Dear Sofioula,

what you said about the conditions of your birth could be potentially important:

“we had to fight together to stay alive at my birth, because she had complications that could kill us both. Maybe that was imprinted in my subconscious”

It’s possible, because there is such a thing as body or implicit memory, where we don’t remember the situation since we were too little to remember, but our body and our nervous system does. That, coupled with the fact that your mother later told you about the event, might have formed an image in your mind, that you’re somehow responsible for your mother’s life, for her survival.

You later agreed to adopt her submissive style, as she was pleading with you not to upset your father with any problems – so not to make him angry. If your mother pleads with you to stay silent, and you have an unconscious belief that your rebelling might not only upset her, but endanger her life – then of course, you’d want to stay silent. In other words, if you believe that you raising your voice might literally kill her – it’s a very strong incentive for you to stay silent and accept all the injustice and mistreatment and wrongdoings against yourself. Because your mother’s life is more important.

If this is the case, you’d need to accept that your speaking up and protecting yourself from abuse will not endanger your mother. You setting healthy boundaries isn’t dangerous for her whatsoever, but it’s vital for you to have a healthy life.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear soma,

so if I understand correctly, your parents don’t pressure you to choose a particular university, or a particular field, they just want you to choose a good uni, is that right? And you want that too, so that you can have a life and career abroad. Is that correct? What is it about the university choice that is making you uneasy and that you’re unsure about – is it the field (e.g. science or art, engineering or medicine or law, etc), or something else? Are you afraid you’re not good enough and won’t be able to enroll a particular uni, or won’t be able to perform well later? Try to list all the expectations and fears/dilemmas about the uni, and see what the biggest fear is.

I am sorry about your father being a volatile factor in your life. How is he manipulating you? I understand he’s not living with you and your mother at the moment – is that right?

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear Maven,

I’m relatively new to this forum and have just now read your thread. How are you doing at the moment?

I do hope your physical symptoms were just temporary. Sometimes a high heart rate may be a result of a panic attack or anxiety. Have you been to a doctor since?

The marijuana was also a core part of the healing process too, as strange as that sounds. It felt as if getting high would activate an old bridge between the left and right hemispheres of my brain, as I was suddenly experiencing a flood of different emotions that I never noticed while sober. Even simple things like worrying about my job, feeling accomplished, worried about what I said to someone, or my unhappiness with my then girlfriend – all of that was revealed to me while high. I suddenly had to acknowledge long held emotions that I was never consciously aware of sober. My emotional flashbacks only ever occurred while high.

From what you’ve shared about your healing with the help of marijuana, it appears to me that marijuana did indeed help you feel a range of emotions, which you weren’t able to feel before. You probably have the tendency to suppress your emotions, and marijuana helped you unlock those stifled emotions. However, I don’t think that you actually healed and processed your painful memories while being high, even though you believe you did:

Crying and reconnecting with my inner-self happened while high. I was able to process a lot of painful memories and realizations while high.

I don’t think it’s possible to properly process emotional wounds while high, because in order to heal, we need to be in touch with our wounded inner child, as well as our inner good parent (the opposite of the inner critic), and then put those two – the inner child and the inner parent into a dialogue. I don’t think this is possible while being high.

My guess is that you might have applied a shortcut to healing, and I get this impression because of this what you’ve said:

“I’m in the process of reframing my past traumas from specifically targeting me (why me?) to understanding that I am just a node in a complex casual web of traumas being spread from individual to individual.”

It’s true that trauma is trans-generational, and that we shouldn’t be stuck in the victim mentality (“why me?”). However if you generalize and diffuse your own experience, saying “trauma happens to everyone, not just to me”, and you don’t pay a closer look to your own particular trauma, in which particular individuals (your parents or care-takers) took part, you can’t really heal. So when you say that trauma is spread from individual to individual, yes it’s true, but it doesn’t spread among random individuals, but within families. And it’s caused by the child being physically or emotionally abused or neglected by its parents or care-takers. So a very concrete person (or persons) cause us trauma, and we need to process this very particular trauma (or traumas) in order to heal.

From the way you’ve described it, this might not have happened completely for you. You might have jumped from feeling a lot of emotions and having certain flashbacks to sort of processing it all in one fell swoop, which isn’t how healing happens. That would explain why you were still feeling a lack of joy and pleasure, and experienced depression again, even though you’ve accomplished a lot on your healing journey in a relatively short amount of time.

Dear Ilyana,

you’re very welcome.

I would really love to find a way to be nicer to myself. It just hurts so much to be always finding fault with myself.

What can help you to be gentler with yourself is to remember that there’s a wounded inner child in you, and when you’re judgmental with yourself, you’re actually judging and condemning her. When the child is in pain, she doesn’t need your scolding but your soothing and compassion. This helped me a lot to develop self-compassion and tone down my harsh inner critic.

I have had lots of therapy before, but this therapist seems to have a very different approach, which is more focused on healing than insight.

I’ve had experience with body-oriented therapy too, and it definitely helps to process emotions and create a new emotional and bodily experience, rather than just staying in my head. Because we may know and understand everything, all the reasons for our trauma, but still be unable to change our behavior. That’s usually because the inner child – who is stuck in the past, in a particular emotional wound – needs to be healed first. For that, we need to get in touch with our inner child and give it a corrective emotional experience, which helps her get unstuck.

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 Peace,

it’s so good to hear from you! And so good that you decided to focus on your studies and leave your boyfriend. He unfortunately was one of those people who was good at telling you nice words, things you like to hear and that you crave for, but his actions actually showed his true character. Now it would be the best if you’d stay away from men for a while, and focus on your studies and on yourself, your own healing.

You’ve already made the first step, and that’s the awareness of the problem: you’re aware why you’re attracted to men who flatter you and show interest in you – and that’s because you were emotionally neglected as a child. You felt all alone, abandoned, very insecure and fragile. You say you’d start crying when someone would simply ask you a question – so big was your sense of insecurity and perhaps inadequacy that you won’t know the answer…

Anyway, until now you’ve been repeating those old patterns regarding men, but now you have the awareness why this was happening and that it was because of your core emotional needs weren’t met. There’s a book on emotional neglect, called “Running on Empty: Overcome your Childhood Emotional Neglect“, written by Jonice Webb. It talks about how emotional neglect happens, as well as how to heal it, i.e. how to practice self-care, self-soothing, how to pay attention to your emotions, how to trust your emotions etc. I believe it’s a very useful book, so you might give it a try, regardless of whether you find a counselor or not.

The primary goal of your healing would be to meet those unmet emotional needs, either by yourself (with the help of the above book, for example), or by working with a counselor. What might also help is to buy yourself a doll, that represents you as a child, and talk to her every day, telling her you love her, brushing her hair, holding her. It might seem silly, but this is exactly what you might have been missing while growing up – that someone takes care of you, spends time with you, pays attention to your feelings. To compensate for that, you now become the good parent and care-taker for your inner child.

Also, try to take up a hobby, something that you like and enjoy doing, so that the positive, creative, playful part of your inner child comes to the fore as well. The goal is to have fun, to enjoy like a playful, innocent child. Having a hobby will also help you to relax after your studies, so it’s a win-win goal 🙂

Oh, and perhaps you can start a journal, where you’re writing everything and anything that comes to your mind, all your thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires… I believe it would be very useful in processing your emotions and even for self-soothing…

Dear Ishita,

I don’t think it should be a problem that you accidentally reported your post. By the way, edits can be done within the first 5 minutes or so of posting, later it’s not possible any more.

So , could you please tell me how Rebounds are supposed to be like,

I personally haven’t been in a rebound relationship, but now I’ve looked it up, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be immediately after the breakup, but it’s the first relationship that follows a “Very Serious Relationship”. Since your friend was pretty serious with his ex, I imagine the relationship with you could count as a rebound for him. You also said he was hurt a lot by the break-up, which would make him a candidate for getting involved in a rebound relationship. Here is a relevant quote:

“People are much more likely to have rebound relationships if they were the one who was dumped. That’s because getting dumped can be highly distressing and a serious hit to your self-esteem, which is going to prompt more coping behaviors, like rebound sex and relationships.”

In both of your posts you mentioned something interesting – that you didn’t want him to think that you’re a mess:

“I was making attempts of letting my guard down around him, because otherwise I used to feel an insecurity , that maybe he is so perfect he would never understand why I am a mess.”

“Our conversations had mostly become about him, because I had again begun to feel this insecurity, that what if he feels I am a mess.”

You also appear to have admired him – but I’d say glorified him somewhat before you got to know him better:

I have always admired him, and maybe did secretly like him too,

an overachiever yet humble

maybe he is so perfect he would never understand why I am a mess

It appears to me that you glorified him, thought he was so high above you, and that he was inaccessible since he has a girlfriend, plus he’s an overachiever so he’s primarily interested in his studies. But when he did show increased interest in you, I guess you were smitten and perhaps felt like your unattainable dream may be coming true after all? You didn’t even talk much about yourself, but it was mostly about him. You put him in the center of your attention, showered him with admiration (I assume) and made him your No1 priority, even to to point of neglecting your studies.

All this attention felt very good to him, specially since he had been was recently broken up with, which I guess was a blow to his ego. So he was definitely enjoying your company, your attention and admiration. When you were a little more reserved, he’d immediately start showing more interest in you, so that he can keep you hooked on him (“i noticed how he used to act the former only when I showed as if I wasn’t very into him, which is kind of narcissistic behavior”). Perhaps he wasn’t doing it consciously, but he was nevertheless doing it.

BTW when you say he was “overly protective” of you, what exactly do you mean?

All this shows me that he was flattered by your attention, and even misled you so that he can get your attention, but he probably didn’t have serious intentions with you.

It breaks me a bit inside, thinking , that he would have probably gotten involved with any girl then, he could have got his hands on.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that “any girl” would do for him, but in a way, any girl looking up to him and admiring him like you did, probably would have done, yes. It doesn’t mean you’re not good enough, I repeat, just that he’s not that great guy that you put on a pedestal and admired. He might even be someone with narcissistic tendencies, as you’ve noticed. This showed his true colors, and you’re right to consider whether you even want to remain friends with him or not.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear Michelle,

I too wish you well. It’s good that you’re creating some boundaries, certain “deal breakers”, and aren’t tolerating some of his old behaviors any more. If he makes you happy on a day-to-day basis, and you can let go of thinking about the future for a while, then the relationship could function, I guess, without you suffering in it.

I will make less plans unless he asks to do something. I want to see how he feels when he isn’t simply submitting to me because I’m around, but when he decides “hey where is she, what is she doing?”

Good that you intend to let him take the initiative and show interest in you, and doing things together, rather than you always initiating it and hovering above him. I don’t know how your current dynamic looks like, but it wouldn’t be good if he does things just because he feels he has to please you (almost like “please mommy”). I’ve been in one such unequal relationship, and there was a parent-child dynamic, not two grown-ups interacting. I don’t know how much this is true for your relationship, but it’s good that you intend to change it and allow him more autonomy and self-expression.

It will have to be something inside of him that changes

Yes, true change can only come from within. He may be stretching his limits and changing his behavior to accommodate for your needs, but eventually, he will have to figure out what it is that he really wants, independent of you or anyone else’s influence.