Katy - Peru

Katy

Katy with Veronica who waits in lines to make money for her family.

It is hard for me to write about Katy. So I will just make notes.

27 year old single mother of two girls, Maria Belen and Lucero, ages 8 and 6. Ex-husband is a Buddhist.

Very open. Hugged me while I cried. Told me she has tried to kill herself.

She told me she is full of resentment. Used to be very rebellious in school. Mother would hit her. Still loves her mother.

Told me she likes to drink sometimes, and dance.

Feed me with her fork when we were eating lunch and asked me if it bothered me. I said no. She said her ex-husband didn't like it.

He also tells her she is going to spoil her daughters by being so affectionate and babying them so much.

Was afraid to come up to my room because "people would talk."

She went to a meditation camp where the people were told they couldn't talk to anyone but the leader for 10 days.

She said she was thinking about killing herself just one week ago. Because she feels so alone.

Her ex husband will not let her inside his house.

She is not working. She has no money of her own. The government here doesn't give single mothers money. She doesn't even have a bank account.

He is paying for her apartment. He told her he doesn't want her letting men inside the apartment that he is paying for. He said if she keeps on letting men in he will stop paying and take the girls away from her.

She told me she has a friend who is coming to visit he who

She believes in angels.

One day I was showing pictures on my computer to a friend of hers. Katy walked out for a few minutes. When she came back

Her friend was talking about how far it was to walk some place. Katy said "It's not far" in an impatient, intolerant, invalidating, disapproving voice.

When her daughter Maria Belen was getting ready for school and looked in the mirror, Katy said "You are pretty" in the same disapproving tone. What she really was saying was something like "Stop looking the mirror. I don't like it." The question is though, why didn't she like it? Because a) she thinks Maria Belen is learning to be too "egotisical" or because b) she feels insecure about the way she just brushed Maria Belen's hair. In other words, if Maria Belen wants to change the way her hair is, her mother will take it personally. She will feel a little rejected in other words. The more insecure the mother, the more this kind of thing happens inside homes every day. So the daughters, or sons, learn not t show their true feelings, their true wishes, because their insecure mothers disapprove when ever it is threatening to the mother's fragile sense of security.

Said she would like to live in a small community of like-minded people.

At around 8:30 she started picking up Lucero's colored pencils. When Lucero saw this she looked so said she looked like she was getting ready to cry. I asked her why she was sad and she said "I want to draw." Katy said "She has to get ready for bed so she won't be late for school." I said, "What happens if they are late?" She said, "They don't let them enter." I had heard this before in Ecuador, but I still find it hard to believe. When I hear things like this it pains me. Here, it is just normal, accepted. Like all the rules are in every country.

Watching Katy brush her daughters' hair and put those little elastic things in showed me again how we teach children to feel powerless. Lucero and Maria Belen had almost no choices this morning. Nearly everything the did was required of them. At one point Katy asked if they wanted some milk. Lucero didn't answer fast enough and Katy pressured her. She said 'Tell me. Yes or no?"

Another way to offer milk without this kind of pressure would be to say, "There is some milk if you want some" then just leave it up to them.

The only time I saw Maria Belen smile was when she came out of the bathroom and I asked her if she wanted to take a picture.

Katy and I on her bed. This was the first day we met. We look like lovers, according to Marcos, but we didn't do anything besides talk, hold hands and hug. She held me while I cried a couple of times.

Brushing Lucero's hair early in the morning. Getting them ready for the brainwashing place called school. Next, Maria Belen after brushing her teeth.

...

how are you feeling mas o menos i ask each one they say nothing

i ask olderone how she is feeling betweeen 0 and 10 she says nothing

i tell kati i want her to work for me. she says flatly, "doing what?"

i know that when someone says this they are not very excited. if they were excited they would quickly say ok! then then would say something more like, what do you want me to do?

her question stuns me. i don't know what to say. i feel attacked by it and i feel pressured to give her a "good" answer. I can tell she isn´t in the mood to really listen or talk about it. so i feel pressured to give her a short, but "good" answer. i wish now i would have said something more like "you don't really want to talk about it now?" or "can we talk about it later?"

but i say "writing"

she says nothing. then lucero says i want tea

kati says nothing

i ask lucero "what do you want?" she says nothing

i look at her cup. it has milk in it. i say you don´t like milk. she shakes her head no.

i say can i have some. she looks at her mother. i ask her again. she keeps looking at kati. i say for a third time can i have a drink of your milk? she keeps looking at her mother, then nods her head to say yes. i take it and drink some. then i say thank you and give it back.

then i hear something on the tv about angels.

i see what they are talking about. the caption reads do angels exist or are they just christian mythology?

i think maybe they are going to have an intelligent discussion about this topic. but instead it looks more like an infomercial for angels. they are interviewing this woman who is telling people how to invite angels into your house. she says something like you light candles and put out flowers or something. she says she has six angels that visit her everynight and she explains what they look like and she says they answer her prayers.

i ask lucero if she believes in angels she says yes i ask kati. she says yes. i stare at her, not believing what i just heard. i think maybe she misunderstood me so i ask again to clarify. she says yes.

she asks me if i believe in them and i say no.

hering this hurts me so much i put my head down and cover my face with my hands.

no one says anything. no one does anything.

the other day, yesterday she would have said what's wrong, or shown some caring about the obvious pain i was in. i keep listening to the bullshit about angels and it keeps hurting me to think of what people are teaching these two children. it reminds of all the poison being injected directly into their brain cells.

i stand up and walk past kati. she says nothing. does nothing. no one says anything.

in the past i would have concentrated on how no one cared how i felt. i would have felt rejected by kati. but, well i do feel that way a little, and i do feel a yearning for someone to care how i feel. to see that i am i pain and try to help. or to show they care, which itself would help,

-- i start to go up to my room. but i don't want to be there alone with my pain. so i go outside. i remember how everyone comments on my barefeet when i dont have shoes on. this just makes me feel more defiant. i see marco's brother. he says "steve, mi amigo" i shake his hand as i walk by. as i did the first time i walked past him. but this time my mood is much different. i dont know if he can tell but i do know that he is not someone i want to talk to when i am depressed, in pain.

so i walk out the door. then i remember my van is sitting in the parking lot just across the street. i get in it and drive. at an intersection i slow down to see if another car is coming out from behind the building. the streets are very narrow here. and there is almost no visibility. but when i come to a stop, after maybe 3 seconds, someone behind me honks their horn. i feel defiant. so i deliberately don't move. i count to ten. then i cross the intersection. when the road gets wider i have a choice to seek a bit more revenge, to try to feel a little more powerful and incontrol, to punish the person behind me by driving right down the middle so he cant go around me. it is a one way street by the way. or i could move a bit to the right and let him go by. i feel sure he will because i have seen how they drive here and he has already shown me his impatients

-- now i am in the internet and three university students come in. they are making a lot of noise. they take two computers, one next to me and one behind me and they are shouting back and forth.

they have no clue there is any one else in the room, trying to work needing silence. i feel hostile towards them. it is

yesterday

1. you should seek the things that hurt you (i said that is like saying you should eat food that makes you sick)

2. at the internet cafe

walked away when i was talking to the mother who says "alright!" and who works in the bank line

walked away when i was talking to maribel (like my mother who made it obvious she was bored when i was talking to someone in the new age shop in florida)

walked away when i was taking pictures of the street the hostal is on

left when i was crying

left after she had killed my motivation, refused to go talk to the schools, lecutured me telling me "you keep changing your mind, you have to..."

tapping her foot when i was having problems on the computer.

lucero writes her love notes.

March 31

once she said "it's difficult" about getting space to use.

when she feels defensive she turns things around like by saying "and when the volunteers come, what are you going to have them do?"

she wants to prove to me that I am not ready.

when I ask her what she thinks she says "it depends on you." but when I tell her what I want to do she gives me reasons why it won't work.

she has said twice "you don't know me" - this is another way of saying "I feel defensive so I am going to attack you and try to discredit you, make you doubt yourself, feel less sure of yourself. What you are saying is too true, so I want you to think it isn't true. This will protect me from having to hear the truth from you."

Does the person want you to know them?

I feel frustated because people here don't do anything when I am not giving them instructions. They don't work when I am gone. They watch TV, go shopping, plan parties, go to parties, everything else except think, write, work, try to learn.

Katy did not learn anything about the computer while I was gone even though it was in her room for four days. As far as I know she didn't type anything about her life, her feelings, about what the kids' answers to our questions are.

I don't want to attack her but I feel resentful about it. I feel attacked, judged, killed by her in the sense of killing my motivation. So I feel resentful since this has happened so many times before in my life.

she also said when we were sitting on the church steps "the people are going to come and they are going to ask what they are going to do and when they see that you don't have it organized they are going to lose interest."

this is when I asked her "so what do you think we should do" and she said "it depends on you" This is another defensive answer. Another way of avoiding telling someone how you really feel. At least it is the way she uses it.

at one point she said "what do you want to do first?"

this was a little like manfred murderous father saying "do you have a plan?" or whatever he said.

it is some kind of attempt to destabilize you, it is an attack. she didn't say it in a helfpul way, not did Manfred's father ask it in a helpful way. It wasn't like "I want to help you, where do we begin?" It was more like "I feel superior to you because I am asking questions like a parent or a school teacher" (which Manfred's father was both)

And also "I believe it is important to have a plan and to know what you are going to do first, second and third, so I expect you to have the same beliefs. If you do then I will feel less alone. And I will feel more approving of you and more supportive. But if you want to do things in your own way, I will feel disapproving and critical and maybe judgmental and I will probably give you a lecture on why you should do things my way."

When I told katy that i was afraid she was going to go the schools but not try very hard and instead she would try to prove that she was right and i was wrong, she said "you don't know me" so I said but I have already seen how you told Richard something and he didn't believe you then when he came back you said "see?" and I asked you what that meant and you said "It means 'I was right'". She smiled when I said this because she could not argue anymore. I was laughing a little too but then she started attacking me more and eventually said "you have to...." That was pretty much the nail in the coffin. I didn't say anything after that. I just started thinking. About how hard it was to find anyone who would help me, about... I don't even remember now. It hurts to even think about it. I feel so depressed still today. I did almost nothing after she left yesterday morning around 10:30. Slept. Thought. Layed in bed. Until around 6 pm when some band started playing and it was too much for me to take so I went to the Internet where Francis' wife was talking to her mother on the phone for like an hour. Arguing with her, shouting at her. Then her daughter comes down and she says "what are you doing here? you follow me around like a shadow."

Francis' wife, who is in her thirties, kept saying "mommy". "Yes, mommy." "I know, mommy." "But Mommy..." She had a frustrated impatient tone the whole time. When she hung up she said "Take care, mommy. Don't worry. Good bye mommy." It was obvious she felt stressed talking to her mother and wanted to get off the phone but the mother wouldn't let her go.

In Katy's room the other night. MB wanted to play with the cell phone. Katy was reading the instruction book. MB said three times "I want the cell phone." Katy ignored her all three times. Then MB reached out, said "Prestame" and took it. Katy did nothing. MB is learning to be agressive and take what she wants. She tried the whiney voice, but that hadn't worked. So she just took it.

Prestame is something like "give it to me" and also something like "loan it to me." They seem to use it for both ideas.

They use the same word for more than one thing a lot here. Like "llave". They use it for key, faucet and valve.

I asked her once to write about her life and she said that would be too painful. She told me she was sexually abused by her half brother when she was thirteen. I wonder if any of her psychologists have told her to write about her life. I asked her the other day if they had ever given her a hug and she said no. I asked if she thought they would cry if she killed herself and she said no. I also asked if she felt more alone, less alone or the same after she talked to them and she said she felt less alone. But when I said would you feel less alone by talking to a psychologist or by getting a hug from someone and she said a hug.

The other day her ex said he wasn't going to pay for her room anymore. He also told her he didn't have time to go shopping for the gym shirt that the girls need for school.

8:18 - I hear her music. When she plays it very loud she is in pain. It is a tape of love songs. The other day when I heard it I went in and asked her how she was feeling. I almost asked her to turn down the music so we could talk but I knew she needed it to help stop her pain. And I trusted her to turn it down when she was ready. We talked for maybe twenty seconds she started telling me what was wrong and then she turned the music down without me saying anything about it. I gave her a hug and she cried.

But now I don't feel close enough to her to go down and do the same thing. I feel colder. Less caring, less compassionate. More resentful. More judgmental. Still hurting from yesterday and the other times she has hurt me, killed my motivation, abandoned me.

So what do I do?

I wish it were so easy to just put my hurt feelings aside. My eyes are getting watery now. She is in so much pain each word from the songs downstairs remind me of her pain. Each note that rises up the three floors and enters through the window into my room. I wonder if she is playing it with a hope I will come down again. If she consciously knows it is a cry for help. But what if I go there and I know how much pain she is in and she doesn't know it. And I cry and she doesn't know what to do? What if I feel rejected when I am in pain myself?

Two needy people. Who will help the other? Can they somehow learn to help and not hurt each other? But where will Katy learn something like this? Not here in Peru. Not in this little sick town called Chiclayo. Not in any meditation camps.

How sad she didn't get a chance to get to know the people in that meditation camp. It is hard to believe someone would actually tell them not to talk to the other people for ten days or whatever it was. They could have learned so much from each other. So much about how they had all been invalidated and discouraged and poisoned and soul murdered in their familes. But no, they were taught to meditate. To try to stop thinking, stop feeling. But Katy still feels alone after her meditation camp, still feels suicidal. Has no more understanding of where her pain came from after being there for ten days than she had before she went. And has no more understanding of how to avoid poisoning her own daughters, who she clings to so desperately to try to feel less alone, yet who she is actually pushing farther and farther away from her. Or at the least creating an unhealthy "insecure attachment". She is creating insecurity in them, laying guilt trips on them, making them feel dependent on her. The last thing she wants is for them to feel secure and independent. She would feel 100 times more alone if they left her.

So as I have been writing the music has stopped. Now I hear people shouting downstairs. Maybe they are getting ready to eat breakfast again together. Go back to their routines. Talk about food, soccer, other people. Make jokes. Who knows.

So my question is, what do I do? Stay or leave? Invest more time in Katy? Buy one or two more computers? Pressure Marco to pay me for the van? Take it back from him and sell it myself or try again to get it fixed? Drive it slowly to Trujillo? Pay the other mechanic to fix it?

It was obvious that what she said hurt me yesterday. But she didn't come up and ask how I was feeling. She didn't sent Marco up. She didn't send MB up. She hasn't come up this morning. If I ask her why she didn't ask me how I was feeling either before she left or later in the day or if I tell her I feel uncared about she will get defensive. And this will hurt me even more. I will have to debate with her and try to convince her how I feel. It takes too much energy.

I need someone who asks me how I feel and who cares.

You might be thinking I should be able to just tell them, but it is not that easy for me. If you read more of my life's history you might understand this. Or if you read the journals of teenagers on teenopendiary you might understand it. But it would not be worth my time and energy to try to explain it to you. It is all there if you want to look for it. If you really want to understand things, you can find the answers if you look around, ask questions, pay attention. But if you don't have that much desire to understand you can just tell yourself that you understand and you can judge people like me. This is much easier to do than to actually search for real understanding. I have done it lots of times myself.

With Katy it is so hard to know what to do. She has such a good heart. And she has two smart, sensitive human beings in her control. She is damaging them, poisoning them, emotionally abusing them each day. She is using them to try to fill her own unmet emotional needs. But I can't judge her for this. Sarah will do the same thing one day if she has kids. In her own way. And would I judge Sarah when I know so well how she was poisoned?

So it seems we need something like a 12 step program, the first of which would be "We admit we have been emotionally poisoned." Or maybe "We accept....." since admit seems like some kind of admission of guilt. Interesting. Admission is also entrance into someplace. So we enter into the land of guilt?? And people "admit" themselves into mental hospitals. And you have to pay "admission" fees to go to concerts or basefall games. Seems we need a different word for these different things.

So I am feeling resentful that they have not invited me to breakfast. Yet I have twice left when they were eating. I have made it clear I don't want to be part of their group. What Katy could do is bring food up to me. Then I would feel a little more important, special. I think I am special, but not many people treat me as if I were. Katy said to me "you are important" in an impatient, disapproving, judgmental tone (which now triggers feelings of resentment from all the times I have been disapproved of, judged). She said this when I was telling her that since I have a need to feel important...But she interrupted me before I could even finish what I was saying.

so we can add that to the lists of reasons why it is not healthy or me to be around her. I need someone to LISTEN TO ME! Not interrupt me, not lecture to me.

When a person drowning they need someoen to help get them out of the water, not teach them Japonese. Or a better analogy or whatever it is would be "not hand them a brick, or hit them over the head with one."

Maybe when I want to kill myself I will go back to the people who have judged me, like my sister and Heather Drummond.

To understand this you would have to read what I wrote the other day about killing myself by drowning myself holding onto a rock or a bag of rocks. I think it was in March 30's writing.

Thinking of understanding reminds me of how little David Caruso understood me or even tried to. Another psychologist who didn't learn too much of practical value it seems. Wait, it is "practical" if you can make money from it. But what I meant was learning something that actually helps people. But let's clarify that some more. Let's say helps them with something that is really important, not just making more money or learning new tricks to avoid feelings. Like meditating and cognitive therapy. I think Bradshaw said something like cognitive therapy wasn't enough. I didn't get it at the time, but I do now.

11:05 I hear music again which I think is coming from Katy's room. I go out to look.. It is. She is standing in her doorway talking to Kiko and someone else. Then she starts laughing and hugging Kiko. This hurts so much I want to take a picture of it. Taking pictures helps me feel a little more in control of things which hurt me. It helps me learn from the pain because I can look at the scene and remember the details and analyze them later. Or something like that. I am not sure of all the reasons it helps me feel better, but it does help me feel better. Maybe it is also, in this case for example, so I can show people and explain to them what hurts me and why and more specifically in this case maybe some day Katy will see the photo and ask me about it and I can explain to her how much it hurt me that she was laughing and hugging someone else when I was in my room alone, still hurting from what she did the day before. It has been over 24 hours now and she hasn't asked me how I feel, hasn't come up to see if I am alive. Okay so that sounds dramatic maybe. But it hurts so much. All my life I have needed someone to ask me how I feel and to care. And that person hasn't existed. The people I needed were near me, but they didn't ask me and or they didn't care. First is to ask. Maybe. Or maybe first is to care and show you care in some way even if you can't say the words "how do you feel?"

If you can't say the words, maybe you are young and have never been taught such words, or maybe you are from another country and speak another language, or maybe you are old and you have never been taught such words. So in all of those cases, maybe you can't say "How do you feel?" but you can still show someone you care by going close to them and looking at them with a face that says "I see you are in pain and I care and I want to help." You can also reach out to touch them and at least offer your physical touch. Maybe they will accept it. Maybe they need it. Maybe it will mean the difference between life and death to them.

I can't cry in front of Cathy now I don't think. Or if I do I won't go to her for a hug. I wasn't afraid of her when I met her. She hadn't hurt me yet. But now I have learned how quickly, how easily, how skillfully she can hurt me, literally without even trying. So I am afraid. I saw a mother in her, the mother I didn't have, and she has the mothering instincts. But she was damaged, poisoned. So she can't be my mother. I don't have the energy to train her. To first of all deprogram all the negative programs she has had implanted in her. I don't have enough anti-venom in me to de-poison her. I need anti-venom from her. She has it but it is laced witjh poison. This is maybe the saddest thing. She does have it, but like water you need to drink which is toxic, if you are dying of thirst the very water you need so desperately can also kill you. You drink a little, it feels so good. But you go back for more and then you suddenly realize as you are drinking the water also contains poison. You try to spit it out, but it is too late. It has already entered your system.

When you are sick with food poisoning, your body knows what to do. It makes you throw up. But when your mind is poisoned, what do you do? I am afraid the mind doesn't know what to do. Perhaps with a million years more of evolution the mind will have some kind of a "purging" system. A woman who wrote me used this word - "purge" - she said her husband attacks her verbally (I don't know about physically). She said he is emotionally intelligent and she recognized him when she read my section on the dark side of emotional inteligence. So he tries to rid himself of the poison which was fed to him as a child and teenager. But this is years later. He is something like 50 years old. We need, the human body and mind needs, a system to expel the poison, the emotional poison, quickly.

What both frightens and drives me is that I know that we can teach children and teens how to expel this emotional poison.

So again I am faced with the question - what do I do? Do I leave? Do I stay? Do I try to hurt Katy? I notice that I wrote "Cathy" once. I have a sister named Cathy. I wonder if this was a Freudian slip. Katy is pronounced more like "Cotty" in Spanish. So why did I write "Cathy". Who knows.

Anyhow.. what do I do? Take my computer out of her room? I am afraid if I take it now she will sense the resentment I feel, which I don't want to feel, and she will feel hurt. She might feel punished and maybe I want to punish her. Do I? Do I want to punish David Caruso? Do I want him to feel pain? Yes, but not as punishment. Not really. More as a motivation to try to learn. David has choices in how he tries to stop his pain, if he is feeling any still from what I have written about him and what I still write from time to time. He can try to not think about it, he can try to explain it away by saying something like "that guy has problems". Or he can try to feel superior to me, he can try to judge me. He can also try to change the nature of his pain. By that I mean something like redirect it to a different part of his brain where it will not threaten him so much. For example, when he says "I regret inviting you to the workshop and to my house" this is a way of redirecting pain, I'd say. It still hurts to feel regret, but not as much as feeling the pain of my criticisms of him. Because when he says "I regret it" he is blaming me more than himself probably, or at least there is some kind of a division of "guilt." If we can say someone else is responsible for our pain, it might help us feel better, or this might also be just an illusion. A trick we try to play on ourselves which doesn't really work. I have said that accepting responsibility releases resentment. (Of course at the same time I am not accepting much responsibility for the pain I feel when I think about what happened between David and I, so feel free to call me a hypocrite. I don't want to think about that write now. I feel guilty and hypocritical and fraudulent even when I admit that, but it is true, so fuck it, I will say it. Yet I feel bad about it. I can't just say it and move on. I wish I could. ha ha. I am not laughing. I would like to laugh but I am not in a laughing mood right now. This is serious to me right now. god i miss sarah. she used to understand so quickly even when she couldn't see my face or hear my tone of voice. sarah could sense through the chat windows, as if she was looking at my soul not just my words when we chatted....

anyhow, i don't know where i was now or where i was going. i need a break.

ok. i took a short one. 30 seconds maybe. i swung my camera back and forth for a while. like u really care. ha ha. care.

care.

you know, a funny thing. i don't know how to say that word in spanish. after all the time i have been in south america. i don't know how to say "I need someone who cares how i feel"

i wish i were talking to daniela more often. every day would be nice. twice a day or more. she could tell me, if there is a way to say it. but i don't think there is quite the same way in spanish.

care.

i put it in the middle of the page to show how lonely the word is. like billy joel's song honesty.

which reminds me of elizabeth. did i show you her pictures? i have one on this page. and here is a file I started when I was in Jaen.