Dear Gaia:

I agree: your suffering doesn’t make sense. My suffering at your age and before your age… and after didn’t make sense either in that there was no purpose to it. It wasn’t right or just. It shouldn’t have been. It didn’t make my life better, didn’t teach me anything.

I too felt like an alien. I thought everyone else was normal and I was abnormal, a weird thing, something wrong, strange.

I didn’t know what I was, other than that I was something bizarre and unacceptable. I tried to be somebody else and I escaped best I could into day dreaming and make believe, but I was stuck being what I believed was an undesirable thing, that thing looking back at me in the mirror.

Will you tell me more about your home life, your experience at home, with your parent/s?

anita

Dear Gaia:

I can relate to having an “extra-sensitive and somewhat victimist” mother.  Will you tell me how she expressed that extra sensitivity and victimist attitude (it will be interesting to compare your experience with that to mine, which I will share with you,  if you’d like)

anita

Dear  Gaia:

She was or is easily offended by you as well, correct? By others and by you?

anita

Dear Gaia:

My mother used to be easily offended by me. It made me feel very badly. Because I loved her so very much and when she told me I made her sad, when she let me know I made her suffer, I felt terrible. I did not intend to make her suffer. I wanted her happy more than anything.

It made me feel that I was a bad little person, to hurt my own mother. I was afraid to hurt her again, afraid, anxious.

anita

Dear Gaia:

Things are changing for me, still in the process of changing. The change for me started in my first good psychotherapy seven years ago. That was only the beginning. I didn’t know a lot of things then that I know now. And tomorrow I will know something I don’t know now.

I will explain a bit: I was a very anxious child, had OCD very early in life and that was very difficult to have, to do all those rituals, all day long, it seems. I felt very guilty for causing my mother great suffering. I didn’t know then, but I know now, looking back that I believed I was a bad person. Also, inadequate and very unacceptable, the freak in a world of normal people. I didn’t know what choices to make when I was your age, before and after. Had no idea what was authentic for me, how to be.

Now I know I was not born abnormal and there was nothing wrong with me. I now know that the abnormal things about me, the OCD for one (I don’t think I qualify for the diagnosis anymore), was not something I was born to have, some fault or freakiness, but a consequence of growing up with a very distressing mother. A mother is a very powerful being for a child.

Let me know if you want me to share more, and if so, what would that be.

anita

* didn’t reflect under Topics

Dear Gaia:

“Others do effortlessly”- it only seems like it. You only know of your thoughts 24/7 (when not in a dreamless sleep, that is), you know your struggles. You see others, you don’t “hear” their thoughts, experiencing their feelings, when they are alone, when they close their eyes at night or wake up in the morning, and all in between. You see them smile, act confidently perhaps, and you think they are always like that, correct? As if their thoughts are always.. proper, or right. Not the case.

Do you believe then, having read your recent post, that your problems originated at 14, not before, and in the context of relationships with peers, not at home, in the relationships with your parent/s?

anita

Dear Gaia:

It makes sense that problems in teen years exacerbated problems from before. To make sense of your suffering (the title of your thread is “my suffering doesn’t make sense”), that is, to understand your suffering so to feel better in life and to live a better life, one that feels better and one in which you make effective, authentic choices, better understand your suffering.

Without understanding, and then learning what to do, day after day, how to manage your emotions and sensibly control and choose your behaviors, life will continue to not make sense.

You wrote that you tried to help yourself and let yourself down. You need help from the outside, such as psychotherapy, so to understand and learn. At least, start you in that process.

You also wrote that you are a joke, that your life is a joke. I am sure that you are not a joke and that your life is not a joke. Misunderstood, or not understood yet, yes, but not a j0ke. Your suffering is real and not at all funny or entertaining, not to me, not in any way, shape or form.

anita