Dear Girija:

You started this thread “lost and weary” March 3, before your mother’s diagnosis. And now, you are even more weary, more tired. I am concerned about you, hoping to read from you soon.

anita

Dear Girija:

It is a good thing your aunt is helping and you got a break.

“I really miss her. I want to her to recover. I am scared”- a girl needs her mother, it is this way from birth, when she holds us for the first time and feeds us.

Don’t forget that you love her and always loved her, that never changed no matter how she failed you. A child’s love for her mother is of the unconditional type, it sets in and it stays.

Not reciprocated? Doesn’t matter, it stays, always there.

Tell her you love her, again, if you already told her recently. Because it is true. Know in your heart that you are a loving person.

Later I hope you take this knowing and make a better life for yourself because a loving person is a good person, and a good person deserves a good life.

anita

Dear Girija:

It makes all the difference when you don’t “have to know it all and do it all”, that you “can lean on them”, on other people. We are people who need people, like one song says, we are social animals, and just like an elk without its herd, we humans feel anxious, fearful without anyone to lean on, without a herd, or a social group… a family, a close social group.

“Fear has nothing over me when there is someone by my side”- this is the nature of a social animal, it feels safe within the group, and scared exiled from the group, all alone.

“I have very little else in common with the people around me. That I have to figure out. What am I willing to lose and what will I lose that for. I am still lost, but not so weary”-

– you write so beautifully.

I hope to read more about what you are willing to lose, and what you will actually lose, meaning, I am trying to understand… I remember when I was a teenager, I wrote this sentence for myself, a thought I had: “I lost everything before I had anything”. Looking back today, I think I meant that I lost the together-experience, the together feeling with my mother but never really had it. There was always a desire for closeness with her but I have no memory of being close with her, not  a single memory of affection between her and me, a meeting of the hearts, so to speak.

I think that the less of that together-experience a person has, the stronger and stronger the need for it becomes, like a hunger that consumes one’s life.

anita

Dear Girija:

I need to understand part  of your question: “how do I function normally again?”-

– again suggests that you functioned normally before and you want to resume that normal functioning. Therefore I ask: when did you function normally and what was the nature of your normal functioning at that time?

One more question regarding the first part of your recent post, “I have lost faith in people”, by people do you include your father and your mother (at any point in your life)?

anita

Dear Girija:

I think I understand your questions. I re-read (again) all your posts in your other threads and in the first 4 pages of this thread. A couple of comments about me: what I learn about life is not from reading books and through formal education, an academic kind of learning. What I learn is an inside-out kind of learning, intentional, persistent, emotional. When I read posts here , I ask myself: how are these things happening in my brain, in my life, and I move my attention from me to others and back.

My childhood was no better than yours and perhaps worse, Girija, and my distress and suffering for decades have been no less and perhaps greater than yours. Regarding functioning, your functioning in life so far has been way more functional than mine has been.

And now, the answer to your questions is in your own words: “it is a pattern. They are all rearing children, not raising them. No one cares about emotional needs. They are all doing what society expects them to do”. This means that many of the people you come across everywhere experienced something similar, having been raised not as emotional beings but as … live-biological tissues that need to be fed, bathed, clothed, woken up in the morning and told to go to work, and so forth.

When you, Girija, look at  others, you see mostly people who function. You feel your own distress, you usually don’t see others’ distress, so you assume they don’t feel distress (and they may not feel it when you see them because they are busy working. Their distress will show later when you are not watching).

Someone watching you is thinking the same: Girija has this well paying job and a degree, oh how fortunate she is!

My next point: most of the people you see and complain about at your work, in the hospital recently, they are not as unloving and as unkind as the people you grew up with in your own home.

In your own home, having lived your whole life with your father, mother and a good part of your life (if not all), with your grandmother, these three adults have been crueler to you than anyone you interacted with outside your home so far. I know this because you shared enough about your life at home, at work and elsewhere.

So what happens is you assume everyone outside your home is bad while reality is they have been better to you, kinder, than your adult family members at home. You close your eyes to how bad they are and you project your father, grandmother and mother into the outside people.

“My mother always took care of us, besides emotional stuff- I thought that was love”. Well, you are an emotional person, and it is not your fault that you are, you were born that way. “people are too strong, harsh even cruel. No one stops to see where another is coming from”- these people are your father, your mother, your grandmother. “I can never get her to listen.. My mom was never ‘supportive’. She never took our side”.

February 2018 you wrote about your work place: “no one has the time to listen. We are assigned a mentor but I guess they are busy too, so it feels like I should be knowing these answers.. My mentor especially liked to be rude and critical and extremely disinterested in guiding me”- none of the adults in your home listened to you, guided you. You wrote that your mother expected you to come up with the answers yourself, didn’t bother to listen and try to help you. (And it was worse at home because a child is more needy than an adult).

As a result of being reared and being treated as if you had no  such thing as emotions (humans are emotional beings more than anything else, by the way), you developed the belief that you are deeply flawed, disappointing, useless, too weak to handle life. You feel shame as a result. Fear preceded and followed these beliefs, intensifying with time. Next you naturally get angry, fight with your mother and feel even worse about yourself as a result, guilty,  and the ball of distress and sickness, so to speak, gets bigger and bigger as it rolls down a muddy hill.

Here are some of your words regarding your belief that you are deeply flawed, a failure, your experience of  shame and guilt: “how can I believe in myself… and accept my flaws. How do you do it? Know you are flawed and that these flaws are visible to anyone easily if they look. How do  I overcome the shame of who  I am.. I know I’ll have no one to blame but myself. That I failed because I didn’t change… I need to change now.. It’s inherently a problem with who I am”.

When you talked to your manager, “the explanation I gave him was to ‘correct his perception’ of me as a person, not as a team member”.

At one point, March 2019, you made some progress: “I actually feel like I’ve made more progress in the last month… I managed to meet a deadline and was even rewarded for it… I’ve learnt to reach out to people outside my own team when I’m stuck on something technical and people are very helpful”- see, some people on the outside are .. nicer than the people in your home.

But your life time core beliefs took over soon after that progress. It takes more than a short term experience (or a youtube video or a book or any quick fix) to change an early  life experience that lasted throughout your Formative Years, the years where so many thousands of connections were formed in the brain.

April 2019 you wrote about the hospital experience: “it made me feel like I was interacting with robots. Is this reality? We don’t care and are just here to get by?”- in your home, yes, this was and is reality. You were treated like a robot, a being without emotions. This is why you “feel very hollow inside”, your emotions were not seen by anyone, ignored, so it feels hollow, empty and painful inside.

“Always felt in any social situation like I shouldn’t be there”- just like in the social situation at home where you were “stuck being down and weak while everyone else bombards me with their expectations”, you didn’t refer to your home life when you wrote this last part I quoted, but it was  your home experience nonetheless.

“I depend on my mother a lot at home- she is the  one that wakes me up everyday. She even checks on me from time to time- go bath, eat now, etc.”- this is not enough for a human child. Would be nice if it was enough, but I  don’t make the rules. It is not enough for adults either, there has to be more than that.

“something needs to change”, you wrote at  one point. “how do you know what to change and what to accept”- accept that you are an emotional being. Accept that you were not treated as an emotional being at home (and still not). Accept that your anger at your mother is understandable and does not make you a bad person, that you always loved her no matter what, even when angry at her. Accept that what you referred to as your laziness and procrastinating, having no passion etc., these are not flaws, these are the results of  your upbringing.

In your post before last you wrote: “People act toward what is in their best interest and I have often been hurt by that… my social anxiety comes from this”- your social anxiety was born at home, that is, in the context of your original and most significant social group- your family. Your parents acted with their best interest in mind, which was to not bother themselves with you.

“I cannot engage with people as I think they will hurt me”- some people outside will hurt you worse than your parents did, such people as human traffickers and murderers. But most people will treat you better than your parents treated you.

Let me repeat that: most people outside will treat you better than your parents treated you.

“I am the shadow of what I am expected to be in all areas of my life”- you are not a satisfactory robot, I agree. And you can’t be.

Might as well be the human that you are- attend to that hollowness inside, that emptiness where your emotions are no matter how ignored all these years. They still need to be seen and heard and attended to.

There is nothing wrong with you. There is no Flaw. There is no badness about you. May you have the courage to endure your fear and distress and do what is right for you.

anita

Dear Girija:

A member posted in your thread May 12. That was the only post on record here by this member. I hope she returns to your thread and answers your reply to her.

Many members don’t respond, starting a thread or posting in someone’s thread, then receive a reply, an empathetic, thoughtful reply.. but they don’t return, not even to say thank you. One wonders why, why did they bother to post and then they don’t return.

You wrote in your recent post “Isn’t it interesting that so many of us feel this way and are yet expected to carry on? I wonder what would happen if every one of us was honest about ourselves”-

– so many of us feel the same way, yes. We don’t behave the same way though, do we.

You wonder what would happen if every one of us was honest about oneself. If you were honest about yourself, Girija, right now, what would you type away in your very next post, right after you read this sentence in my post to you?

anita