psychotherapy

Three Way Mirror Vanity

Posted on by SomatiCat

I had three mothers.

There’s a photo of them together, sitting in a living room. Every time I look at it, I think of the witches—not the ones from Hocus Pocus, but the ones from Macbeth. Together, they conjured me: a daughter with a fragmented identity.

When we are young, we come to understand ourselves through interaction with our parents. We need to feel loved and accepted—especially by our mothers. Our survival depends on them. They become the foundation of who we are.

In my early childhood, my parents, grandmother, and aunt all lived under the same roof. My real mother was a nurse and gone during the day. My grandmother took care of me. She was a woman of few words, rarely expressive. She fed me, probably changed my diapers, and otherwise left me to my own devices. I was a free-range kid. She was always busy—tending to our small rice paddies, vegetable garden, and housework.

I followed her around, watching her do everything by hand or with simple tools. I saw her harvest soybeans, shell them, sort them, boil and mash them, and finally turn them into homemade miso paste. Everything was made from scratch. That’s just how small farmers lived.

She also took me on her regular visits—to the neighborhood Shinto shrine, and to my grandfather’s grave. From her, I learned ritual manners. She was more superstitious than religious. To this day, I still visit that same shrine when I go home. It’s deeply rooted in me. As long as I physically survived and followed her instructions, I was allowed to exist.

Sometimes, when my mother worked night shifts, my grandmother “let her rest” by handing me off to my single, childless aunt. I often slept beside her. Only much later—nearly half a century on—I learned that my aunt had once had a child out of wedlock, a daughter she gave up for adoption.

To her, I was a baby doll. She adored me and constantly told me I was cute. Whatever I did, I was “cute” to her. Naturally, I loved her. Looking back, I see now that I was her emotional support animal. A doll she could pour her love into. I was a blank screen, an empty vessel for her to project her longing and affection onto. As long as I accepted her version of “love,” I had a place in her world.

My actual mother? She’s almost completely absent from my childhood memories—except when I was sick. As a nurse, she took care of my body when it broke down. But emotionally, there was no connection. With her, I felt like a utility animal—fed and maintained for function, not love.

Her “love” was always conditional. I was a “good enough” daughter only when I served some purpose for her. Most of the time, that purpose was to be strong-willed, fearless, and short-tempered—a stand-in, a surrogate warrior she used to push back against her verbally and psychologically abusive husband. I was her avatar, not her child.

As I grew up, I developed three distinct clusters of identity traits—not like someone with dissociative identity disorder, but more like someone sitting in front of a three-way mirror vanity, where each angled mirror is distorted and reflects a different version of her. And those warped reflections bounce back and forth endlessly, deepening the distortion.

It was deeply confusing, to say the least.

It took me decades—more than half a lifetime—to even begin to feel the original me. I spent so many hours trying to reconcile those mirrored fragments. Now, I no longer need the mirror.

As for my father—he hated that I was a girl. The only time he acknowledged me as his child was when I got good grades. Otherwise, I was worthless.

Touch: Your Brain’s Interpretation

Posted on by SomatiCat

Even though the sensory receptors in the skin are mechanoreceptors, it is your brain that interprets the signals they send. Since the brain remembers past experiences and the emotions associated with them, touch is never merely a  touch. Even the same mechanical touch can be felt differently—it can be loving, caring, comforting, or healing; sensual or sexual; cold, abusive or invasive. Even when you think your touch is neutral, it’s up to the receiver’s brain to interpret it.

When I was in my late thirties, I went through infertility treatment. To check if my fallopian tubes were open, I underwent a very uncomfortable test. The pressure I felt inside my body was so invasive that I instinctively contracted my entire body, bracing myself. Then the technician’s assistant gently placed her hand on my arm. I melted. Her touch was neutral, and I don’t think she was consciously trying to comfort me. I felt it came from her spontaneous empathy. 

I have Meniere’s disease. One day, I had a Meniere’s attack in a gross anatomy lab and had to lie on a cold linoleum floor for some time, clutching a barf bag. I told everybody that nothing could be done to relieve my suffering and asked them to keep me safe and leave me alone until the symptoms resolved. I threw up in the bag and was hyperventilating in a fetal position. Some people can’t tolerate witnessing suffering without doing anything; it might make them feel powerless. A few of them placed their hands on me, perhaps to soothe or heal. I just had to endure the unwanted touch. They were mechanically the same kind of touch, but my brain interpreted them differently. One was comforting and the other was annoying.

As a child, I experienced improper touches, which were a violation of boundaries. This experience made me sensitive to the intent behind a touch. I don’t remember receiving loving touches from adults in my family during my childhood. My nervous system used to react to every touch as if it were a danger. Sometimes, a touch triggered tremendous rage, while other times, it made me feel nauseous. It took me a long time to learn to discern a safe touch from an unwanted one. I’ve learned to set boundaries and to choose how to respond, not just to react. 

copyright 2024

Split

Posted on by SomatiCat

I watched Split and Glass on Netflix, where a fictional character with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) develops a personality with superhuman strength. James McAvoy was phenomenal, shifting seamlessly from one persona to another on screen. The story is a textbook case of severe childhood trauma: the psyche fractures to protect the vulnerable self. One of his identities, “The Beast,” punishes the undamaged—those who haven’t suffered.
[Spoiler Alert] The Beast sees the damaged as pure.

That’s what drew me in.

I have a friend with DID. Sarah is brilliant, cultured, well-read, and funny. She took many younger, “damaged” women under her wing. She was the one who introduced me to Broadway, gifting me tickets to Sondheim. We’d sit in cafes, visit restaurants, and talk about arthouse films and everything else. Her life sounded like a novel. She told me she was one of the first female TV producers—or something close. I’m not sure if Sarah is the original. I met two of her other selves: Tommy, a boy who constantly said, “Sorry,” and another, terrifying one—probably her internalized mother.

The switches weren’t as clean as in the movies. She once said she had a “Flat Earth Committee” in her head, which decided what she could or couldn’t do. That committee often said she wasn’t allowed to leave her apartment.

Before her DID diagnosis, she’d been given a charcuterie board of mental health labels: agoraphobia, depression, anxiety disorder. She’d been prescribed all kinds of medications. None of them helped.

Many friends tried to help her. After all, when she showed up as “Sarah,” she was wonderful. But over time, that became rarer.

I was the last one who tried hard. I had this urge to rescue someone else—maybe instead of rescuing myself. Her disorders were inflated versions of mine, so I could speak her language to a certain extent.

I don’t have DID. I’ve been dissociated, but not to that degree. I had dysthymia and episodes of major depression. Sometimes I wasn’t “allowed” to get out of bed. I had extremely low self-esteem and poor communication skills—unless I was in a professional setting. Then I became articulate, competent, impressive. I still have a voice inside that occasionally whispers, “Jump” or “Kill yourself.”

Over time, I realized that some of Sarah’s other personalities were sabotaging anything that might make her better. Whenever she admitted to feeling improvement, they lashed back—as if healing would erase them. As if their survival depended on her staying damaged. Ironically, their original role had been to protect her.

They exhausted me, as they had exhausted many before me.

I haven’t seen Sarah in years. She reaches out once in a blue moon—only in moments of desperation. The last time, it wasn’t even her. A mutual friend contacted me because no one had heard from her. Turned out she’d fallen and been hospitalized. She didn’t have her phone in the hospital room, so she couldn’t reach anyone. But she came up with an ingenious solution: she befriended the woman in the next bed and asked her husband to deliver a handwritten note to my building.

That’s Sarah—resourceful and fiercely capable when it matters. She once told me she’d made a deal with the “committee” to keep her alive. One of her friends with DID had died by suicide. Sarah wasn’t going to be one of them.

Eventually, I accepted Sarah as she is. There’s no “original” Sarah waiting to be recovered. She was already many when I met her. I just didn’t know it. She contains multitudes. Every piece of her is my friend. And I’ve let go of the childish fantasy that I could save her—or anyone else.

Everyone splits, to some degree.

There are incidents I don’t remember, but my body seems to. I don’t have a single, monstrous trauma, just layers: a verbally and emotionally—possibly sexually—abusive father; a manipulative, passive-aggressive mother; a narcissistic aunt; a silent, possibly borderline grandmother. Add to that a culture soaked in misogyny, inappropriate touches, and the absence of loving contact—and I was left scarred.

I didn’t split, but I did build personas: a tough bitch and an abrasive man—my internalized father—to protect the vulnerable child inside me.

I’ve spent decades re-parenting that little girl. I wanted her to grow up into who she could have been if she had been loved and left alone: a happy, loving, beautiful girl. A confident, capable woman who could love and be loved.

I didn’t become exactly what I hoped—but I like who I’ve become. I’m happy with this version of myself.

You can’t restore the original child. But you can hold your scars with tenderness. You can carry your pain gently, like something sacred. And in doing so, you become who you were always meant to be:

Clean and pure, with old scars.
Survive. Then thrive.

Giant Anteater

Posted on by SomatiCat

My high school best friend recommended me to watch a Japanese drama series, titled Brush Up Life. It is a story of a young woman, who suddenly died in a freak accident. She arrived at the reception desk of the “upstairs” office. A clerk at the desk told her she was assigned to re-incarnate as a giant anteater. She refused to be reborn as a giant anteater and asked the alternative option. The clerk told her that she could redo her life from the birth with her current knowledge and consciousness. The woman chose to start over and changed her life as she went. To make a long story short, every time she started over, something didn’t work and she died. So she kept going back to the start. Eventually she got the result she wanted (she saved her friends’ life).

My friend asked me if I could start over with current consciousness intact, what would I do. I thought about changing this and that. I would be on SSRI as soon as it’s available–I wasn’t diagnosed until in late 30s and I had developed a basketful of disorders. I would focus on physical fitness –I had eating disorder and was out of shape, a heavy smoker with alcohol dependency. I would move to the U.S. as soon as possible–I moved here in my late 20s and didn’t know my old country’s restrictive culture had traumatized me. I would study harder to get in a medical school –I applied for but wasn’t accepted and instead went to study liberal arts.

Then I realized I would be born into the same family and would have to do it all over again. The heroine of the drama has a “normal enough” and functional enough family. She tries to change things to save others. I can’t change my dysfunctional family. I can’t change how my parents deal with me. I would be born into the same family with all the pain, fear, shame, and anger. No. I would rather be a Giant Anteater. It would be much better.

My friend said she wanted to change one event, which traumatized and defined her life. Her parents moved from a metropolitan area to a rural city due to her father’s job and she was transferred from a private school in a large city to a local public middle school in a pretty tough district, where she was bullied as an outsider. She still can’t get over the trauma. She is now a professor of psychiatry at a local medical school, established and lives in a large house. She is married, has two sons, and they both are well-respected medical doctors. She has grandchildren, who live in the same city. I am freelancing, living in a small apartment with an old dog. I’m divorced with no children. From outside, she seems to have a good enough life. Still, she wanted to change.

I’ve been thinking about starting over, but every time I think of it, I end up choosing a giant anteater. I had a volatile life and I wish I could choose differently here and there, but if I changed any event I wouldn’t be able to be here. Every mistake I made, every bad choice I made, it was a ferry to carry me here and now. I have realized I am very content and happy with who I am now.

I just spend much of my life in constant stormy weather, hanging onto whatever I could to survive. And the deadly wind and current pushed the boats, ferry, or sometimes just a wooden lifesaver to where I am now.

So it’s possible to make peace with your life. I never expected to have this calm ordinary days at the end. (Of course, I spent large sum of money and time on this and that therapy.)

Father’s Daughter

Posted on by SomatiCat

If by chance I talk a little wild, forgive me; I had it from my father.

— HENRY VIII, ACT 1 SCENE 4

My childhood home was not a happy place. I didn’t know how being loved felt like. My younger brother told me once he made his presence as sparse as possible to avoid unpleasant encounters, well, mostly with our father. He also told me he had never felt loved by our father. When he was a pre-teen boy, he was always attached to our mother, like a baby monkey, while I don’t remember my mother’s touch. I had never felt loved by her, either.

My parents fed, clothed, and provided a bed and more than enough schooling. So I wasn’t neglected and was physically well cared for.

After multiple of failed relationships, I realized I didn’t know how love feels like. I didn’t have felt sense or reference point of being loved. I still don’t grasp the idea of being loved for just being me. I have to be needed and useful for the other person to be loved. That’s my false belief. Becoming aware of it was a great step.

My father passed away about 10 years ago after suffering Alzheimer’s disease. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in early 30s and he was insulin dependent for most of my life. His father and his older sister died young from complication of diabetes. There are many diabetics in his family.

After more than half a century of dodging genetic bullets, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and since I can’t take medications due to a severe and weird side effect from raised insulin level, I have been controlling it by diet and exercise only. Currently I wear CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and I finally understand what my father was going through.

I remember he said that he never enjoyed eating. He considered it as a bitter medicine. Even though he was on insulin, he was on tight calorie deficient diet. Our family never enjoyed dining out because of his diet restrictions. I always thought I didn’t want to be like him. So I enjoyed eating a lot. Now I am on a very strict diet. I can’t eat anything which I used to love–ice cream, cheesecakes, chocolates, sweet fruits, pasta, rice, pancakes… I don’t enjoy eating out with friends, because I can’t eat most of what they eat. I’ve learned that my blood glucose level dictates my moods. My father’s diet was not as scientific as mine. It was just a guess work and he was so disciplined. He needed to if he wanted to live. Now I am also disciplined regarding what I eat because I want to function.

It also dawned on me that my father must have experienced no felt sense of love. He used to say his mother, my grandmother, had loved his older brother, but never loved him. He didn’t know how love feels like. I had never felt sense of love from my grandmother, either. She cared for me when I was a little girl, but I didn’t get the sense of love. It didn’t start with me. And if you have not felt loved by your parents, it’s almost impossible to love yourself. I used to hate myself.

Fortunately my dogs taught me how loving and being loved feels like in my body. I remember my father used to take home a puppy and took care of it. The dog might have been the only thing he could feel love.

I don’t have children and it’s a good thing. Neither my brother. At least it stops with us.

If your family is loving, make sure to teach your daughters and sons to stay away from those who don’t know love. They could often be very attractive in a way only damaged people could be.

Trauma Walking

Posted on by SomatiCat

The young woman walked straight to me and introduced herself. “Hi. I’m a survivor,” she said. “Hi,” I said.

It wasn’t a meeting for survivors of any kind. It was just a shamanistic drumming circle gathering. I was in a process of healing journey and was trying out many modalities. At that time, I was highly sensitive to other people’s emotional state and somehow my attention was habitually drawn to traumatized people’s energy. Even before she talked to me, I sensed a tightly wound vortex with thousands of black birds swarming against the dark sky and the vortex was walking toward me.

No, I don’t want to be sucked in that, I thought.

I was taken aback that the woman introduced herself to a total stranger as a survivor. I don’t remember if she said what kind of survivor she was. However, my mind interpreted as a child sexual abuse survivor. The fact she identified herself as a survivor made me think hard. She had chosen that word to define her state of being.

During the drumming, my attention was relentlessly drawn to the woman. No, I don’t want to be sucked in that, I thought again. I could sense that she was looking for a “hook” in people around her. She was looking for a survivor to share the vortex with.

After the gathering, I told my friend about the woman and asked, “Did I look like that?”

Do I look like that? Is a survivor my identity? Does that word represents my entire state of being? I had to think hard because I saw myself in her. Trauma walking, vulnerable and dangerous at the same time.

When there are predators outside of the room, we need to survive. Our sympathetic nervous system needs to be on high alert, like a tightly wound vortex. Once the predators outside of the room leave, we can unwind (deactivate) the sympathetic nervous system. For some of us, the predator is inside the room. We carry the predator with us.

After decades of therapy and numerous healing works, I don’t carry the predator with me anymore. I survived but I don’t define myself as a survivor. The trauma doesn’t define me.

Heart Chakra Story

Posted on by SomatiCat

What does love mean?  What does love feel like?

When I was a little girl, I loved my aunt, who was the only source of goodies in my life.  She took me out for shopping and bought me cute outfits. She took me everywhere to show off her adorable little princess and told everybody how cute I was.  I loved when she took me to a milk bar on weekends and we had pancakes and milkshakes like a mother and a daughter.  They were fluffy and sweet with syrup. 

I followed her everywhere like a duckling.  I waited for her to come home and cried for her when she was late.  When I ran to hug her, I smelled alcohol in her breath.  She showered me with beautiful things.  She gave me money to buy beautiful things.  She even wanted to adopt me one time even though my parents had no reason to give me up.

She spoon-fed me sweets and snacks, regardless I wanted or not.  She dangled pieces of snacks in front of my face.  I automatically opened my mouth and ate whatever she fed me like a baby bird.  She was amused and she still tells me how cute I was.  She still tries to spoon-feed me.  She is 94 and I am 60.

She licked my face because she loved me so much.  It was yucky and I didn’t like it.  When I said no, she proposed to trade licking with goodie.  If I let her lick my face, she would give me a candy. 

Quid pro quo.

That was love I knew.  Love meant stomaching boundary violation from people who gave me something because they “loved” me.  And I had to accept it regardless I want or not because if I didn’t I could lose love.

As you might guess, I had eating problems.  When I felt unlovable, I filled the empty “stomach” with food, binge eating junks.  I always felt an insatiable hunger no food could fill and once physical stomach was full, I felt more unlovable and nauseous, and I forced my self to throw up.  (She could have fed me veges at least.  I wonder why nobody binges on veges…)  I still have difficulty to tell if I’m hungry physically or emotionally and feel anxious on the perceived prospect of going hungry.  The Covid-19 grocery situation was nerve wrecking. 

I always loved plants.  I asked my aunt to buy me a rose bush.  It was a red rose.  I loved her (the rose).  I was a disturbed and rebellious teenager and didn’t talk to my parents, but I went to talk to her every morning.  She was the only one who heard me.   My aunt was building her house in the property next to our house and one morning I found my rose plant was crashed under construction materials.  I hated her for that and cried and screamed that I would burn her house down.  It was the moment I learned that what I loved and cared for could be destroyed or taken away at a whim.  I learned that nobody cared how I felt.  Witnessing me in a murderous rage, my aunt replanted the rose bush somewhere safer.  I didn’t care about the rose after that.  My heart was crashed.  My heart stopped talking to the rose.  The rose bush was me.

My aunt sill “loves” me in her way.  She doesn’t see me or hear me.  She still sees a little princess.  Every time I visit Japan I spend some time with her as a physical form on which she could project her little girl.  It has been my role and I still play it because she is 94 and it is just several days a year.

After my father passed, I’ve learned that my aunt had an affair with a married man (in 1950s in Japan!) and had a daughter, and that the man and his infertile wife adopted the baby girl.  I realized that I had been a stand-in for her daughter.  Entire town knew about the scandal and still she showed me around as if I were her own daughter, in a matching outfit with her.  I remember people asked her if I was her daughter.  I am sure they knew I was not and still they asked, alluding to her illegitimate daughter.

I don’t feel love toward her.  I feel I owe her quasi-daughterly care.  Nobody loves her.  She is highly narcissistic and very caustic woman and I am the only one she “loves.”

BTW I just noticed I still react the same way when I am threatened to lose something I love.  I have this urge to destroy or walk away from the very thing I cared about so much, shutting down.  I don’t do that anymore, but I am aware that it’s still in me.

Yesterday I found somebody cut and stole a sunflower from the park garden I took care of.  It happens often.  Some people are assholes.  I felt the old rage bubbling up from my stomach and wanted to pull all the sunflowers from the garden, so that nobody would take my love away from me. 

Writing Your Own Birth Story

Posted on by SomatiCat

Most of us do not have much memory of the first several years of our life. What I remember is the stories my parents, my aunt, and my grandmother told me. It is not my memory. I doesn’t make sense that I have kept somebody else’s story as mine for my entire life. The story of my first years set a narrative of my life and colored every story I told myself.

“You were a scrawny little baby. You looked like a little monkey. You didn’t want to suck formula from the bottle. We had to squeeze formula into your mouth and when it was full you were forced to swallow. Your grandmother thought you wouldn’t survive.” It was the story I was told again and again by my aunt.

In that narrative I was a runt, who didn’t have a strong will to live and the story of my life was colored by it. I didn’t have strong attachment to life, or so I thought.

And it was not my story.

I took a workshop, “Write Your Way to Deeper Consciousness: A Guided Journey Through the Chakra” by my dear friend, Rev. Freddie Kluth. In the First Chakra class, I was told to write my birth story. So I called my mum. This is her story of my birth.

According to my mother, I was born around 10:00 ~11:00 pm on the day before the winter solstice. She started getting mild contractions. She left home to go to the dormitory for nurses by herself. The dormitory was close to the hospital she worked, and I guess she lived there before she married. She arrived there around 6:00 pm and rested in the dormitory until she was in labor. Nobody from the family was there. Only the matron of the dormitory accompanied her and stayed with her during the labor. It was a normal, rather easy birth, almost on the due date.

“Was there anything unordinary?” I asked. “No. You were normal. Your brother was small,” she said.

That’s all. Do you think it’s normal? I was the first baby she and her husband had. And there were two other women in the family with childbirth experiences. Why did she go to the hospital by herself? I understand that the hospital was like home for her. She spent most of her life working there. All the friends she has worked there as nurses. And it was in 1950s. We were poor and they didn’t have a telephone. There was no way to call a taxi. But my father had a bicycle. He could have biked.

My family is weird…

Freddie asked me to re-write the story to celebrate the birth of myself. This is my birth story I rewrote:

A young woman walked toward the woods. When the day started to wane, she heard the call of woods in her belly. In a hut she shared with a man and his kin, she dropped a bamboo sieve she was using to sort beans from husks. Some beans were spilt on the dirt floor, whispering cold dry words of …shame…shame… W omen folks working in silence looked up and gave a wry face. The fireplace held no fire to save firewood.

“I gotta go,” the woman said to herself and she rooted herself up from the silent cold hearth. The women folks went back to their chore. The woman put her straw boots on and picked up her straw coat.

The day was waning. “I gotta go,” she said and walked out of the hut her man’s kin lived. The night was reaching out for her. There was no daylight left to cast a shadow. The woman walked slowly but steadily toward the woods. “I know where to go,” the woman thought. The woods in her belly were calling.

When she saw a light in the woods, it was already dark. She knew who lived there and knocked at the door. An older woman greeted her. Warm air embraced her. The young woman rooted herself down and rested on a cot by the warmth of fire. The moon slid across the winter sky. It was the longest night of the year, when all the night’s spirits would come out and celebrate. Dead leaves danced with the wind, following the steps of the night spirits, whispering…she is coming, she is coming.

In the cabin on the cot by the hearth the woman moved. The call of woods were getting louder and stronger. The older woman came to her and said, “It’s time to go into the woods.” The young woman rooted herself deeper into the earth under the cot. Her roots ran beyond the boundary of the cabin and spread deeper and wider into the wood. Underground mycelium started to send signals all over the woods, to every tree, to every creature, and to every night spirits. The longest night was alive with full of spirits cerebrating the awakening. Before the midnight, the night spirits heard a baby cry. “I am … I am… I am…”

The next morning, a man came to the medicine woman’s cabin looking for his woman. There was no sign of the young woman. Instead he found a tree where the cabin used to stand. At the foot of the tree, a baby girl was sleeping wrapped in a straw coat. After the longest night of the year, the sun shined on the ground white with frost, warming everything it touched. He picked the baby up and walked out of the woods. The spirits of the woods whispered, “she’s ours… she’s ours… she’s ours.”

The man didn’t know the baby was marked by the spirits of the night woods. The baby is connected with the woods through luminous mycelium. She will be able to hear stories untold and to see spirits unseen. She will carry the luminous mycelium far away, spreading the whisper of the woods, spreading the life of the night sprits on everything she will touch.

She will be back.

We don’t have to accept the story we were told. We can rewrite and change the narrative. After all it’s your story. Not theirs.

Baby Talk

Posted on by SomatiCat

I don’t baby talk to my dog. All my friends do. When they see my dog, their demeanor and tone of voice change. I look at them as if I didn’t know them. I love my dogs and I take great care of them. I just don’t talk to them.

I don’t remember anybody baby talked me when I was a baby.

I’m not motherless. I grew up with three mothers. All of my mothers lived under the same roof. My mother and my father’s bedroom was upstairs. My spinster aunt and my grandmother share a bedroom on the ground floor. And I don’t remember sleeping upstairs with my parents. I slept downstairs with my aunt, my father’s older sister. Since my mother worked as a nurse, she was not home during the day. She also had night shifts.

During the day my grandmother took care of me. She was not a talker. As a widow, who brought up her four kids mostly by herself, tending the family paddle field, growing rice, she was a hard working superstitious matriarch. I remember her always working, silently. Most of food we had was what she grew. She made everything from scratch. I spent most of the day with her. She might have talked to herself, but I don’t remember we ever talked.

I spent the night and weekend with my aunt, when she was home. She sometime came home late drunk. She took me into her bed and cuddled me till I fell asleep. I loved being with her. I was a little princess to her. (I still is a little princess to her. She is 96.) But she didn’t baby talk to me.

I don’t remember my mother’s touch. I don’t even remember her presence even though she was never absent. To me she was a nurse, who took care of me when I was sick. And I got sick often. She didn’t baby talk to me.

I think I didn’t learn to speak “parentese”. And I think none of my three mothers knew how to speak baby talk. It doesn’t come naturally to none of us.

Love is like baby talk. If you didn’t learn how to express love from your original family, it won’t come naturally. You have to learn how to express love.

I think each of my three mothers loved me in her own way. They had their own limitation. I shouldn’t judge their capacity for love. I have to accept that was their maximum capacity for love.

Sometime I feel like the Terminator/machine in T2, who had to learn to be human taking, baby steps.

Weight Belt of Gold

Posted on by SomatiCat

A woman and her husband were on a boat. She saw her friend struggling in the water to be afloat. Her nose was barely above the water. She reached out and tried to grab her friend’s hand. Her hand was slippery and she was too heavy.

Her husband noticed the drowning woman wearing a weight belt. The belt was loaded with gold. It was clear that the weight of the belt was pulling her underwater. “She needs to ditch the belt!” The husband said. The drowning woman would not let go of the belt of gold.

The boat was small and had no room for another person. “I have to rescue her,” the wife said. “She needs to ditch the weight first,” the husband said.

This was not the first time they saw the woman struggling in the water. This was not the first time the wife reached out to rescue her friend. The drowning woman had never let the weight belt go.

She probably could swim, only if she didn’t have the weight belt of gold pulling her down.

“If she let the weight belt go, there are many ways to help her to swim to the shore,” the husband said.

When I was married to a passive-aggressive narcissistic husband, I moved out of our marriage three times. Every time I moved out, my ex found a way to get back and I let him back. On the third time, I finally ditched my weight belt of gold. Looking back, the weight was not made of gold. It was my fear of unknown, insecurity about living on my own, and fear of walking my life by myself. Once I ditched the weight belt, I found I could swim first tentatively and then very well. 

We can't rescue somebody who wants to hold onto the weight belt of what they think is gold, knowing that it is the cause of their distress.

It is very difficult to find ourselves helpless in the face of suffering of our friends. We tend to try to rescue them. It might be more helpful to sit with our own sense of helplessness. When we befriend with our own helplessness and learn to tolerate it, then we might be able to be compassionate in the face of other’s suffering without rushing to rescue them.