Book: unloved daughter

How to get rid of a hole in the heart? By changing your behavior and focus of attention, comprehending your own experience, you change your attitude towards it, and it becomes smaller. I do not believe that it can be got rid of - I think I will feel it all my life - but I can assure you that I perceive it differently than before. It was filled with my love for other people and their love for me, places dear to me, books and words that softened me, the sound of the ocean, the smell of freshly plowed land, the beauty of flowers, the laughter of my daughter - I did not expect this. I perceive this emptiness in my heart differently because I deeply understood its impact on me and accepted the woman I have become, the child and girl I once was.

Acceptance does not mean forgiveness, finding explanations, denying what happened or erasing it from memory. It means saying to yourself: “What was, was, and all this concerns her, not me. I can't change her, only myself."

You cannot change the factual side of your life. However, there is a productive approach: to analyze your behavior in the past and understand how childhood experiences guided your choice of actions and people. If you do this objectively, without falling into the usual self-criticism and self-flagellation, you can become the mistress of your own destiny.

Have you noticed how easy it is to overlook the familiar around you? You stop seeing a pile of shoes at the front door if it's always piled up there. The eye no longer clings to clothes piled on a sports simulator. These are everyday examples of how clutter becomes the “norm” for us. If you grow up in a home where toxic behavior is practiced - derogatory remarks, silent treatment, ridicule, because of which you feel like a nonentity - then you get so used to it that your consciousness stops noticing it. The habit continues into adulthood.

It's hard to believe the truth: under the surface gloss and success hides a little girl, still yearning for the mother she deserved.

In psychology, there is an idea that "evil is stronger than good." This means that negative events have a much more important and long-term impact than positive ones, although there are many more days and years in our life that are generally good. Be aware of how much you remember an unpleasant encounter or traumatic event, and compare it to remembering a day when nothing bad happened. It's the bad moments that stick in my memory. Long after the impressions of a vacation at sea have faded, we remember the terrible return flight, the noisy drunk neighbor and the loss of luggage.