Dear Cali Chica:

You wrote: “I feel it is as though you are given cake but no taste buds- can’t enjoy or appreciate life in a true way”- your mother gave you cake, more precisely, your father gave you cake (he paid for house, expensive clothes, jewelry, toys, schooling,  international travels, etc.) and your mother presented the cake to you, but it is not that she neglected to give you taste buds, she robbed you of the taste buds you were born with, robbed you of your natural ability to be fully engaged in the here-and-now, to feel affection, empathy, joy, togetherness… and calm.

Your mother has been extremely pathological (the word you used) way before she became a mother.. In addition to not feeling empathy for you, to attacking you for having any emotion or problem, she also gave you a lot of senseless nonsense, illogically inconsistent and contradictory information about herself, other people, the concept of luck and friendship and so much more. There is a saying, that even a broken clock is correct twice every 24 hours. Your mother, in her teachings of what life is about, may not have underperformed a broken clock.

In your quest to please her you were doomed to relentless cognitive dissonance, a barrage of senseless nonsense, a mental torture for any human who naturally needs logical consistency.  One reason why you didn’t listen to her much as a child (“sometimes I don’t listen to my mom”) is because of that ongoing outpouring of nonsense. You kind of covered your neurons with a protective silencer sheet that prevented her words from reaching your neurons.

Your mother was about appearances, she valued the appearances of success, from the prestige of being married to a doctor, to her home, her clothes, her jewelry, going on expensive vacations and touring the world, and maybe her favorite: having friends.

Showing off her young daughters as dancers  who wear expensive clothes and who have friends/ a busy social life was part of her quest for the appearances of success.

Her extreme emphasis on you and your sister having  friends was not motivated by her valuing friendship or valuing people. In all of the posts I read, I did not detect her valuing her husband, her daughters, anyone in her extended family, anyone in India or in the USA or anywhere ese in the world. I remember she temporarily valued this woman in Peru I think, one who helped her to get a refund of some money… dishonestly. But this temporary valuing is not what I am referring to. After all she valued you and your sister temporarily when you made her look good, such as when you danced well at weddings or when you befriended a girl and she got to meet the girl’s parents.

If a person served her purpose, be it getting a refund or serve her need to appear successful, she valued that person temporarily as a means to an end.

You started life as all children do, eager to learn, eager to please, affectionate, loving, trusting, vulnerable. In your first decade you started showing the negative consequences of your mother being present in young life. At this point, you and your sister were alike (during the first decade of your respective lives), trouble was brewing.

Your mother expressed to you and to your sister that making fiends is the most valuable thing in the world (“my mom convinced us, and imprinted in us, that to have friends is of utmost importance”).

As an adolescent you adopted the social butterfly role, while your sister did not. Because of this role, as teenagers, you fared better than your sister. You were occupied with a job that pleased your mother (“my mom was trying to live vicariously through me by placing immense immense pressure on friendships. she almost idolized how many friends I had growing up, it was always an important thing and priority. such as oh mom today i went to the gym – ‘oh with who’ not, oh what did you do there, did you have fun”), a job you accomplished successfully (“adolescent Cali Chica: yes I am so good at making friends!”).

But your sister did not have a job, so to speak, other than her occasional gig as dancer in weddings (she still finds comfort and pride in fashion and dancing). Your success at your social butterfly job gave you a sense of worth and pride, (in addition to the same gig your sister had).

And, unlike your sister, you spent way more time outside your home, playing in other people’s homes, and that was fun. She spent more time with your mother, alone with her, and later, when your parents left on vacations, she spent a lot of time in the house alone.

You pleased your mother when you played with other children and you pleased her when you brought new people into your mother’s life, children and adults (the parents). This job gave you a sense of power, hence Super Cali Chica was born in adolescence. On the other hand, your mother taunted your sister for not having friends, didn’t want her home when visitors arrived so to avoid the appearance of non-success, that is, a failure, aka your sister. (“oh the beautiful butterfly CC type, versus the other daughter”).

Your primary job, the social butterfly job, gave you as sense of power, of competence, and that sense of power and competence motivated you to work hard in every area of life: “I work so hard in career and personal life, stay fit, do yoga, have great friends…”.

Fast forward to 2016: your mother rejected in overtly aggressive ways,  the new people you brought into her life, that is, your to-be-husband and his family. She fired you from your primary job.

You still continued the job by habit, fueled by the sense of approval and power you already experienced in it. The job requires appearing energetic, positive and pleasing… except that you are very negative regarding people, they are all bad, after all, this is what your mother taught you. You socialize and have moments with people, but … can’t get intimate with.. bad people, or those foolish happy-go-lucky people your mother taught you to devalue, maybe despise.

Before you cut contact with your mother, you imagined it will be a great loss to her, “the idea of losing her daughter is crippling to her…to the point that when she felt she was ‘losing me’ even over the last year bc of her delusions related to my in laws – she was besides herself.. she would likely get our whole extended family involved, maybe even end up hospitalized due to deep despair, hysteria, and psychosis related to the idea of ‘losing me'” (1/17/2018)-

– none of that happened after you cut contact with her. But at one point, long ago, and for many years, when you were a child, you needed her as desperately as you incorrectly believed only a year and a half ago, that she needed you.

Your memories of your early childhood are naturally very selective. In your more recent posts you brought up a lot of fun memories from your childhood, and even suggested that your first decade of childhood was pretty pleasant. A clear example of selective memory of your mother is:  “I recall her being more kind and motherly. I recall her cooking meals, and listening to me”.

But you wrote before, January 22, 2018: “When I look back at my childhood all I can see is sadness. Whether it was feeling sadness for my mother who is suffering.. and feeling like I was born into this life of only of us because as my mother said that is our bad luck. And just sadness in general because there was always a sense of unease, that what we had was not good enough”, and later: “my whole life the holidays were sad and lonely, filled with, oh everyone else has better plans…  I had to escape from the distress that was going on in my household day in and day out. There was no space to openly talk about what I was feeling, the bad feelings, I was ridiculed for having these bad feelings”, May 2018.

In your many posts, including those in our exercise,  I can rely on your mother’s voice to be an accurate representative of your mother’s real voice, but I cannot rely on your Cali Chica the child voice to be an accurate representative of the child that you were,  because your memory of your childhood is selective, focusing on fun times, forgetting the misery and distress.

Let’s look at the pool example: “my mom took me aside and said that I shouldn’t run in a bathing suit like that. I am getting older and it ‘doesn’t look good’…She said that my aunt and uncle were looking and snickering because I was doing that ..don’t do it see – they were looking at you and laughing – laughing at you like you’re foolish'”. You then wrote about that incident: “I can’t say I thought about it again though”- it is not possible that you didn’t think about it again, or that you were not affected by it. You … forgot, disassociated from that emotional experience of shame and hurt and humiliation.

Your neurons were already covered with a protective sheet of not listening, forgetting… and not feeling unpleasant emotions as much as possible, not feeling the shame, the hurt… Problem is that this protective sheet surrounding your neurons, so to speak, also prevent you from feeling affection, empathy, and regret or guilt when you hurt your husband.

Your mother taught you to not love your husband (or anyone, really) and to be angry at him “He (your husband) should be walking in and thinking about you because: if he doesn’t he is selfish, walking in only thinking about himself! how dare he! look see how men are, they’re good in the beginning and after a while they don’t even ask about you, see! look i told you so! he is not that great after all – seee don’t you feel foolish now! your mother is always right isn’t she.. .You shouldn’t think about him when you walk in from work because: if you start doing that he will take advantage of you…. to be loving is to be naïve, and perhaps foolish… It is much harder to be loving when you know the truth about people” the truth about her is that to love her is naive and foolish”.

You prefer the company of people you are not close to and thrive on interactions with them: “Yesterday I was at a get together, we threw a going away party for my good friend who is moving. It was a very pleasant day, with many different friends.. I was so relaxed at the entire event… I didn’t have anyone there that was extremely close to me, not my sister, no best girlfriend, nothing of that sort… people were more like acquaintances. I thought about how This was relaxing to me. I am easily distracted when someone close to me somewhere, quite fixated on what they are doing or what they want”- this is why you chose to email acquaintances while in South Africa, instead of interacting with your husband, why you pay attention and talk to your dog, and not to your husband, and why you were excited about a not close friend’s recent engagement (S’s), but not your own.

When you tried to help your mother, she attacked you: “she would exclaim ‘you are NOT MY MOTHER who do YOU think you are.. stop telling me what to do – acting like you have it all figured out – go look in the mirror at yourself and all your problems..'”- part of her pathology was that she acted like a child, throwing tantrums in front of her daughters. When she attacked you in these ways, as part of her infantile anger tantrums, you must have felt hurt and rage. This rage at being attacked-while-trying to-help is a big part of the current rage that is still there, in you.

You incorrectly thought that your mother will be happy if you are happy and lucky, (I asked you as part of our exercise: “If you are lucky, like those other people who are lucky and don’t deserve to be lucky, will your mother hate you too, like she hates those other people?” You answered: “No Anita!! Of course not!!! My mother will be SOOO HAPPy. Finally our family got what they deserved, that lucky ending”. I then asked you: “Your mother loves you, she wants you to be lucky, she wants you to be happy?” You answered: “Yes so very much, she dedicates her life to me…I want to add again, my mom will be so happy if I end up lucky, she wants that for me. She didn’t get so many of those chances, so she wants to make sure I do. She works so hard to do that”-

– incorrect, not true. Your mother didn’t care how you felt, if the thought of how you may feel ever crossed her mind. All of her life as a wife and mother was about how she felt, that is all that mattered to her.

you wrote: “My emotional instability…self loathing and more running frenzy and avoidance of true emotion…(husband says) My constant negative comments about everything – and never seeing the glass half full, always finding something to pick at or complain about. Its the constant negativity that is far more draining than anything to him. In addition, He spoke about how he feels that my behavior is erratic.. that rollercoaster/up and down.. as a result, he never knows what to expect. He stated he doesn’t know if he is going to come home to angry CC, or overly happy CC. Angry CC or ecstatic CC”- this is Cali Chica. The social butterfly Cali Chica is a well executed performance: ” I was always more socially graceful and ‘apt”’ in that I have always been told I am engaging and charming, that I draw people to me and make them feel good, and comfortable. I have been told this by friends, colleagues, and patients alike”.

Underneath the super physical appearance and performance of the apt and graceful Cali Chica, there is a withered away, hurt and angry Cali Chica (” I withered away. Shoulders stooped over, head hanging low”). The reason you have been “that rollercoaster/ up and down” is because disassociated emotions, such as anger, joy, passion, dont stay hidden at all times, sometimes they erupt in ecstatic joy, excitement and intense motivation or rage, overwhelming ourselves and others… before going underground once again.

These eruptions don’t happen only a few times per month, let’s say. They happen on a daily basis, multiple times per day, an emotion erupts just a bit, enough to overwhelm us and we rush away from that experience. This happens internally, that is, no eruption of behavior directed at a person nearby. And so, that baseline  anxiety as you referred to it is about multiple little eruptions per day, each ne overwhelming, each one is followed by an escape, a distraction, a rushing.

You wrote about your sister: “she saw much earlier on that my mom is a bad person… As a result, she has had anger/resentment at her for many years… I..  was a blinded saint/devotee to my mother for many years (myself) versus my sister. In fact because my mother ‘favored’ me.. If she had been mean or pushed me away.. I may have developed anger and hate towards her earlier, and seen reality earlier. Instead I was in the dark… That to this day I remain loyal in many ways, ways I do not even see”-

-as an adolescent she approved of your social butterfly performance, your primary job. You were loyal to her because you had something big to protect, her (conditional and inconsistent) approval and your feelings of competence and power that came with a well executed job. Your sisters didn’t experience competence and power except when dressed up and dancing at weddings and such and when engaged in her elaborate day dreaming.

This is what happened  your early years, the beginning, early in that first decade: “young Cali Chica, She brought her mother a flower. mother said: oh I used to have these in INdia all the time – these flowers.. her mother: not a glance, not a care. look what I did for you, I got you a flower”-

-the flower you brought her was your affection for your mother, your love for her. When she dismissed it, pointing to India’s flowers instead of noticing the flower you brought her, she dismissed your affection for her, your love for her. Naturally, your ability to experience affection and love for people, particularly people close to you, was removed from your awareness, your neurons covered with that protective sheet that keeps out affection and love… and empathy and joy.

Here is your disassociation starting in your first decade: “I NEVER recall feeling bad about it. I recall being a kid that was in my own world and wasn’t so hypervigilant or aware or aiming to please. I don’t recall ever feeling: oh my I need to worry and try to remember more. In fact, I think if anything I was slightly aloof/unaware/floaty in the head – floating through life not so sensitive to my surroundings… during those years my mind didn’t go to these dark places at all. it was only until I was older say 25 and more”.

What we disassociate from as children does not disappear. It returns to our awareness at one point on and in ways that bring us suffering. Your distress in your mid twenties and on was not born in your twenties. It was born in your early childhood. You felt it more in your twenties because disassociation always has a time limit.

“The true anger started when I told you those more recent stories say at the age 28”- no, it was born in the early years.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

An amazing dream, a big smile on my face!

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

I wish there was a room like that for you to hibernate for three months, a room just like the one you described. If you had a photo or a small painting of such a room, maybe you could carry it with you wherever you go and go there in your mind, or you can have that image ready in your mind to go to from time to time.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

This very early morning, hours ago, I sat in front of the sliding glass doors, looking at this little bird that landed on the deck, frenzied and I thought of you. And me: I am still un-frenze-ing myself. I wish it was a faster process. What I learned recently is that unless I truly understand the extremely slow and gradual nature of the process of un-frenze-ing, unless I am satisfied with a tiny amount of progress per unit of time, there will be no progress at all for me.

“If I was to  go back to her childhood and observe her- what would I see? .. Maybe a happy go lucky kid”- no, she wasn’t happy go lucky. She was terribly hurt. But that girl that she was is long gone, locked deep inside that monster she has become.

Regarding my definition of cognitive dissonance- I will explain a bit what I meant by it when I mentioned the term to you, without looking for an online definition- I meant that she told you and/ or did X and Y while X and Y are contradictory, not logically consistent.

-examples (from memory, I didn’t review what I wrote to you since I did):

1. X= she likes you bringing company home, how much fun that is for her and good for you to have friends, Y= she hates cleaning after and slaving after you and your friend when you bring them hope and is upset that the friend’s mother is resting and having fun during the visit.

2. X= other people have jealousy for us.. being lucky, basically. Y= we are unlucky.

3. X= having a big family is a good, good thing. Y= family makes her miserable, taunt her, etc.

4. X= friendships are extremely important to her Y= she has no friendships.

5. X= American people have it so easy Y= American people have a lot of problems.

6. X= Cali Chica is a pretty doll, a talented dancer, a joy to have Y= Cali Chica is a pain in the .. , a problem since she was born.

7. X= I want more people in my life Y= I hate people in my life (you, Cali Chica, your sister, your father, all the family members who taunt me, the American people who have it easy, your husband to be and his family, and … well, everyone.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

In the last few days I was wondering why you didn’t post and I thought to myself that there may be problems at home (or that you were busy socially, people coming in, it being summer time, almost)- I don’t know if you feel like it,  but if you do, tell me about this recent happening, the “unraveling of resentment” etc.,  that you mentioned.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

It occurred to me yesterday that I never asked you regarding your statements in the past that you abused him, and that I don’t know what it means, how that abuse looks like or sounds like. I wanted to ask you about that, if you can describe the incident of the greatest abuse that you inflicted on him.

And then, if you will, describe the latest incident of abuse.

I will respond to the rest of your post above after getting this (and maybe more) information.

anita