An incredible pain

An incredible pain
Thursday August 23, 2007

Dear Alice,
First of all I’d like to say thanks to you for your replies to my last two emails. Then, I would like to share with you my feelings at the moment. I’ve been on holiday in my hometown and spent some time with my parents. I did talk a lot to them without any arguments, and it was quite touching. I believe they have changed completely and they are different from what they used to be fifteen years ago during my childhood. They have accepted and understood completely our past and all the mistakes they made. Yet my resentment and rage are still here, but these are towards what my parents were in the old days, not what they are now. It’s as if I’m stuck in a time warp. A difficult situation for me as I see myself in the impossibility to break my relationship with them today but I’d like to break it with what they used to be. It just sounds very weird. It’s like fighting against phantoms.
Yet again I find myself split in two. I’d love to get rid of my past but in order to do it I would probably need to express all my trapped rage and feelings. How? I don’t know. Even because I think that if I were to go in regressive therapy I would need a special room, designed to be physically smashed, as I believe I would need to express some form of physical violence in order to release the pain. My father has even offered me to be my “enlightened witness”, helping me to go back with my memory (!). I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. I don’t think so. But I’m still stuck.
Any advice will be much appreciated.
Thanx again for your work. M.

AM: To heal a broken bone you don’t need to break it again. You don’t need a dangerous repressive therapy to learn to feel because you CAN feel the rage; it is stored up in your body and will not leave you until you are willing to understand its REASON. Nobody has feelings without reasons. It is not about parent’s “mistakes,” it is about their probably very scary behavior toward the child you once were. It can be this fear that hinders you to see the reasons of your rage and makes you feel guilty instead. Your last letter was very insightful, try to stay true to yourself and don’t allow anybody to confuse you. The own father can’t be the enlightened witness or therapist to his son who suffered from him as a child. This would be highly confusing. You write: “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. I don’t think so.” TRUST YOUR FEELINGS, THEY KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, THEY WILL GUIDE YOU.