 days ago?

(I ask even though I know the answer because I want to understand your thinking).

anita

Dear Gaia:

“to see the truth about her”- the only reason I suggest to see the truth about her more and more (you already started but there is more to see) is-

– that the more truth you see about her, the more truth you see about you.

My intent in communicating with you is not to learn who she is but to learn who you are.

Because of your relationship with her when you were a young child, you ended up believing that there is something fundamentally wrong with you, something wrong that you were born  with.

This is what I want you to examine- maybe there is nothing wrong with you from the beginning. Now you suffer because you believe there is something wrong with you and because of that wrong, you are “cursed for life”.

But before you believed what is not true, there was nothing wrong with you.

Is it possible, Gaia, that there was nothing at all wrong with you in the beginning (before you believed there was something wrong with you)?

anita