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My Mother and My Emotional Bank Account
My mother and my EBA - emotional bank account. I have to keep my mother away from my EBA. She will steal money from it, then deny she took it, then accuse me of taking it, thereby stealing more. I don't doubt that my mother loves me. But she needed me too much. She needed all of us too much. She still needs us too much. So she steals from our EBA's. She is like a drug addict who steals to feed her habit. When she denies my perception of something she steals from my EBA. When she labels me, she steals because I need to feel understood and when someone labels me, I don't feel understood. If she labels me as "selfish" for example, I wonder if I actually am selfish. (Note: this was written before I thought more about the word "selfish") Now I see that almost everything my mother does, she does to try to fill one or more of her unmet emotional needs. Whatever she says to me, it is an attempt to fill one of her own emotional needs. Whatever my mother wishes for me or wants me to do, it is an attempt to fill one of her own UEN's or unmet emotional needs. Looking at it this way helps me understand a lot. It helps me understand I have to stay away from her, as I have to stay away from a drug addict who has already come into my room and taken things they can sell so they can buy drugs. I can love my mother or the drug addict, but I have to protect my things, if they are things I really need. S. Hein (Originally written in 2006) -- |
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More about my own mother...
My mother loves me. I really don't doubt that.
But she has needs which conflict with mine. She literally would
come into my home and rearrange things, for example. She could
not accept that I would put a certain bowl in a certain place or
do things a certain way with the food in my refrigerator. So she
would have this insatiable need to change things. If I protested
she would be likely to feel defensive, then turn it around
somehow. Fortunately it has been a long time since I saw her and
since she came to visit me in a place where I was living so I
don't have too many specific examples. But I can remember one
time clearly that she came to visit me in Dallas and after she
left I found a few things in different places in my kitchen.
Instead of her asking me where to put things, she just put them
where she wanted to.
Now I am afraid some people might say
"This is a small thing and blah blah blah," but when
you have enough small drops of water, you can drown. And my
mother almost killed me emotionally, one drop at a time.
Some people have accused me, especially when I wrote my book
and when I first started writing on the web of hating my mother.
This shows how little they understood the situation. They
understood it just enough to use it to try to fill one of their
own unmet emotional needs. They might believe that one must
always "love" and therefore accept unconditionally,
one's mother. They might need to believe this because they were
told it as a child by their own mother or father, who in turn was
trying to fill a need not to feel abandoned later by that child.
My mother actually told me once "You can't leave your
family." But I did. I keep in touch via email a little but I
have not seen any of them in around five years or so. They would
all steal from my EBA. If they supported me they would read my
website and write me things like "I really admire what you
are doing" or "Your idea to do so and so is really
good. Good luck with it. Let me know how I can help."
One sister is a clinical psychologist, another is a counselor.
Yet I
feel sure neither has told anyone about eqi.org. I am not even
sure if
my sister with the PhD in psychology has seen it. I wouldn't show
it to her
now because she believes in using anti-depressant medicine and
believes in
the idea of "mental illnesses" when I would say the
cause is abuse of one sort
or another.