Silencing a Mother’s Voice

And finding peace in stillness

Yesterday, July 3rd, was my mother’s birthday. If she were still alive she would have turned 88 years old.

There are so many stories out there from people who suffered mental, emotional and physical abuse at the hands of parents. Many of us go through much of our adult lives with the voices of those parents still echoing in our heads. After reading the article by Ann Litts on inner voices and narratives (The Things You Are) and especially after reading the discussion that followed that article I got a nudge to tell my story of how I dealt with one of those kinds of inner voices planted in our heads by a parent.

My mother suffered from a long list of psychological pathologies. To put it in laymen’s terms, she was an utter basket case. She constantly spewed forth abusive venom towards all four of her children as well as any other human who came within range. I longed with all my heart for the day when I could move out of the house and begin my own life free from her voice and abuse.

I left when I could and did not look back but sadly her voice followed me as it was stuck in my head. It happens to a lot of people. Simply leaving did not get rid of her voice in my noggin.

Many people turn to psychotherapy for help in quelling those parental voices echoing in their heads. And many people have received valuable help this way. Not me. I do not know why but I have always been a little skeptical of psychology.

Instead, I dived headlong into every non-religious spiritual practice I could find. I tried everything. I studied everything. I meditated, I did sweat-lodges, I did vision quests, I did past-life regression, I used countless affirmations, I performed mojo ceremonies and took divine substances, and I even walked barefoot over red hot burning coals (it’s easier than it sounds).

Just as with psychotherapy, it took many years of spiritual practice to come close to getting HER voice out of my head. As far as I can tell there is no overnight fix, whether through psychotherapy or anything else. HER voice was in my head and in my ears for the first 18 years of my life and it took longer than that to get it out.

A big difference between psychotherapy and the many spiritual practices I utilized over the years is that psychotherapy attempts to replace those abusive voices in our head with different voices; different voices that are more positive and affirming than the abusive voices in hopes that the new voices will drown out the abusive voices. Psychotherapy is about the retraining and re-scripting of our egos. Along with all those abusive voices in our heads, it is our egos that carry on most of the conversation in our noggins.

While psychotherapy attempts to replace bad mental conversation with good mental conversation, the best of the spiritual modalities attempt to replace ALL mental conversation, including the non-stop blabbering of the ego, with supreme divine SILENCE. It does not change the conversation. It ends it.

It is in this state of divine silent stillness with all the mental chitter chatter turned off that we can access something completely different. Instead of non-stop mental conversation we can find and access a state of surrender that opens us up to the Real Us and to the unconditional love that flows to us and through us from our Source. When this unconditional love is flowing through us unimpeded by conditioned mental thought patterns we are inundated by a force that renders all those conditioned mental thought patterns powerless.

And all of our actions and responses to life become free of those voices in our head. Instead we act and respond from the heart instead of the noggin. And we start breaking free from the mental shackles of the abuse we have experienced.

Unconditional love transforms all things!

I reacted to my mother’s horrific mental and emotional abuse by going as far away from her as I could and by not communicating with her. That silenced her actual physical voice but not the one in my head. While my life got better without her actual physical voice entering my ears her voice was still in my head as was the endless voices of my ego. In addition to their other functions, egos are our primary defense mechanism. We rely on our egos and, unfortunately, we also begin to identify our egos as who we are. The ego is our false identity; the UNREAL US.

Through the many spiritual practices I pursued I eventually over decades became an itty bitty, teeny tiny bit wiser (at least I like to think so). I realized that every human is at their very own point in their path of self-realization. We are not all at the same point of self-awareness. We are all on our own paths. How can I expect her to be at a higher level of self awareness than the level she was at in her life? Like everyone, she has to go through every step of her path, one step at a time. How can I condemn her for merely being at her current place in her own spiritual path? To expect otherwise is not fair and it only holds her in that place and keeps her from moving forward.

And that only holds us in our current place, preventing us from moving forward.

Although my mother and I were estranged for many years of my adult life there were many events (like the death of my father) that brought us back together for brief periods. I realized that she had not changed one iota, in fact she seemed to be getting worse. Meanwhile, I seemed to be changing a lot — at least in relation to how much she was not.

Over the years my mother’s voice in my head slowly dissipated. It would occasionally get triggered but I was much quicker in realizing that and thereby releasing it. I finally got to the point where I felt that I was well over 90% free of it.

My mother lived exclusively in her head. She never silenced her thoughts long enough to realize that there is anything else. She lived through her fears and phobias and manias and OCD and prejudices and hate and confusion over and over and over and over again. Eventually, her brain became seriously diseased. She became eaten up by her brain. She spent her last years in a mental health facility.

Then the phone call came saying that my mother had slipped into a coma and she was not expected to live for much longer. So I went to speak to her one last time.

I was the black sheep of the family. I was my mother’s greatest disappointment. I was the demon seed of her progeny. I was the one she fought with unrelentingly. I was the one she heaped the greatest amount of abuse upon. I was the outlet for all her hate and angst and disappointment and fear. Several different times we went years without ever speaking to each other.

How ironic it was that I turned out to be the very last human she ever spoke with.

Or should I say, spoke TO. The doctor told me that even though she was in a coma and could not speak that it has been clinically proven that coma patients can hear what everyone around them are saying. He suggested that I say whatever I needed to say to my mother before she died.

The irony got even more intense. I spent a couple of decades trying to get away from her actual physical voice then I spent a few decades trying to silence her voice in my head. And now she was lying in a hospital bed completely unable to speak. Her actual physical voice had finally gone totally silent!

And to my astonishment I realized that her voice in my head had also gone silent.

It was now my turn to speak.

I told her that I loved her and that I forgave her for every single solitary thing she ever did to me (and to others). I told her that I now realized that she was acting from the place she happened to be in her own personal development and that it was pointless to expect her to be any more evolved than she was.

I apologized for not being more evolved than I was; for not seeing her pain at the root of her outward abuse. She had lived a very stressful life. She spent her youth in Europe in the middle of War World II. She experienced horrific terrors and this left her mentally, spiritually and physically bruised. She had experienced the very same abuses that she dished out to others. I told her that her very harsh life was not in vain; that I really did understand and that I could finally sympathize and empathize with her. I told her that I could feel all her pain and that my heart wept for what she had gone through.

I apologized for all the grief I had given her and forgave her for all the grief she had given me. I then thanked her for all the abuse and grief she had given me because that served to make me stronger, much like a howling wind makes a tree stronger. I thanked her for pushing me onto the unconventional path I ended up following, even if she was not aware that is what she was doing. I reminded her that before either of us came into these lives this is what we agreed upon for our mutual benefit. Our agreement was to brutally challenge each other in order to help each other grow.

I told her that it did not matter to me if she ever forgave me for being such a horrible offspring. But I forgave her completely for being such a horrible mother. And I told her that the most important thing was that she forgave herself for everything in her life that she felt bad about. She needed to forgive herself and all others and let go.

I told her that it was time to let go and surrender. It was time to stop clinging and holding on to things. I told her that I would try to do the same. I told her that she had plenty of exciting adventures ahead of her; new lives with new experiences. I told her that I would let go if she would let go. It was time to move into those new things.

I finished my final talk with her with a simple, I love you.

Ten minutes later she died.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved. My Latest Stuff — My Complete Archive Index