The following was a letter I wrote which ultimately i decided not to send my parents. Maybe one day I still will but probably not. not exactly sure how helpful it would be.
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Dear Mom & Dad,
Over the past little while I have done some thinking and working through some serious despair. I have come to the realization that if I want my nervous system to develop in a positive way I can’t be around you and in your presence any more. Especially around you mom. You are nearly in a perpetual state of activation that consistently triggers the freeze response in my nervous system beyond my current conscious control. If it’s not problems with a vehicle, than it’s some real estate issue, if it’s not that then it’s some ticket, or a sick friend, or a hurt body part, or a bad night, or a well you get the point. The drama is never ending. It’s as if you live in one crises after another and I can’t deal with it anymore, especially if I am supposed to somehow work for you and help you clean up your problems.
I want you to know the primary reason I need to write this letter to you, is that by understanding your issues and how they effect me experientially I can come to understand my own and where they came from. Understanding those dynamics then helps me formulate strategies to resolve my own issues.
Sometimes the truth is a dish best served cold. These issues are very emotional for me and I have no desire to sugar-coat them.
Honesty sometimes hurts but it’s better than living a life of delusion.
The bottom line here is that you never got the love attention and most importantly connection you needed when you were a child.
You developed maladaptive strategies to get it, which is the causal factor in all my of my anxiety-survival, emotional and health issues.
What confuses me is how you use Somatic-therapy. You seem to use it and the therpist as a Tylenol dispensing machine to fix your little aches and pains.
The therapist is only to happy to oblige, however the vast bulk of Somatic-therapy has to do with poor mothering as the somatic-therapy course shows. NOT traumas later on in life.
It’s as if you have your own mother on a pedestal, and refuse to look at how she did not fulfill your human needs.
Not once Have I heard you criticize your mother or the circumstances in how you were raised. It seems to me to be willful ignorance, to protect her dysfunction and your own.
Well it’s hurting me and I can see it hurting everyone around you. I can not remain silent any more. I must speak out. I feel it is my duty as a son who cares about himself first and then his mother.
A wise man once said: “A lot of parents will do anything for their kids except let them be themselves.”
I know you guys didn’t feel like your parents cared for who your really were, but you may not realize you are making the same mistake.
You may think your are the shining example of regulation, but your reactions to recent real estate drama says otherwise. That drama is exemplary of how I see you, or how my nervous system has seen you for most of my life. A consistent unrelenting battle for survival.
This is an unhealthy emotional climate for me and now I say “no” to it. Given my state of emotional development ( which is very low) the environment is far too challenging. Rather than getting ahead it just sets me back.
In larger terms when I saw my therapist the first time and described to him my issues with anxiety, chronic fatigue and nightmares do you know what he said??
“Your parent’s don’t love you for who you are.” I was stunned he came to that conclusion so quickly, but I couldn’t argue it.
His second response was “you don’t know how to feel anger” and then he had me practice being angry at those who didn’t love me, which was extremely challenging.
Being angry at the parents who don’t love me but provide for me materially is difficult and is seen by my nervous system as a threat to my survival.
I feel that you guys will probably never love me for who I am as long as my spiritual beliefs divide you guys from me. This is a fact I am willing to accept.
You see it has always been a catch 22. Ever since I was a young teenager I was sick with CFS largely because I lived in constant emotional turmoil by being in your presence. The sickness made me material dependent on you guys and forced me to stay connected, which just exacerbates the initial cause. It’s like a negative feedback loop that keeps destroying any little progress I make.
The last several sessions my therapist had me imagine Aliens taking you mom away to never be seen again. He is trying to get me to develop my own emotions independent of yours. He also told me to imagine a picture of the family and removing you from the frame.
The reason I haven’t told you much of this is because I am terrified of hurting you. You also get into this victim-hurt state, rationalizing your actions instead of asking the deeper questions of why this is so and what to do about it.
I also realize that you guys can’t love me for who I actually am, and what I actually want for myself, because you don’t love yourselves, and your parent’s never loved you for who you were. Especially so you mom. I can still see you fighting for recognition from your dad. And your mother was either to sick, or emotionally distant to give you the recognition you desired as well.
Instead of going through the therapy and learning form the mistakes of your parents you both have created the very conditions for me you despised so much.
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Mom when you show up late to family get-togethers you come in, and have this searching/needing look on your face. Seeing others socially connect it’s as if you fear isolation, and want to latch onto someone as fast as possible.
You desire connection so needily it seems like you are a vampire. You quickly launch into some dramatic story to try and hook people, and make them give you attention.
Then you desperately try to hold on with a survival like grip to any deep emotional connection that someone may offer.
You consume relationships and connection like you consume food. When you eat it is an emotional affair, such that the food represents emotional connection. It is terrifying to observe, and as a child triggered my personal survival responses.
If the mother is supposed to represent emotional nourishment in the household, and she is obviously not a source but a rabid consumer of it, no wonder the whole family is skinny. It represents emotional malnourishment as well as physical malnourishment. The whole family subconsciously feel threatened every time you eat for it is a symbolic reminder of how emotionally malnourished YOU are, and the maladaptive way you try to compensate for it. All people who suffer with weight gain issues, and self control around food it’s an emotional malnourishment problem.
It’s because they never got the connection and nourishment they needed as children. So they go around trying to take it from others or food. As a child of such a mother it is the greatest threat to our very survival. For how can we get what the caretaker does not have to give in the first place?
This is why having family dinner is the most stressful time for me (and the rest of the family judging by their being underweight). It subconsciously triggers all of my survival responses and resistances to your very way of being. I feel incredible disgust towards you and the emotions are so negative and powerful I dissociate from my body, and impairing my digestion. This will surely keep people thin and cause all kinds of gastro-intestinal related disorders. Eating in your presence is extremely detrimental to my health.
Your consuming of emotions and then holding on to them, especially negative ones is the same reason you are such a pack-rat. It is why you indulge in an extreme form of materialism and emotionally hold on to nearly everything you buy. If you can’t hold onto people you hold onto emotions, and harbor them. I realized I learned this maladaptive strategy from you, and that emotions begin to fester and form rot. Literally and figuratively. There are fungal health implications here where fungus grows on dead things.
One of the lessons I learned with my therapist is to release unnecessary negative emotions. It is something I need a lot of work on. As a child I took on your emotions your negative ones, in order to take some of the burden off you so you could give me the attention and care I needed. You were a rather depressed mother. Never mind that you could manufacture negative emotions to infinity. I do this automatically and subconsciously now because it’s programmed survival. This is why I desperately need substantial time away from you so I can learn not to do this. I have to reset my emotional system so it does not do this, which is almost impossible if I am consistently in your presence.
The fact that you didn’t get the love and connection you needed as a child and you are still ferociously and subconsciously searching for it makes you incredibly narcissistic. It’s always about you and your emotions and the entire family and their nervous systems are ruled by YOUR emotional whims.
As a teenager when I was late out at night you wanted me home at a certain time, under the guise that you were worrying about me and that YOU couldn’t fall asleep. It was for your selfish emotional connective need that you showed a most perverted kind of love. Watch the following video.
http://youtu.be/8BA8CcEUP84
Notice when the mother says “you scared ME” ,and then says “give ME a hug make ME feel better”. The message here is that the mothers needs are more important than the baby. This is exactly the way I have experienced you for most of my life. Your emotional needs almost always came first. My personal safety was a scapegoat used to satisfy your emotional needs. Most manipulative and self-delusional! This is why I have avoidant attachment style with you.
I have come to realize I barley have any comprehension of what it means to have someone put my emotional needs first. When I first started dating my gf I got a glimpse of it, someone who actually cared about my emotions, it totally baffled me! I didn’t really know something like that was possible!
Through this I learned my emotions were unimportant, just like the Somatic-therapy manual about bad-mothering stated. I am still trying to learn what my own emotions are like and really want, but this is nearly impossible in your presence. My childhood subconscious survival programming takes over, and I default to trying to logically figure out your infinite problems to insure my survival. As long as you keep my bound to you solving YOUR problems, it will be very difficult for me to focus on my own.
Your attachment to problems, drama and illness (cracked tooth, fungal toe, etc.) are your mal-adapted way of YOU getting connection. This is why your daughter is permanently ill and has allergies. She LEARNED THAT FROM YOU! That this is how you get connection, through illness. Mother like daughter, it astounds me that you can’t seem to make this connection. The reason I believe why is that if you acknowledge her maladaptive way of getting connection you would have to acknowledge your own. And that threatens YOUR very own survival so you don’t do it.
The use of money is another maladaptive way you try to get the connection you so desperately seek. This is why you LOVE buying things and going shopping! With the promise of sale you can manipulate customer representatives into giving you connection. Better yet is getting involved building a new home where someone who you wield money over “the contractor” is forced to play nice and spend LOTS of time connecting with you.
This is why you put a condition on people who travel with you that you paid for, that they need to spend time with you. The time family friends were in our vacation condo and wanted to take a couple of dinner-nights for themselves I could see you felt slightly jaded, slightly ripped off. It is why you put that condition on my gf and I if we wanted to travel with you we would HAVE to spend every evening with you.
Some people like your current and only friend are opportunists, and as your personal previous therapist are quite willing to play the role of a surrogate nurturing mother in exchange for a nice trips to the Maldives. Befriending your therapist has all kinds of ethical and moral dilemmas attached to it. Remember the one before this one? Do you not learn from your past mistakes? You donated money to the somatic therapists, we’re you trying to buy “friendship” from them as well? How about a nice trip to the Caribbean this way they are obliged to spend some time connecting with you. Why is that the one therapist instructor doesn’t like you? Are you going to feign ignorance here as well?
The money is a crutch for genuine connection. The money almost always comes with strings attached. The more dependency you can create the better. Another example is your massage therapist, who you give an enormous house to use for on the cheap. It’s as if everything you touch becomes corrupted with your neediness for connection. Now I believe there is caring there for you however it is tainted with motivations based on insecurities. It’s impossible to disentangle your altruistic motivations from your insecurities. They are so nicely baked together, you can just ignore your insecurities and view yourself as some altruistic fairy godmother, and then wonder why everything falls apart. Surely your not at fault for you see yourself as the benevolent-giving victim.
Imagine giving money freely without strings attached? What would that be like? If you had no money, how many people would still choose to spend time with you of their own free-will?? I am starting to wonder if you even know what genuine no-strings attached friendship is even like.
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If you really think I have gotten you wrong, please don’t try to correct me, first talk to the therapist and ask HIM why he thinks I have perceived you wrongly.
My hope is you will contemplate deeply everything I have laid out here, and not look for excuses for your actions.
Maybe it will all go in one ear and out the other, or you will feel like a victim, but it is my hope you can learn from this.
As long as put myself in your presence I am not respecting myself. I am harming myself. I am doing myself a disservice, trying to make it work with someone who actually doesn’t respect/love me.
In order to respect myself I have to say NO to the abuser.
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Do you really think it is my dream to work for you for the rest of my life and manage your stuff?!? It might be you dream for me, to keep me permanently attached to you however this shows exactly why you guys don’t love me for who I am.
I feel that you are using me for the connection you so desperately seek, that you never got from your parents. My life purpose however is not to be used in such a way in case you didn’t realize it.
For whatever reason Dad you want me to experience everything you did when growing up. Working for most of your life being chained to a job you don’t really like working for your in-law.
I would rather not repeat the same mistake you did but now I find myself in the same situation enduring a similar suffering.
It would appear to me that both you Mom & Dad felt powerless most of your lives. At the beck and call of grandpa’s decisions and his money.
Little wonder you would subsequently do the same to me. I think I would rather be poor than be bound into some kind of subversive emotional slavery.
I have no idea what I’m going to do now, but I know this can’t continue. If your providing for me materially comes with the condition of being emotionally attached to you at the hip and all your problems, I can’t do that anymore.
Heroic Mastery 