Coffee With A Side of Emotional Healing

For most of my young life into adulthood, I struggled to reconcile feeling abandoned by my mother because I desperately wanted to know why she left me.

I yearned to feel close to my mom, to know that she loved me, was proud of me, and that I was important to her. However, this wasn't easy since she left me with my great-grandmother when I was an infant.

I never understood why my mother chose to leave me. There had to be something severely wrong with me because all other mothers, you know, the ones on television, never left their little girls. No, ma'am. Florida Evans, Carol Brady, Clair Huxtable, and Vivian Banks never left their babies, no matter what.

I spent years trying to understand what horrible thing I did to cause my mother to leave me. To compensate, I looked for a mother in almost every woman I met. I suppose some of them sensed my craving for a mother's love and treated me with kindness, but that didn't soothe my soul or shake the ghost of my absent mother until I randomly met a woman at a local coffee shop. I couldn't know that she would forever change the trajectory of my life.

Although I was thriving in other areas, I held on to feeling hurt and abandoned by my mother's absence. I knew that I had to find a way to numb the pain or suppress it somehow because a life lived longing for someone who doesn't want you is agony. I got my wish when I met Betsy.

When Betsy came into my life, I was 36 years old. By then, I had served my country in the U.S. Army, married and divorced, and started my second entrepreneurial business while pursuing acting and modeling. It had been years since I had seen my mother. I was an adult. You'd think enough time had passed that I could stop missing my mommy—not quite.

After my divorce, I moved from North Port, FL, a rural-esque town in south Florida, to Sarasota, FL, a comparatively booming city. I had seemingly left the seclusion of small-town living with its dirt-paved roads and the loneliness of missing my mother for a fresh start.

I loved my new city! I moved into a quaint studio apartment/cottage in a historic, walkable neighborhood and quickly found Metro.

Metro became my favorite coffee shop and go-to casual hangout. The menu was eclectic enough without being pretentious, the coffee was on par with Starbucks, and along with a full bar, there were comfy chairs and sofas to lounge and people-watch.

Like many an afternoon, I found myself at Metro. Lunchtime was usually busy, which derailed me grabbing my usual sofa spot, so I opted for a bar stool. The owner, Betsy, came from the kitchen to serve me.

It wasn't unusual for Betsy to be out front and center with customers. Her hallmark was being friendly, approachable, and easygoing. I didn't know then that Betsy was also a retired golf champion and a psychotherapist.

Whenever I visited Metro, I'd often wave hello and share some light-hearted pleasantry with Besty, but why, on this day, did she take time away from the busy lunch crowd to talk to me? I couldn't tell you.

I'm a highly sensitive empath. I have a reasonably spot-on intuition about people and what they feel, even when they don't. I think it's safe to say that many counselors and therapists are sensitive empaths, too.

What would usually have been a casual hello turned into a slightly more candid conversation that ended with Betsy offering to take me on as a therapy patient over a cup of coffee.

I had been in therapy as a young adult, but I never felt comfortable with any doctor or therapist the way I did with Betsy. For one thing, Betsy would make herself comfortable during our sessions. She would kick off her shoes and fold her legs under herself in a chair or on the sofa, and she would talk to me, you know, like a real person and not like a patient.

I anticipated that Betsy would help me develop coping skills to manage my new life and responsibilities. Remember, I'd recently left an eight-year marriage, moved to another city, launched a business, and started newly found creative pursuits. Thankfully, Betsy recognized a more profound need.

Not long after starting therapy with Betsy, she asked me to do a visualization exercise to talk to my inner child.

Uhm, what?

Apparently, I needed to connect with my earliest memory of feeling abandoned by my mother, visualize myself at that age, and then bring my young self out for a chat as my adult self. Then, I was to talk to mini-me and explain that our mother's decision to leave had nothing to do with her.

Betsy explained that in my visualization, I should get down to mini-me's level, hug her, tell her that I loved her, that she was a good girl, that I was proud of her, and that she would grow up to become a beautiful woman.

I'm confident I've not experienced a more cleansing cry than I did after doing that exercise with Betsy. In one 45-minute session, I learned to give myself the love and acceptance I'd desperately wanted from my mom for so many years. I realized then that I could live a fulfilled life without ever understanding why my mother left me.

"...we have the power to change our stories. The inner narrative we cling to can be re-imaged, reshaped, and re-aligned for our greater good."

That one visualization exercise with Betsy also helped me realize that we have the power to change our stories. The inner narrative we cling to can be reimaged, reshaped, and realigned for our greater good.

I appreciate that my mother's reason for leaving me with my great-grandmother likely had nothing to do with me. She was sixteen when she got pregnant, and I can only imagine how difficult her life was as a young, newly married teenager.

As children, we don't rationalize reality. Instead, we react to perception, and whether right or wrong, that internalization causes deep, long-lasting trauma. Without the lessons I learned from Betsy, feeling abandoned by my mother would forever creep into my psyche, making me feel broken and unworthy. But I don't carry that burden anymore.

Of course, I still have moments when I wish things were different with my mother. I wish we could put the past behind us to have a relationship as the women we are today, but I can't make my mother want to be a part of my life. She made her choice, whatever her reasons.

I appreciate my grandmothers, great-grandmothers, aunts, great-aunts, cousins, and countless women friends who "raised" me, and I am eternally grateful they filled the void my mother left because their love and warmth helped shape the woman I am.

And thanks to Betsy, my little girl finally found healing.