Self-talking cure

Recently, by accident, the old wounds opened up. For a month I was miserable remembering how my mother tormented me and how cruelly my father, when I rebelled, rejected me.

How strange is our memory: it has been twelve years since then; six since I even remembered about it last; but now the wounds opened up and it was as if they had been cut only yesterday.

Strangely, what cured me -- quite suddenly -- was not to reflect on how undeserved it all was; and how decent I had been throughout; but the opposite: to reflect on my mother's good reasons for having treated me as she had. In some way, her love for me had been spurned, rejected, unrequited, disappointed: I had fled from her to Asia.

After all, I realize this now, I fled to Asia only in part to get away from America, but also, and perhaps mainly, to get away from my mother's demands on my time and emotions. I could argue all day, of course, that she had no business loving me as much -- or, to paraphrase a philosopher, wanting as much from me, which is, in fact, the same thing; that it was unreasonable of her to expect that I would put her above my own ambitions or my own lovers; etc. But there is no arguing with facts, and the facts are these: she did raise me expecting me to make up to her for the sacrifices she took for my sake unasked; and I refused.

Did she have the right to feel spurned? No. Had I asked her to make these sacrifices for me? No. Was I right to rebel against her demands. Absolutely.

But is it understandable that she would feel spurned?

Yes.

So the story isn't, in fact, what I had thought all these years it had been: that I'd loved my mother and she rejected me. It is the opposite: that I had rejected her long before that, long before she set out to hurt me and withdrew from me my father's love.

Realizing this suddenly parted the clouds. Not because I understood how she had felt, but because I convinced myself that it was me who did the ditching first.

The unexpected therapeutic effect of this realization showed me in stark relief how our psychology works: we don't really care to see ourselves as just -- there is actually no satisfaction in that; we just want to see ourselves as having dealt better than we got, justice be damned. We're not very different from baboons really.