Dangerous “friends”
Tuesday July 10, 2007
Hi Alice, I wrote you yesterday and you graciously responded to which I am grateful. I am still thinking, since I wrote you, and I am asking from you, your thoughts on what I’m going to describe here. I know your experience and feel you might be able to help me cement a growing awareness and confidence in my feelings, that I really am finally able to put 2+2 together. Not only in how my mind/feelings work but also that this can lead to a genuine and truthful awareness in/of others, the true nature of their actions. You may remember that I asked my friends to stay away for now and a few have angrily abandoned me. One friend, as I explained to her my reasoning for my anger at my parents and refusal to forgive, angrily said “your rage at your parents disgusts me, afterall I know your parents and they seem like nice people”. This was said with the knowledge of what they did to me. She then said, which I believe to be KEY, “I was an unwanted pregnancy and my mother didn’t like me but I have no feelings of anger at her”. She finally said “well call me in a year or so when you have forgiven your parents and have quit all this therapy stuff.” Then she angrily hung up on me. Her son several years ago married a mortician. I always wondered why this choice. It makes perfect sense now, thru my feelings, to believe that her son is unaware of his past terror of his mother’s rage. She also appears unaware, that there is a good probability that there still lives in her a rage. He now attempts unconsciously to keep in check his old feelings of the infant terror, his mothers’ rage, by symbolically marrying the mortician. My friend called me two days later and apologized but eventually got around to pressing me once again for forgiveness. I asked her to avoid this subject altogether and declined to share what I was feeling. I declined for two reasons. One, because my thinking was not solicited and two,I felt there was a slight possibility, that if my thinking is correct, this knowledge could release in her, strong feelings that she, in my opinion, is unprepared to deal with. Returing back to my request. Is this sort of thinking, and now a sometimes seemingly effortless ability to perceive, a direct result of facing my once repressed fears. Or might I still be deluding myself thru luck, only touching on one logical possibilty for her sons choice of spouse? I feel like I am searching for a true confidence that I really can walk on my own two feet and trust my insights allowed by my feelings. It seems only logical that I should experience this “unsureness of self” as I test and retest what I think to be true. Growing inside me is a somewhat unsettling but very real vision of how the abuse of the child, eventually thru repressed feelings, has the very real potential to live “headless” its rage in unimaginable destruction throughout the world and THIS SCARES ME….. Do you feel my interpretation of the sons marriage to the mortician is a valid one? I hope you don’t feel my question is a waste of your time but i do feel the need for outside guidance. You may print this letter if you see that it is of general interest. And thank you again for your generous insight.
AM: I think that your conclusions are absolutely correct. The way your “friend” tried to impose her “opinions” (or rather her fears) on you shows how she might have done the same with her small child: killing his own opinions and feelings of what seemed right to HIM. Fortunately you are no longer blind, you are no longer dependent on mortifying friends.
You asked us not to publish your last letter and we respected of course your wish. But maybe you could write a shorter version, including your dialogue with the limb and its answer to you. I think that this story could encourage some readers to try the same. They are also scared as you are if they dare to feel differently from the way they were told was “right” but the help and the wisdom of the body is so surprising and so convincing in your history. You can recall it again and again and work with this memory to soothe your fear. It will work but only if you don’t let your “friends” intimidate and contaminate you.