Dear Gaia:

In your March thread you wrote: “my mom, she’s … extra-sensitive and somewhat victimist. I don’t like a lot to share those things with her cause later, I feel like I have to comfort her too besides myself, it’s exhausting… she’s somehow easily offended and emotional”-

It is scary for any child to have a parent, a main caretaker that is anxious. To feel safe a child needs a calm parent, a parent that the child perceives as strong and capable.

Can you elaborate on “extra sensitive”, “victimist” and “easily offended and emotional” ?

anita

Dear Gaia:

I didn’t understand “often absent for work”- what do you mean by it and how did it affect you?

I need to get away from the computer for about sixteen hours. I will be back to your thread, read your post attentively and reply then. If you would like to add more information before I am back, please do.

anita

Dear Gaia:

For a child the main caretaker, usually it is the mother, is the most powerful person in the child’s life, not only during childhood but all through life. It is in the context of the child’s interactions with her mother that the child’s brain is formed, that is, the many thousands of connections in the brain are formed.

I will look at your interactions, as a child, with your mother best I can from the little information I have. If you would like, read and evaluate what I type next and let me know if it is true to your experience and where it is not true, correct me:

As the little girl that you were, you witnessed your mother expressing (facial expressions, including tears, voice quality, words used, etc.) intense distress. You saw and heard her suffer again and again… and yet again.

You in turn became very distressed witnessing her distressed. You naturally wanted to help her and you tried, tried hard to help her, to make her feel okay.

But you failed. Yet you kept trying. It was exhausting. In your trying, no one was there to comfort you.

Notice this: an adult psychotherapist sometimes gets overwhelmed by the suffering of a client, a client who is a stranger to the therapist (not her mother). A term used for that is compassion fatigue, I think.

Imagine a child, more vulnerable and way less equipped than a psychotherapist, not having graduated with a Masters degree and so forth, you can imagine the … compassion fatigue of that child watching her mother suffer.

You used the word overwhelming, meaning watching her suffer was too intense for you, too distressing. As she expressed self-pitying to you, you felt pity for her, intensely.

No wonder to me that you were jealous at other kids who had “their mother… Always light-hearted”. You were not a light hearted child because you were burdened with your mother’s expressed distress, with her heaviness. Her expressed distress was the heaviness that you carried with you and still do.

anita

Dear Gaia:

When you were a young child, you didn’t know yet that your mother “can take personally even things that don’t revolve around her”. I am thinking that you naturally believed her, that people really were offending her, often and a whole lot. You experienced that way lots of injustice, that is, the injustice in people repeatedly offending your mother. And that made you angry.

Am I correct?

anita

Dear Gaia:

I am trying to understand: you wrote that you never talked about people offending your mother, talked to whom?

Did she repeatedly talk to you about people offending her (“‘easily offended’ she can take personally even things that don’t revolve around her”)

anita