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PAIN AND SORROW – Paris Talks by Abdu’l-Baha on November 22nd, 1911.

In this world we are influenced by two sentiments, Joy and Pain.
Joy gives us wings! In times of joy our strength is more vital, our intellect keener, and our understanding less clouded. We seem better able to cope with the world and to find our sphere of usefulness. But when sadness visits us we become weak, our strength leaves us, our comprehension is dim and our intelligence veiled. The actualities of life seem to elude our grasp, [p. 110] the eyes of our spirits fail to discover the sacred mysteries, and we become even as dead beings.
There is no human being untouched by these two influences; but all the sorrow and the grief that exist come from the world of matter—the spiritual world bestows only the joy!
If we suffer it is the outcome of material things, and all the trials and troubles come from this world of illusion.
For instance, a merchant may lose his trade and depression ensues. A workman is dismissed and starvation stares him in the face. A farmer has a bad harvest, anxiety fills his mind. A man builds a house which is burnt to the ground and he is straightway homeless, ruined, and in despair.
All these examples are to show you that the trials which beset our every step, all our sorrow, pain, shame and grief, are born in the world of matter; whereas the spiritual Kingdom never causes sadness. A man living with his thoughts in this Kingdom knows perpetual joy. The ills all flesh is heir to do not pass him by, but they only touch the surface of his life, the depths are calm and serene.
Today, humanity is bowed down with trouble, sorrow and grief, no one escapes; the world is wet with tears; but, thank God, the remedy is at our doors. Let us turn our hearts away from the world of matter and live in the spiritual world! It alone can give us freedom! If we are hemmed in by difficulties we have only to call upon God, and by His great Mercy we shall be helped.
If sorrow and adversity visit us, let us turn our faces to the Kingdom and heavenly consolation will be outpoured.
If we are sick and in distress let us implore God’s healing, and He will answer our prayer.
When our thoughts are filled with the bitterness of this world, let us turn our eyes to the sweetness of God’s compassion and He will send us heavenly calm! If we are imprisoned in the material world, our spirit can soar into the Heavens and we shall be free indeed!
When our days are drawing to a close let us think of the eternal worlds, and we shall be full of joy!
You see all round you proofs of the inadequacy of material things—how joy, comfort, peace and consolation are not to be found in the transitory things of the world. Is it not then foolishness to refuse to seek these treasures where they may be found? The doors of the spiritual Kingdom are open to all, and without is absolute darkness.
Thank God that you in this assembly have this knowledge, for in all the sorrows of life you can obtain supreme consolation. If your days on earth are numbered, you know that everlasting life awaits you. If material anxiety envelops you in a dark cloud, spiritual radiance lightens your path. Verily, those whose minds are illumined by the Spirit of the Most High have supreme consolation.
I myself was in prison forty years — one year alone would have been impossible to bear—nobody survived that imprisonment more than a year! But, thank God, during all those forty years I was supremely happy! 112 Every day, on waking, it was like hearing good tidings, and every night infinite joy was mine. Spirituality was my comfort, and turning to God was my greatest joy. If this had not been so, do you think it possible that I could have lived through those forty years in prison?  [unjust imprisonment from religious persecution]
Thus, spirituality is the greatest of God’s gifts, and ‘Life Everlasting’ means ‘Turning to God’. May you, one and all, increase daily in spirituality, may you be strengthened in all goodness, may you be helped more and more by the Divine consolation, be made free by the Holy Spirit of God, and may the power of the Heavenly Kingdom live and work among you.
This is my earnest desire, and I pray to God to grant you this favour.
http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/ab/PT/pt-35

NOTE:  This post won’t accept any other formatting that what it decided to include all by itself, hence no paragraph indentations, etc!

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I found the following in an unlikely place within the pages of a slim green book one of my sisters gave to me called, Suburban Adventures of a Naked Gardener by Ian Taylor (2004).  Reading his words made me realize that the deep and abiding sadness many, if not most survivors of very stress-filled and traumatizing infant-childhoods know nearly every second of their (our) lives resonates with Taylor’s simple description.  And yet Taylor is writing about something MORE in this passage, about something he calls “unconditioned” sadness and “unconditioned” fear.  In other words, these are feelings that humans are born with no matter what:

“”Harried” or “stressed” is not the same as “sad.”  There are spiritual traditions that regard sadness as a most important part of our being.  If you settle yourself, they say, and center yourself, and quiet your latte-charged mind for a while, and if you do this often enough, and with care, you will find your heart growing soft and tender.  It will soften and open, and you will find that in the center of your heart deep down, at the core is sadness.  A deep, sweet, aching sadness.  The sadness is a good sign.  It signals your humanity.  It’s unbearable; but it makes us what we are.  It’s also a fuel.  From this sadness we can generate compassion, insight, and kindness.

“Unconditioned sadness is not often the topic of your typical dinner conversation, and neither is unconditioned fear.  A friend who spent some days alone in the mountains last fall mentioned the fear he felt at a certain point in the evening when, for an instant, he faced the full significance of being by himself, in nature, with night falling.  I realized with some surprise that this is something I have experienced often enough myself in the same circumstances without ever naming it, and certainly without speaking of it.  It might not be by accident that we haven’t spoken of it again.”  (page 103)

Thinking about Taylor’s words while I consider my own survivorship from severe infant-child abuse makes me notice inside myself something I think is a core difference between how my abusive Borderline mother was in the world and how I am.  For some (various) reasons my mother’s body-brain grew in her infancy and childhood in her environment of trauma in ways that EXCLUDED from her the ability to truly feel the exact same feelings that Taylor writes about.

I, in turn, grew and body-brain within the environment of trauma and abuse I experienced to INCLUDE these feelings.  Many write that the main super highway in the human body that directly moderates, modulates and allows for the experience of genuine, authentic, (and consciously deliberated and MORE than superficial) human tenderness, humility, kindness, consideration, cooperation, empathy, altruism and compassion is built around the vagus nerve in our autonomic nervous system.  When trauma changes human infant and very young child development in ways that prevent these feelings from operating normally, people we call ‘those without a conscience’ are the end result.

After reading Taylor’s simple words I am more grateful for the fact that I was able to bear the pain, fear and sadness of my formative first 18 years INTACT in my ability to tolerate the force and weight of these emotional states, because if I had NOT been able to bear them – and if my developing body-brain had instead blocked my capacity to feel them – I would have lost the essence of my humanity as my mother – and as my father – did.

So when I feel sadness, when I feel fear – when these feelings are genuinely being communicated to me by my body through my brain, I can APPRECIATE and VALUE the fact that I CAN feel them.  The alterative of NOT feeling them would be more than I could bear.

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A dear blog reader posted this song for me!  HERO by Mariah Carey.  I wrote this back:  “If there was ever a movie of my story, this would be the theme song!!! I am just getting to the point in the story when I am seven and we are ‘going up’ that Alaskan mountain – I was SO SAD, and in Mother’s letters, what does she say? That of course Linda was ‘poking’ up the mountain! In knee deep mud, over ice, in deep snow — little me with the broken heart was TOO SLOW???? Oh my GOSH!!”

One of the ‘blocks of thinking’ I am doing right now in my pause in the book writing process (short pause – but needed to consolidate what I am learning along the way – and that is A LOT of important information about myself) is that as I work on my story I am finding myself.  On first glance that might not appear to be such a big deal, but to me it is!!  The simplest way to describe what’s going on for me right now is that as I locate myself in the story of my childhood – using my abusive mother’s own words as she wrote them in letters to her own mother over the time span of my childhood – I am really finding a little girl ME frozen in time, space and place.

Just FROZEN, standing at different points along the time line of my own life where trauma intercepted my own experience of being a child so profoundly that I never got to connect my own experience of life with ME!  My MOTHER’S version of reality was forced upon me as my own.  Like a little bug caught in a drop of tree sap that turned into amber and trapped me there, each memory I have of myself in my own early years lies caught, trapped and frozen into a piece of ME – one memory after another.

This is very hard to explain to someone who never had a severely mentally ill extremely abusive parent!  These continual brutal and brutalizing interruptions of my child life by each traumatic attack of me created a dissociation between me and my own experience of being a child – of being a person.

I FELT it last week when I had my first-ever piano lesson!  I felt exactly six-years old!  I felt that happy, that excited, that hopeful – and as I practice now, as I experience the THRILL OF LEARNING itself and begin to realize the music can flow right out of MY fingertips – well, this is a kind of ecstasy that SHOULD have been my right to know all the way through my childhood – and my entire life!

THIS feeling is real.

Yesterday, thanks to a generous so-sweet gift from one of my sisters who gave me the money to buy one – I saw a very nice used bicycle at a second hand store and BOUGHT IT!  I rode another child’s bike when I was nine years old.  Never since then.  I bet when my bike is delivered and I hop onto its seat, put my feet on those pedals and fly away that I will experience the BODY memory of being nine years old.

True, nothing along the way has specifically STOPPED me from gathering piano playing or bike riding into my repertoire of life today (I will soon be 60).  But there is something ELSE going on for me as I find myself in my own childhood story.

I am doing exactly THAT!  As I free my childhood from the terrible grip of trauma I am in some mysterious way running my life backwards.  The other day when I was writing I crossed through time over being in second grade.  Those experiences are written in the book, and there are little things I remember that have NOTHING to do with my mother.  I am the one who scooped my much-hated cold canned peas off of my lunch tray one day and stuffed them into my empty milk carton.  I am the one the matriarch Principal saw doing that.  I am the one she marched right up to demanding that I dump them out and eat every last one of them as she stood behind me and watched.

I am the one who heard in the background the continual repeating of two songs on a 45 rpm record that played every single lunch period of my second grade – over and over and over again – all year long!  I am the one who was in that body.  And what happened to me in my body all the times IN BETWEEN my own experiences of being myself in my body in my childhood INTERRUPTED my ability to link my own experiences together into a long line that includes and leads to ME in my life now.

I am the one that got to go on a train trip along the ocean when I was seven because a neighbor (a Brownie scout leader) offered to take me.  My mother let me go because at the moment the question was asked she found no way to save face in front of this neighbor and say “No!”  I have never forgotten that day!  At the destination end of the train trip we were escorted into a ski lodge, a grand room with towering ceilings, round tables, pulled-out chairs for all the little girls to sit on.

I am the one that was in that little body and can remember sitting my bottom on that chair, scooting it in toward the table, running my finger tips over the patterns of the large round white paper lace doily on the table in front of me.  I am the one whose eyes saw that perfect yellow pear and picked it up from the doily.  I had never seen a real pear before, never held one in the palm of my hand.  The pear FILLED my hand it was so big!  No.  Wait.  It filled my hand because I was so small!

I’ve always had the memory of that sweet drippy yellow tasting pear.  I know it was strangely gritty!!  I rolled the grit around in my mouth with my tongue and thought about how different this fruit was from an apple.  (It certainly didn’t crunch!) I am the one who has always remembered this day as one of the few happy highlight moments of my childhood.

But it is only as I pull my own self, my own experience, my own childhood, my own LIFE as a child out of the grip my mother had on me ALWAYS that I am FEELING my own self in my own body – then and NOW – and the dissociation, the continual dissociation that the brutal violence from my mother caused me, is beginning to heal in amazing ways.

I sit at the piano now and in my body I can FEEL me being the same me I was holding that pear.  These are the SAME hands that touched that doily.  These are the SAME eyes looking at this computer screen that watched the ocean pass under me as I stared down out of that train window, so close were the tracks to the edge of the ocean.

This is FELT EXPERIENCE – ongoing FELT experience.  I can’t describe any more of this right now, but I just wanted to mention how putting my story together is so different from anything I have ever done before – and it is wonderful!  I keep having the thought, “So THIS is what it was supposed to be like!  So THIS is what all that continual 18 years of abuse robbed from me!”  Being a child, experiencing one’s self in one’s own life as a continuous pattern of being in the world all the way through, all the way through to adulthood — nobody stealing 99 moments out of every 100, leaving one with only one lonely moment, one out of every 100 moments, that belonged to the child.

Every time my mother attacked me she created a rift, a hole, a breach and a break in my own ongoing experience of me being me.

Every time she attacked me trauma took over MY life.  MY childhood.  MY ongoing experience of doing what I was born to do:  Be a child who was experiencing herself in her life, learning, playing, learning, growing, being loved and being kindly and wisely guided and chaperoned through my formative years.

This is NOT reparenting to me.  This is like taking a giant Pink Pearl eraser and erasing out those 99 moments of hell and ONLY leaving the ONE pure moment of ME being a child.  As those 99 moments of my MOTHER’S hell are erased out of MY life I can scoot together every one of my own memories, my own childhood experiences of goodness and purity and make MY OWN story of MY OWN self clear to me — THEN and NOW.

As ‘attachment experts’ state, it is the loss of the ability to tell a coherent narrative of one’s own life story that is the #1 symptom of insecure attachment disorders due to traumatic unsafe and insecure relationships with those we depended on when we were little.

Going back and healing my STORY is healing ME!  Better get back to my task now!!  Will keep you posted!

NOTE:  All I really need to know right now is that I am turning the black and white NEGATIVE of my severely abusive infancy and childhood into a POSITIVE.  As I erase the 99 moments of every 100 that belonged to MY MOTHER and HER story and that had NOTHING whatsoever to do with ME, during those 99 moments all I need to know about myself right now is that I endured them with goodness because I was BEING a HERO.

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I am taking a day off today to play.  Am traveling with my new friend into a nearby town to have lunch, meet some new people, see the scenery.  Wonderful desert rain last night so it is a new world today, and a beautiful one.  I will do my best to be a part of it.

I woke up thinking about ‘comingled feelings and states of mind’ in relation to the book writing I worked on yesterday.  Part of what I can so clearly see is that to my Borderline mother ALL her children, and in some important ways her husband also, were extensions of my mother herself.  In her writings she attributes thoughts, feelings, beliefs and needs to her children that CLEARLY in fact belonged to her.

She didn’t know the difference between her own self and her children.  Some could say we were all projections of one part or another of Mother’s internal state as she projected herself out onto us.  What really happened was that we were INCLUDED within her own mind-being-self without distinction except we had our own body and our own name.  As she contaminated OUR reality with HER reality we did become no more than ‘multiple parts of her own personality’ — for good (my siblings) or for ill (me).

I am thinking this morning again about the ‘anger issue’ as I realize clearly that I wasn’t BORN into this world to be an angry, hate-full person.  If I allow those feeling states to swallow me up now — well, those are NOT me.  They are NOT who I was born to be although like every other human being I have the capacity to experience those states along with all the other shared human states.   But it is clear to me this morning that if my mother had NOT been so terribly sick she would have parented her children differently.  We would then have grown up being (as children and as adults) more truly who we were BORN to be.

I work on being that person I was born to be NOW — and I was not born to be an angry hate-filled person.  So I do choose not to be one — and for one reason or another I made that choice all along through the 18 years Mother so abused me.  As I see it now I didn’t even know then that I HAD the capacity to be angry at her.  I often think that by the time I reached my teen years if I had EVER felt my own anger to equal the trouble she caused me, I would have killed her.  That was the only available escape route open to me as a child.

NIX on murdering my mother, too!

I know my anger is available to me, but I don’t ‘go there’ and hope I never will.  At the same time I choose not to pick up hate and anger at her or at my father, I can focus on my own self in the middle of the hell I grew up in and realize that even then I was reaching from my own self-soul for SOMETHING else — and what I reached for was good.

I didn’t step off of my own path into my mother’s reality THEN and I won’t do it now.  That doesn’t mean that I am freed from the powerful affect that her words, her continual verbal, emotional, psychological, spiritual and physical abuse didn’t weasel its way into my brain-thoughts (cognition).  All of this DID not only change my physiological development so I could endure and survive that terrible trauma, it also changed the very foundation of how I THINK.

Working with Mother’s written words in the same book as I am writing my own story in is fascinating.  No child truly understands the world of parents — their stresses, their desires, etc.  But no parent has the right to usurp their children’s life like my mother did.  But it happened.  Now I work to find out more than I have ever  understood about what happened to me as this happened.

I might add here:  The level of severe infant and child abuse survivors of deeply disturbed Borderline Personality Disorder mothers know is beyond the current ability of most people to understand or comprehend.  It is critically important that we tell our stories!

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Forced myself to be productive on the book writing today.  What a strange story this will end up being.  I’m not sure there’s another Borderline Personality Disorder severe infant-child abuse story out there that includes a mother’s own writings to the extent this one will.  Never will I be comfortable reading the words my mother wrote.  Her voice is in them.

I ran into anger at my mother today – and when that happens I always stop dead in my tracks.  In some ways I think that if I ever FELT the anger I truly have against what my mother did to me I would evaporate like steam or fry into ashes or disintegrate into cinders and blow away.  I also think in some ways that by NOT ‘being’ angry at my mother, by not letting anger at her stick to me as I live my own life, I am SO NOT LETTING HER WIN!

I have never yet seen a benefit to returning her anger with my own, her hatred with my own.  I know I am bigger and better than that — and not sick like my mother was, sick like a raging rapid bear — wolverine — or badger.

So when I encounter one of Mother’s nasty snide verbal snipes she took at me when I was a child in the letters she wrote to her mother, I simply note my flash of anger where it appears and move on.  I trust when it is time for my daughter to become involved in the editing process that we will have some ‘interviews’ and discussions about some of this writing process that is troublesome to me.

For now my story is far too complex for me to rest with any certainty anywhere along in its telling.  My job right now is to find and define the skeleton of my childhood story.  Eventually I will take myself to task on some of the finer points I just don’t wish to deal with now!!

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I did not mean to get off track with my book writing but somehow I did.  There must be a reason, a part of the bigger plan that I do not see or know.  Please do not miss these two last posts and especially the comments and their replies attached.

+INFANT ABUSE AND THE INABILITY TO FEEL THE FEELING OF BEING LOVED

+AFTER EFFECTS OF MY CHILDHOOD: NOBODY SHOULD KNOW WHAT THIS FEELS LIKE

All I wanted to mention right now is that developmental neuroscientists and attachment experts state that a human being’s core self is formed by the age of 18-24 months!  An infant this age, who is passing into toddlerhood, is supposed to have safe and secure attachment underpinnings to all increasing growth and development.

A healthy infant develops the ability to self-reflect and to mentally time travel around this 18-month milestone.  Attachment, empathy, affect (emotional) regulation — all mediated by the frontolimbic areas of the cortex — develop by this time.  An 18-month old toddler can initiate comforting behaviors, has its gender identification, and finishes development of its orbitofrontal system to maturity in the last half of the second year.  Twelve-eighteen months of age is a Critical Period for experience-dependent maturation of orbitofrontal areas of the cortex.

According to Dr. Schore (page 126 of “Affect Dysregulation”) by the end of the second year humans can construct accurate representations (mentally and emotionally)) of events that endure and these representations are accessible over time.  They are imprinted into the right hemisphere of the brain and form the basis of autobiographical memory.

Also in the second year of life (approaching age three) humans begin to form their Theory of Mind they will use to get along in the world for the rest of their life.  Theory of Mind involves imputing mental states to self and to others so that behavior can be predicted on the basis of these states.

In cases where safe and secure attachment between infant prior to the age of one and caregiver DID NOT HAPPEN (to some degree in half or more of our population) SOME degree of trauma altered body and brain development happens.  Every developmental stage following age of one will build on this earliest foundation.

I see everything that happens in the first 33 months of life (conception to age two) as building the ARK a person will climb into at age two and sail off into its life with.  Whatever the quality of that ark is, whatever is packed and stored within it, will be what a person has to WORK WITH for the rest of their life — and this ARK is CALLED SELF.

Whatever changes we later make, whatever healing we acquire, will be based upon whatever our ARK consisted of by the time we were two.  Don;t get me wrong!  There are still miracles of potential in us – no matter what our earliest beginnings gave us.  But neither can we afford to be blind or naive about what some of us are dealing with — especially infant abuse survivors.

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NOTE:  Just Google search any terms here that aren’t familiar — it’s well worth the effort!

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It seems to me that if what ‘experts’ are referring to in the description of Borderline Personality Disorder is related to what I wrote in this post and what is written in its comments

+AFTER EFFECTS OF MY CHILDHOOD: NOBODY SHOULD KNOW WHAT THIS FEELS LIKE

then it would be far more helpful to all concerned to talk about what is really happening UNDERNEATH what might appear on the surface to be ‘a fear of abandonment’.

Humans are absolutely born with needs for safe and secure attachment.  In fact, ALL mammals are born with these needs.  Our entire physiological makeup is designed to run best when these needs are met birth to age one primarily because it is during the stages of development during that time that all the physical chemicals in the body along with the building of our primary social and emotional right brain gets put together, told how to operate and are built into us in the first place (including essential messages from our earliest environment that tell our genetic material how to manifest itself in our lifetime).

Our attachment needs are PRIMARY.  If earliest attachments SUCK then what we need to build our body-brain RIGHT in the first place is simply missing.  It is completely natural that neglect and abuse changes how we develop.  In my case, as I describe in that post, I was left without the capacity PHYSIOLOGICALLY to feel what it feels like to be loved.

It’s not a far stretch for me to understand that my Borderline Mother was built the same way.  This means that her unmet safe and secure attachment needs were unmet, and then ended up building her body-brain so that they would NEVER truly be met — just as my body-brain was built that way.

We might as well ‘call a spade a spade’ and fool nobody, especially our self.

My mother’s Borderline condition prevented her from being able to KNOW the truth about how trauma changed her as it built her.  She lacked the self-reflective ability because of her Borderline condition from being able to clearly recognize what she felt or did not feel about anything.

As I wrote yesterday about my mother in a section of the book I am working on:

My mother was TERRIBLE with money causing problems for her family that I am sure were as directly caused by her early trauma-formed brain changes as were all her other problems including her inability to reason, plan for the future, learn from past mistakes, consider consequences of her actions, care about the impact her behavior had on anyone else, or even to be able to remember her own self in her own life – one decision past the next one. 

She listened to no one, took responsibility for nothing, truly cared about nobody and to my knowledge was incapable of learning anything throughout her entire adult life.  I give all the credit for this discredit to the early traumas of her life that changed the physiological patterning of her development especially in the first year of her life and after that time period, through her fifth year of her life.  All of her traumas were directly connected to flaws in her earliest caregiving environment that FIRST created within her a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder that then combined with her genetic potential to land her squarely in the midst of Borderlineville.

I was not robbed of the capacity to recognize what is wrong with me.  My mother was.  But when it comes to the so-called Borderline ‘fear of abandonment’ I think we need to name this for what it really is: The inability to FEEL loved by someone else — no matter how many others truly DO love us and try their best to get us to KNOW this.  If we can’t FEEL what if feels like to be loved, the set-up for disaster is this:  We so desperately NEED to feel love we will do anything in our power to at least keep our HOPE alive that someday we WILL be able to feel it — if only.  If only WHAT?

If only we had not been so neglected, deprived, maltreated, traumatized and abused PRIMARILY birth to age one — that the wiring in our body-brain that is required to process on a feeling level this information of FEELING WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE LOVED — could not be built into us in the beginning of our life as it SHOULD HAVE BEEN — during our most rapid and most critical stages of development.

Not having this wiring does not create Borderline Personality Disorder.

It happens to everyone who was severely abused as an infant who did not have some other primary caregiver to attach to safely and securely.

That this condition shows up in BPD is significant because it IMMEDIATELY signals that serious trouble was present birth to age two – if not from conception.  This is, I believe, the foundation of all TRUE ‘fear of abandonment’.  It is a logical and natural physiological consequence of early relationship trauma.

Survivors of this kind of earliest caregiver trauma have essentially had this ability AMPUTATED from them!  In their physiological BODY!!  Call it what it is, folks!  A criminally caused permanent condition that is a direct result of INFANT ABUSE!

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Nobody should have to say this to anybody:

I wonder if I can explain this to you so it makes any sense — practice for when it is time to write this into the book —

If you think I am continually in need of affirmations from you that you care for me, etc. you are absolutely correct.  But you are not alone.

My children and everyone who loves me are in the same boat and know and accept and understand why this is so, and love me anyway.

True fact:  Not only was I severely abused for my 1st 18 years — nobody loved me.  So how could I learn to trust any such thing existed?

I didn’t and I really can’t.  I try but that is not the same thing as knowing.  (Like the difference between trying to lift your foot off the floor versus doing it.)

I know I love those I love ’cause I can feel it.  But it is nearly impossible for me to feel what it feels like to be loved by others.

Personally I can’t imagine a greater loss in life than to miss what being loved feels like except to also miss what it feels like to love someone else.  I have this part — just not the other part.

18 years in a virtual concentration camp of intense hatred toward me did this.

Not to whine about this — simply stating a fact.

I am almost 60 and this hasn’t changed yet so probably won’t.  Others hold out to me the gift of their love and affection of me and I am unable to accept it — so they have to continually let me know they mean it.

Weird?  Yes.

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