Dear Ilyana,

good to hear from you. It’s interesting and may even be a good sign that you had somewhat of a manic episode, where you’ve livened up and started having romantic feelings. This hasn’t happened since your son was born, so perhaps it means something positive. It may mean you’re feeling hope again that things can be different in your life:

it also reminded me what it feels like when someone actually likes you and wants to talk to you. If I am going to be in a relationship, I need to feel that way sometimes, and I can see that that is not an unreasonable desire.

You’re also aware of your deeper need:

I miss feeling seen and valued and like someone actually has a bit of faith in me.

You’ve never received that from your mother – she was so consumed with hating your father that she sacrificed your emotional well-being for that. She sacrificed her own health too. For a long time during childhood, you believed your father rejected you and doesn’t want to have anything to do with you. You felt unlovable and unworthy. No wonder you have the need to feel loved and seen and valued. During the depressive phase, I guess you give up the hope that this would ever be possible, and during the manic phase, it seems this hope reawakens.

You say your husband is emotionally unresponsive, and yet you married him. Could it be because at least he wasn’t so obsessed with hating other people like your mother was? Perhaps his lack of emotions felt better than having strong negative emotions all the time, like your mother did?

It could be that your choice of husband was a reaction to your mother, a way to protect yourself from emotional abuse. But it’s not good enough, because you don’t want to live without emotional expression altogether.

The solution would be the same that we’ve talked about in the beginning of this thread – to give yourself the love and appreciation you’re hoping to get from others. Easier said than done, I know… What are you working on in your therapy at the moment? How are you progressing with self-love and self-compassion?

Dear Felix,

I am glad that you’re aware of the two parts inside of you – one that is overthinking and keeps you stuck in a loop, and the other who wants to make progress and advance.

I even tried learning to draw cartoons on weekends to feel some achievement. And yeah it felt good.

That’s great, I am happy for you! Just keep trying out new things, things that are fun and that you enjoy. Keep stretching yourself and your limits, every day a little bit. It doesn’t have to be some big accomplishment, but small things.

The only thing i can do right now is by not posting anything on instagram, i even track my record to feel calmer….. i’ve achieved 18 days without posting and every time i see that record i feel very calm.

Even that is an achievement, Felix. You haven’t been posting for 18 days, you’re sort of exercising your willpower not to post. It’s like flexing a muscle 🙂 And it makes you feel good and calm… it’s a good strategy, I believe.

Actually the past mistakes that i’m only thinking right now is about that instagram stories, i used to post stuffs that end up embarrassing myself…. i did that only to attract that girl (the girl who confesses to me but told me not to wait for her)…. and now after failing to get her….. my brain feels that i did something wrong….. that im embarrassing myself to 300 people who viewed my instagram stories only to get her attention…. and in the end, it didnt work out with her. Like i lost on both sides.

There are two parts activated in you when you reflect upon this story: one is the healthy part who sees that your behavior (bragging) wasn’t the best, since it was motivated by an unmet need for love and approval, specially for being liked by that girl. It’s a self-reflective part, who says “this was inappropriate but I didn’t know better at the time. So I forgive myself. From now on, I’ll try to do better.” This is the part who wants to make progress, learn from his mistakes, and grow as a person. This is also the part who wants to draw cartoons, I believe 🙂

And then there’s another part, who uses whatever “unsettled problem” you have to keep you stuck in a mental loop, obsessively thinking about it. As I said, I believe this part is protecting you from potential failure, by preventing you from trying anything new. It’s an internal saboteur.

When you hear its voice, you can notice to yourself: “Ah, this is the protector. He’d like me to stay stuck because he’s afraid I am a failure. He thinks he’s protecting me, but he’s in fact holding me back. When I listen to him, I am paralyzed and unable to move on. I am accusing myself all the time and my thoughts drive me crazy. I don’t want that any more. I want to advance and thrive, I want to try out new things. Therefore I am choosing not to listen to this paralyzing voice at this moment. I am choosing to experience something new. I am making a space in my mind and heart for a new experience. I am open to a new experience.”

This is just a suggestion, you can use your own words of course. If you feel like trying it, let me know how it went…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Tee.

Dear Javier,

I am sorry about your mother. You said earlier she is blaming herself, and that’s one of the reasons why she had a mental breakdown:

She’s feeling guilty and is blaming herself. I’m ruining her. I just want to hug her and ask for forgiveness and tell her how much I love her.

Did she tell you why she’s blaming herself? Because after all, she is responsible for allowing the domestic abuse to happen for the first 5 years of your life. She allowed it due to her own weaknesses, and the result is her deeply wounded son. I am not saying she is the only one to blame – far from that – but simply that there is a basis for that guilt, in my opinion.

If you see her entirely as a victim, and yourself as a villain who ruined her life, you’re not helping yourself, neither are you helping your mother. Can you accept that you’re not responsible for your mother’s unhappiness, and that it started much earlier than you were even born?

And I think this is so beautiful and a testament to your healing:

Now, I say that “home is within me; it is all the places, people, and memories I have made across the world.”

You can now see it from a different perspective, appreciating what you had and the deep connections you’ve made, rather than mourning what you’ve “lost”. Truly precious…

Dear Jack,

I accept they’re sleeping together, I accept they’re going out on dates, and there’s nothing I can nor will do about it, because at the end of the day, it’s her choice whether she wants to leave him or not.

I’m actually half-expecting they’ll stick together, and she’ll probably tell me to back off – which I will.

Other than all that, there’s nothing else I can do.

You seem to leave all the decisions to her – whether she wants to stay with her boyfriend and break it off with you, whether she decides to keep cheating on him once he leaves, or whatever other arrangement she may choose. It’s all on her, and “there’s nothing else you can do”.

In reality, you could do a lot of things, specially since you say you’re just playing it cool, but in fact it’s hard for you. Which means you do have feelings for her, you’re not just looking for something casual, even if that’s what you told her.

One problem, as I see it, is that you don’t want to appear vulnerable, so you’re pretending it’s fine with you, whatever she chooses. But what would happen if you’d actually show that it’s not the same for you? What would happen if you’d tell her to choose between the two of you, or you can’t be with her?

So what on Earth does she want?

What do you want, Jack?

Dear Ben,

my relationship with my parents is/was confusing.

Perhaps a part of the confusion is that they never fought, at least not in front of you, but once they had a fight, it resulted in a nasty divorce:

My parents divorced, loudly and hatefully, when I was a child. It’s something I’ve never faced down or fully processed.

The first time I saw them fight, it resulted in divorce. I don’t know what to make of any of this.

It seems you didn’t really form an emotional bond with either of your parents. It’s not a child’s fault, but the parents’ fault. It’s like you observe your parents from the outside, almost like two strangers, but don’t have any emotions towards them. You’re not angry or resentful – that’s not the reason why you never reached out to your father (or vice versa) or didn’t go to his funeral. Rather, it seems like the lack of emotional bonding.

Your father felt like a stranger to you. He probably showed minimal interest in you, he was physically present but emotionally absent. You said he drank a lot of beer – so he was probably a drunk already then, but a functional drunk – he went to work every day. But beyond that, he seems not to have been involved much in family life, nor in your upbringing. He had a relationship with the bottle, it seems, and there didn’t remain any interest in you.

Your mother was passive aggressive, you say. She didn’t dare to challenge his drinking openly, but would do “mean things” to him while he fell asleep drunk in front of the TV. If you never saw them fight, it means your mother must have suppressed her anger for 14 years, until she couldn’t any more. Maybe she disassociated from her pain, but she disassociated from you too? Maybe that’s why you couldn’t form a bond with her either?

When did she become religious fundamentalist? After the divorce? Because it seems that a “righteous” person wouldn’t tolerate a drunk and useless husband, unless she was taught to be obedient and look away?

As anita says, it seems there was a lot of emptiness, a lot of emotional neglect going on. Would you say this is true? Emotional neglect can be as devastating as emotional abuse (“sin” of omission vs commission…). Perhaps that’s why you’re confused, because there was no direct abuse, no one yelling at you and beating you up, and yet it felt abusive and hurtful, so much so that your “cup” was filled to 95% already in childhood. Does this sound true to you?

Dear Javier,

the neurotransmitter examination has basically proven that your stress level is very high, while the “feel good” hormones are very low. It’s good that you’ve been prescribed a medication and a dietary supplement to improve that. What about liver inflammation – will you be getting some medication for that?

I like how you sound in your reply to Sarah – much more positive than before:

But first and foremost, I’m working on myself, because I have felt dead inside for a long while, and it’s unbearable

You have felt dead inside, but it seems you’re open to changing that, to start on the healing journey, step by step.

I need to “heal” myself, I need to conquer all my fears and get rid of my demons. I’m not responsible for my mother’s pain and sorrows, but I can try to ease it.

Just take it slowly, you don’t need to conquer all your fears, at least not immediately. But you can be aware that some of your fears (of dying, of your mother dying) have to do with your childhood trauma, and so as you work on that, your fears will subside too.

Also, as I said, try to “unblend” from the helpless and desperate part (it seems you’ve managed to do it in your last two posts). Whenever your mind wants to go into the old program of “I feel dead inside. I feel useless and full of fears. Nothing makes sense. It’s all my fault.” — tell yourself that this is just one part of you. But it’s not the entirety of who you are. The other part wants to heal and get unstuck, wants to experience more than the dark hole that you’ve suffered from so far. And most importantly – this other part is capable of healing, of filling the dark hole with love, of feeling joy in life again!

We had a “coping” session, where all incidents from my childhood were addressed and all thoughts and feelings were noted down and listed. For each negative incident, I had to note down a positive incident. This session was to remind me that not everything from my past was negative and awful and to remind and feed my subconscious mind with positive memories.

It’s good that you remembered that not everything in your childhood was negative. Last time you posted, you said that because of that session (I believe you meant that one?), you’re stuck in the past and are missing everyone from the past – basically, that remembering good moments from your childhood only caused you more pain. But I hope that was just temporary, and that you can cherish those positive experiences without them causing an even bigger pain. Try to remember the positive experiences as truly positive and be grateful for them, rather than regretting that you’re not young any more, thereby annulling the positive experience and adding it to the negative “bunch”.

By this week, I will start doing breathing exercises and mindfullness.

That’s great. Start gently, don’t force yourself. And please post how it is going, or whenever you feel you need some encouragement. I too am praying and rooting for you.