Dear Ilyana:

I hope that you do experience a supportive community here. You shared in both threads that you were diagnosed with a bipolar disorder at 26, married at 34 to a man who does not get you, a man who gets angry often, is unempathetic and does not support you emotionally, and gave birth to your only child at 35. It was a traumatic birth during which you almost died. Because of that traumatic experience, you have been depressed ever since, did not bond well with your son, and your relationships with your son and with your husband are strained.

In the last few years, you’ve been having “serious cognitive problems- memory, concentration, and comprehension”. This is devastating to you because you’ve always thought of yourself as an intellectual, and you teach philosophy. An MRI did not reveal a physical cause for the cognitive problems.

You “drink too much, smoke cigarettes and weed.. have poor eating habits and get almost no exercise.. feel like crap most of the time, both physically and emotionally… it feels like I am at the bottom of an immense mountain, and I have no idea how to get up it. Often times I feel like I want to die, like no one loves me, and  like I am doomed to be miserable”, “I feel so alone so much of the time… I don’t know how much longer I can live with feeling as alone as I do”.

“I just wanted to share and see if others have gone through anything similar”- I experienced (and still do, but to a way lesser extent) the serious cognitive problems that you mentioned: memory, concentration and comprehension beginning in childhood. The reason: I was anxious, depressed and feeling very much alone. My understanding now is that without adequate, quality social interactions with others, our cognitive abilities deteriorate. Born as social animals, born to need others, we literally can’t think straight when alone for too long.

You mentioned having bad habits. Clearly, you need to form a new, good habit, such as exercising. Being the habitual, once you form this new habit, it will be difficult to change it back to not exercising. Best would be if you found a way to exercise around other people, such as in a gym. But because of Covid, I am guessing gyms are not open where you live?

anita

Dear Ilyana,

you had a very difficult childhood, with an extreme pain of missing your father, whereas your mother purposefully deprived you of your father’s love and deceived you to believe that he doesn’t love you and doesn’t care about you. Your mother caused this pain in you, which she could have easily prevented, but due to her own anger and disappointment in her husband, she chose to keep you suffering. Her self-interest was more important than your well-being, than your legitimate needs for your father’s love. In a way, she sacrificed you due to her own blindness and stubbornness.

In such a constellation, it’s no wonder that you developed intense self-hatred and never felt worthy of love and acceptance. Your needs were denied, your pain was ignored, and “everyone laughed off your fears, especially of being murdered or kidnapped”. It’s only natural that a child whose feelings were denied and ridiculed would develop all sorts of fears, which then you needed to cope with alone, because your mother wasn’t supportive, on the contrary she was one of the reasons you had those fears in the first place.

Dear Ilyana, what you’ve experienced is severe emotional abuse at the hands of your mother, and it’s no wonder your childhood was such a painful, terrifying, hopeless experience. When you were a teenager, you mother gave you another blow – she went back to school and abandoned you emotionally, only disciplining you when you did something wrong. At the tender teenage years, you were left alone, again. Now it wasn’t abuse, but it was neglect.

I assume by that time you started developing problems in your behavior (you say “and I did do wrong stuff worthy of discipline“), to the point of needing therapy. She sent you to therapy and I guess she blamed you all along for your bad behavior, not realizing how her bad parenting created it.

Within you lives a very hurt and deprived inner child, Ilyana. She’s been through a lot and she needs to be finally embraced, protected, soothed, told that she matters, that her feelings matter, that her needs are valid, that she’s not ridiculous, but a beautiful, lovable, precious little girl. It wasn’t her fault that her mother abused her, none of what happened was her fault. You need to know that. And there is hope, Ilyana, because once you start attending to that little girl, your experience of life and of yourself will change. Amidst a dry desert, small, tender buds will start appearing, the buds of new life…

What’s with your father, Ilyana? Has be passed away too? Did you have a chance to have some sort of closing with him?

Dear llyana:

First, a time line: at 3, your father left your home, at 10 or 11, you had contact with him again, at 19 your mother died, at 26 you were diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder, at 34 you got married, at 35 you experienced a very traumatic birth and have been depressed since (no real mood swings for several years).

As a child your cognitive abilities suffered (“did poorly in school… I was not a good student, and compared myself with others who seemed to effortlessly write good essays and do well on tests”), then improved greatly at university (“did really well in university”), but declined in the last year or so (“For the last year or so I have been having serious cognitive problems- memory, concentration, and comprehension”).

Currently, you are 44, married for 10 years with a 9 year old son, experiencing lack of bonding with son and strained relationships with son and with husband. You practice poor eating habits, hardly exercise, drink too much alcohol, and smoke cigarettes and weed. You teach philosophy.

As a child (and still, perhaps), you hated the color of your hair and eyes, the texture of your hair, your height, you felt dumb, not normal, not like others, not fitting in (“I wanted to think like normal kids and fit in socially”).

“My whole life I have hated myself… I don’t remember a time when I didn’t hate myself”, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to love and accept myself. It’s such a foreign concept”.

Hate, Merriam Webster definition: intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.

I looked for the origin of your hate toward yourself in the little that you shared about your childhood, and I think I found it at the bottom of a bucket: “When she had cancer and was going through chemo, she would puke in a bucket with his picture super-imposed on a cancer cell in the bottom of it”.

About your mother’s anger: “Her anger toward him was incredibly profound… the anger at him was sometimes acted out on me”, “My mom would tell me we were better off without him, that she had given him an out and he’d taken it”-

– he, your father, took the Out and got to live away from your mother’s anger, but you were In, living with her and her anger.

You did poorly in school, while In with your mother, but after she died, when you were 19, you got your Out and your cognitive abilities greatly improved.

Wikipedia on Anger: “A person experiencing anger will often experience physical effects, such as increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and increased levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline”- adrenaline is also released when scared, and when experiencing manic episodes. Growing up threatened by her anger caused your body to experience an ongoing, chronic and damaging hormonal and neural arousal aka stress.

help guide. org/ stress symptoms, signs and causes, reads: “When you feel threatened, your nervous system responds by releasing a flood of stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which rouse the body for emergency action. Your heart pounds faster, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, and your senses become sharper…

“the common warning signs and symptoms of stress overload, Cognitive symptoms: Memory problems, Inability to concentrate, Poor judgment, Seeing only the negative, Anxious or racing thoughts, Constant worrying. Emotional symptoms: Depression or general unhappiness, Anxiety and agitation, Moodiness, irritability, or anger, Feeling overwhelmed, Loneliness and isolation, Other mental or emotional health problems, Physical symptoms. Behavioral symptoms: Eating more or less, Sleeping too much or too little, Withdrawing from others, Procrastinating or neglecting responsibilities, Using alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs to relax, Nervous habits (e.g. nail biting, pacing)”.

I am sure that you can see a whole lot of your state of mind and life in this quote. I have no doubt that the first thing you need to do is to lower your stress level/ undo your chronic neural and hormonal arousal and overload. This will take a lot of time, practice and patience because this overload is your body’s physical and chemical habit that has existed for decades.. The terms for this kind of practice in psychotherapy are Emotional Regulation and (incorporated into therapy later), Mindfulness.

The practice of emotional regulation skills and mindfulness will greatly improve your cognitive function, and it will make it possible for you to eliminate some, if not all of your harmful habits, with time.

“It feels like I am at the bottom of an immense mountain, and I have no idea how to get up”- start with the practice of emotional regulation skills/ mindfulness. We can talk more about it later, if you want.

Your mother was very angry at your father at the end of her life, 16 years after your father left the home. That’s a whole lot of anger for too long. Figuratively, throughout your childhood, she was looking at the bottom of that bucket, not at you. She did not see you. How did it feel to live with a mother who did not see you: “like crap most of the time.. like I want to die, like no  one loves me, and like I am doomed to be miserable”.

You wrote regarding the responses you got on your thread: “It feels good to be seen, even if only virtually”. You still need to be seen.

“I want a second chance at a happy life. I can see it, but it’s on the other side of that mountain I don’t know how to climb.. But there are just so many of them that need taking”-

– After enough progress in your practice of emotional regulation and mindfulness, you will become accustomed to the slow pace of healing, to the principle of one step, one day at a time, and to the fact that it is not going to be a complete healing.

You mentioned that you teach philosophy. I looked up Socrates quotes that may be relevant to you quest:

Regarding you hating yourself, finding it therefore the hardest to love yourself: “Those who are hardest to love need it the most”.

Regarding the process of healing that requires forming new habits in addition to examining the past: “The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new”.

*Following writing the above, I noticed that you posted half an hour ago, answering TeaK’s questions (but addressing the post to me, by mistake perhaps). None of what you posted in your most recent post changes what I wrote above.

anita