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Thanks Anita for your response 🙂
You wrote that you were “a very sensitive child”- here is one definition of sensitive: “quick to detect or respond to slight changes”- of course, a child becomes sensitive when witnessing lots of fighting. The home is a war zone.
Yes that’s was me, and still me. Highly sensitive. I pick-up on the slightest thing in a room that no one else notices. Unfortunately, when I was kid, instead of just ignoring the fighting I would sit at my bedroom door, listening to the fighting. I was a nosy kid as well – ha ha!
You focus on your father’s lack of ability to love. My focus in your account is your mother confiding in you, as a child. I assume she confided in you that her husband, your father, didn’t love her? Telling you all the ways he doesn’t love her?
And so you are sensitive, quick to detect any signs in a man that he is not qualified to be in a relationship with you. Many men are not, but some are. Yet regarding the second group, seems to me, you have your mother’s voice in your head confiding in you about this man being unqualified. Am I correct?
Yes, look I am not sure how often she did this. I suspect it wasn’t that often as I thought (but it was enough)but for a kid words get embedded in the subconscious. The most vivid one I have was my mother “hinting to the fact”, with lines like “make sure you marry someone that really loves you, and even loves you more than you love him” and this was when I was about 4-5 years old. That’s not what a 4-5 year old kid should hear or try to understand (especially an overly sensitive kid). Unfortunately, my mom, confided in me in a number of negative things, where she felt people didn’t care about her. Like my dad’s parents (my grandparents), they didn’t like her and she would be in my ear about it (this was closer in my early teens when she did that). You know she made mistakes, I think she was very depressed and lost a child and just felt unloved. But that is a theme of my mother, “feeling unloved”. She didn’t feel love from her father and felt disconnect from her mother. My mum obviously had real insecurities when she was younger.
Yes, I do think I have my mom thoughts in my ears when looking at men. In some ways she was correct, it’s good to be really careful. She wasn’t being malice, I think she was just so unhappy and didn’t want me to make the same mistake (and be unhappy too), but those discussions should of happened at a much later age. I think she told me those things at the time, just getting her frustration out.
Yet regarding the second group, seems to me, you have your mother’s voice in your head confiding in you about this man being unqualified.
Can you clarify? Do you mean my mum still literally is in in my ear (she is not really) but I guess in my subconscious mind her words impact how I view potential partners.
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Thanks JayJay, I’m trying hard to not think about “time running out”. I am trying to embrace it, and to be honest all my life I did “embrace it”. I really didn’t think about it too much and was just happy doing my thang. The thing is I did get to a point where I was like, “well I am used to being by myself now for over 13 years, it would be nice to meet someone now”.
I am trying to focus on my happiness, and just working on myself, but part of that is also asking myself the hard questions as to why I find it so hard to find and get into a relationship. Plus I’m at the stage where I would like to grow with someone, rather than just myself. But I admit, it is really hard to just not think about about it, and let it go and “go with the flow”. I’m not sure if I could ever get to a point where I will just be fine being single. I mean it’s not the worst thing in the world to be honest, as I am an introvert, so I do love my alone time (I found last relationship a bit suffocating for me), but still I am really curious what a good loving healthy relationship would look like with another human being. Maybe, I will never get that because I am not a “loving, healthy person myself?”.
I am working on my self-esteem. I’ve started to learn the power of “no” and letting go of outcomes. I’ve also in the midst of a friendship that is on the “rocks”. At first I was feeling so “bad and so wanting to fix things”, trying so hard to make amends, trying to understand what I had done. But then I stopped and realised I was making a lot of effort (too much) and had to stop and ask myself why I was making such an effort? In the past, I would of felt like it was “all my fault” and I would be concerned about what the other person thought of me, but I just came to a point where I was like “you know what?”, If you don’t want to be my friend and if I have to jump through hoops then it’s not worth it. And so I let go, and I really don’t care if we stay friends or not now. Obviously, I need to do more of this. Where I am not caring so much about the other person and putting them ahead of me. So there has been some breakthroughs of late. I learnt a new term the other day called “Post-traumatic growth” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_growth and that basically is me. I tend to grow from adversity and quickly learn from my mistakes.
Not easy or simple, takes time. Competent psychotherapy may be necessary to start you in the process of doing just that. At some time in this process you will be able to detect her thoughts (her values, her beliefs). At some time you will discover YOUR values, your beliefs. And then you will replace her… with you.
Ok well I might look into Competent psychotherapy. I think you are spot on I have a lot of her thoughts (her values and her beliefs instilled in me and effect me to this day, I wanted to please her, rather than myself, even though she’s not asking me to that). Now I am like, “god is my mother a big issue?” we seem to have a really good relationship now, but I think her way of thinking values and beliefs (especially the thoughts she had when she was younger) still have an impact on me today.
Anyway, thank you for your help.
Thanks JayJay for sharing your experience. Although, I don’t think our experience was quite the same. No actually my mum doesn’t hate men as such. She never gave me that impression. She disliked her father (who didn’t seem to care about her much). But with my dad she desperately wanted him to love her. No in fact what I saw and felt was that she was deeply in love with my father (too much, especially as it wasn’t reciprocated equally). She gave him too many chances and my father was quite childish and irresponsible growing up and my mother because so in love made excuses for him. What she said to me was actually true when she said “make sure you marry a man who really loves you!” I was more at the door hearing them fight, thinking “why the hell are you holding on? Just leave him, it sad you trying to hold on so badly to someone that doesn’t love you the same way!”
Of course when my parents divorced she probably said a few things about him, but it wasn’t too bad. I was more angry at him than she was. My mum has matured a lot over the years, and she really has no grudges anymore with my dad anymore (he treated her pretty bad in the end to be honest and never apologized). She doesn’t talk bad of him, and says if she she ever saw him it would all be fine, no animosity.
I’m the one the holds the animosity, more for the fact that my father my whole life has been very selfish and childish and when my parents divorced (15 years ago) I ended up having to be like a mother to my father. He got his first manic episode at the time, and as I was the only family in the picture in his life I essentially bore the brunt of it all (from spending sprees, to verbally abusing me, to suicide attempts – this of course was a whole new level of being selfish that I had never seen in my dad growing up – hard for a then 19 year old) and it’s only in the last 6 years that he’s taken his illness seriously and takes his meds. He’s still acts very much like a child though and is always the victim, never takes real responsibility for anything. My whole life my dad put himself first and others second. It was always “me, me, me”.
I had a lot of children and people in my life. I was part of a very close knit religion (which screwed me up as well). It was good as child though, lots of people that acted like an extend family. So I had no problems being around kids, it’s just that I also enjoyed being by myself as well. I loved playing by myself as a kid, and sometimes found hanging out with friends a bit tiring. But I spent plenty of time over at friends houses and playing and all that jazz. But unfortunately, that religion had a big impact on me as I was growing up. It was very cult like, so not encouraged to have friends outside the religion and all that jazz. So that effected how I viewed the “outside world” that’s for sure and still effects me to this day.
It’s not good seeing one parent “over loving” and the other “not wanting to love at all”.
…But is that simply the way you ‘perceived’ things to be with your parents, or they way they actually were, Mia? when we are children, we make up our own minds about how people are and why they behave like they do. And that is not necessarily the reality of the situation, but simply how we saw it as a child, through our child’s eyes.
I often wished my parents would separate, as, through my eyes, they didn’t seem to get on at all. The conclusion that I came to was that my mother was ‘trapped’ into a marriage with a useless, hopeless man, who used her as a servant. that was around the age of seven, I think. I used to think to myself later, in my teens, ‘for goodness sake, why don’t you stand up for yourself!’ in regards to my mother. Both of my parents are essentially selfish people though, so there were bound to be arguments over who was right or wrong, and who was going to win the arguments. And by waiting on my father hand and foot, she actually made him dependent on her. It could have been a method of control in itself.
My parents are still together, so despite the fact that my mother continually gives out the message that ‘all men are useless’ she is still with her useless one! Both myself and my sister grew up, left home, started our own families… etc. My parents bought an RV and went traveling the continent. They didn’t get divorced the moment there were no children around. So the only conclusion I can come to is, that is the way they ‘get on’ with each other, that they like the constant arguments, and that is their way of getting along. That they both love each other is obvious when one or the other of them is ill.
What I’m trying to say essentially is, that the way we might see it through the eyes of a child, is not necessarily the truth of it, it’s the way a child’s mind tries to make sense of it.
I feel bad about how you had to look after your father when your parents divorced. You had to assume the role of being his mother/carer and take the place of your own mother with him at a very young age, with a father who acted like a child. Like Anita has said, it’s like you were yourself married to your father and even though this experience happened a long time ago, you are still carrying that experience of that man with you into you present life. It’s understandable that you are wary of or don’t trust men much, based on how you were treated by your father.
ETA: I also think, like Anita has said, that you need someone to talk this through with. A competent and qualified counsellor or phsychologist who can work with you on this aspect of your past… It’s a lot to work through all on your own.
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