Dear H:

In Dec 2018, you had a PhD, you worked full time, Mon-Fri, attended therapy, but your weekends were “very unproductive.. I’ll usually stay in bed, sometimes get up and go downstairs for food and spend time with mum and little brother. But mostly in my  bedroom.. glued to phone, checking it”.

You suffered from “severe anxiety.. constant worrying, overthinking almost everything, always needing contact, reassurance, so asking the same question multiple times”, and you suffered from “eating disorders”. You were critical about how your body looked, and so, you found online relationships convenient and easy: “for someone to give me their undivided attention without being present physically reduced the pressure of everything. It felt easy.. I could put on weight and not be judged”.

“Whenever I end up finding someone that likes me as a friend, I kind of end up loving that person so much, it sucks the energy out of them by asking the same things over and over again”.

The man you shared about then, and mentioned in your recent post (a year and nine months after your first post), was one of the people whose energy you sucked out, and you did so online (you never met him in real-life), by bombarding him with messages, demanding his attention, “he helped me through a lot, but recently told me I was using him as substitute for professional help, and it was putting him in awkward situation”.

About your family, you shared: “They were always angry growing up… (I) was always verbally abused on birthdays… family would constantly criticise the way I looked etc., .. father used to put me down whenever I got excited about my birthday.. He started resenting me for over-achieving in academia… Mum is better now, but I always had it in the back of my mind that she resents me for a lot of things… He (father) feels like marrying my mum and having kids sabotaged his career progression”.

You wrote more about anger: “I make people angry… I fear if I make them angry, they’ll leave me.. I’ll fall into depressive habits and I won’t be able to cope without them… I hate myself for ruining everything… I hope he doesn’t hate me”.

In your recent Oct 22, 2020 post, 1.5 years after your last post (April 2019)- you shared that you improved and doing well, “in therapy and working on my anxiety”, that you have a new job and are “in the process of applying for a postgraduate course”. You shared that the online friend you shared about, a medic, that over this year, “he would read my email but not reply”, that “he never messaged me directly”, but that you believe that “Back in February, he wrote a blog about me and dedicated some lyrics. I assumed it was him softening up”. You closed your recent post with: “I guess I again should just let things be and focus on me?”-

– I’d say: focus on healing. You wrote that your parents “were always angry growing up”. For a child, it is very, very scary to grow up with parents who do not discipline their anger.

In nature, anger is a threat to commit violence, and so, animals are scared of anger, and humans are scared of anger for the same reason. Children, so very sensitive and dependent on the adults in their lives, are especially and acutely scared of anger.

It is most important for parents to discipline the expressions of their anger so to not scare and scar their children; so to not inject into their children more fear than they can stomach.

It is my understanding that your parents’ anger was not disciplined, and so, you grew up scared of their anger, and scared that being angry at you, they will abandon you, and you will then be all alone. I think that you blamed yourself for their anger, believing inaccurately that you caused their anger, that you ruin things, and therefore, hating yourself.

But in reality, your parents’ anger was not your fault, not your doing- you didn’t cause it.

In your online communication with friends, your fear of anger and consequent abandonment gets activated; you repeatedly get scared that people will get angry at you and leave you. So, you panic and cling, and bombard people with messages, driven by fear.

I hope that you are attending quality psychotherapy and that you will continue to make progress, so that over time, you will be able to have a healthy relationship with a friend/ a boyfriend, in real life.

anita

Dear H:

You are welcome. Good to read that you’ve been helped by good psychotherapy, that you obsess less and that you are working on your control issues.

anita