Dear Felix:

I communicated with you at length in the past, under the screen name Felix. But you either deleted your previous threads or signed in with a new email, so that the record of your previous threads is not available to me, at this point. I remember that years ago you lived (still, I imagine) in Los Angeles, working in the IT field, born in the former Soviet Union, had a hostile relationship with your then wife, and the one solid comfort in your life has been your dog.

In your most recent post you wrote: “I am going with the flow… I am not at all depressed or even sad. I am in a great mood”.

What you described in a bit earlier, in page 1 of your thread, is the opposite of going with the flow and being in a great mood: “I feel like sh%t… I get overwhelming anxiety… I do feel sick, almost to the point of being nauseous from the overwhelming worry… I am all alone and have no support network.. I am always alone… It’s been a long time since I felt anything, but pain.. I just feel overwhelming and out of control..  Guilt is still hurting me. Regret is still punishing me… I am lost. I am beyond lost”.

Let’s look what you wrote about your family: “Good people, but they treat me badly and have emotionally destroyed me“- what I italicized is the opposite of “good people”.

Here is a famous quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man”.

I think that you have been true to your dog all along, you trust him, him and no one else.

anita

Dear Felix:

“stayed up until 6 am…my aloneness. It has been with me since the beginning of time… this being single and alone is terrible. I am bored or lonely.. I crave physical and emotional connection to the point where it makes me psychologically and physically ill”-

– what the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), in its website spcanl. com/ social isolation in dogs, states about dogs is true to humans as well: “Why social interaction is so important: our domesticated dogs evolved from wild ancestors that lived in family groups called packs. As we domesticated and bred dogs  to suit our needs, they learned to substitute humans and other family pets for their pack. Having ‘a pack’ is essential to a dog. It is not a natural instinct for a dog to live alone… The need to interact with people, other animals and their environment is a part of a dog’s biological and psychological makeup.

“Problems created by social isolation: social isolation causes intense boredom, anxiety and often leads to aggression… A dog that is tied onto a dog house nearly all the time and barks constantly (much to the annoyance of neighbors) is literally crying out for help”.

Wikipedia on Social Isolation, reads: “Research indicates that perceived social isolation (PSI).. may contribute to ‘poorer overall cognitive performance and poor executive functioning, faster cognitive decline, more negative and depressive cognition… ‘ PSI also contributes to accelerating the ageing process… Moreover, the social interactions of individuals who feel socially isolated are more negative and less subjectively satisfying. This contributes to a vicious cycle in which the person becomes more and more isolated…

“chronic social isolation in rats has been found to lead to depression, anxiety, and psychosis-like behaviors as well as signs of autonomic, neuroendocrine, and metabolic dysregulation… the isolation of a member of a social species has detrimental biological effects”.

Felix, you mentioned in your recent post that you have family and friends with whom you interact, but you feel lonely, and have felt lonely “from the beginning of time”, meaning that your past and existing social interactions have been very unsatisfying, and therefore you feel lonely. Perceived Social Isolation means Loneliness.

The Royal society publishing. org, on perceived social isolation: “deficits in social relationship- as indexed by perceived social isolation (i.e. loneliness)- (are linked to) adverse health and fitness consequences at each developmental stage of life. Outcome include depression, poor sleep quality, impaired executive function, accelerated cognitive decline, unfavourable cardiovascular function, impaired immunity… and earlier mortality…

“Perceived social isolation, colloquially known as loneliness, is a useful construct to examine the importance of social relationships for health and fitness. People are with (or around) other people much of the time, with only a few exceptions (e.g. inmates in solitary confinement..). Group living- in families and larger communities and societies- virtually guarantees the availability of social others and thus minimizes the likelihood of becoming isolated… Perceived social isolation represents a mismatch between an individual’s social needs and the provisions the social environment offers or is perceived to offer. The mismatch can be quantitative.., but is usually more qualitative in nature. That is… social relationships fail to engender the sense of connectedness and belonging that is critical for human thriving..

“One of the primary functions of social interactions in early life is to foster the learning of trust. Unresponsive and unpredictable parenting foster insecurity and distrust, qualities that can disrupt the foundation on which all subsequent relationships are built…

“Humans’ deeply social nature means that deficiencies in a sense of connectedness are- to put it colloquially- depressing… Lonely children are implicitly hypervigilant… taking longer to get to sleep and more sleep disturbances… ” (a very long article).

In conclusion: the title of your thread is “Where to find strength”? I am ready to answer this question: find strength in quality human interactions. Of course, it is easier said than done. But I will be glad to elaborate on my answer with you, through further communication with you.

anita

Dear Felix:

Previously, you wrote about your family: “they treat me badly and have emotionally destroyed me“. In your most recent post, you wrote: “I have good friends and good family. Everyone I am surrounded by loves me”-

– your “good family” (1) destroyed you, (2) loves you, (3) treats you badly?

I mean, do you see my problem here, trying to understand you?

anita

Dear Felix,

There’s something else I’d like to add. When you say you’ve forgiven your parents and love them unconditionally, without actually having done the inner child work, you’re invalidating the feelings of that inner child. You’re telling your younger self that it doesn’t matter that he was hurt by the actions of your parents (“My parents did some bad stuff in the past when I was younger. And by bad, I don’t abuse or something terrible in that sense. I mean neglect and absence of love and care.“)

Emotional neglect can be very hard on the child, because we feel unseen and unappreciated. From what you’ve written, your parents didn’t see the real you, but were only interested in superficial things. (“They are so different that if we weren’t related I would not look in their direction and they would not look in mine. They are obsessed with wealth, superficial things, Kardashian culture, and truly believe that only material wealth brings true happiness. I am 100% opposite of that.”)

They most likely didn’t appreciate the real you, because they weren’t in touch with their authentic selves either. So you probably felt not understood and very alone. Actually you said it yourself: “The ONLY thing that still bothers me through all my actualization, realization, etc., is my aloneness. It has been with me since the beginning of time.”

I imagine that you felt alone since the beginning of time because your parents never saw the real you, nor were they interested in the real you.

“What matters is that I am learning to love myself, not in a vain selfish kind of a way, but in a way where I see that my mind, body, and my consciousness are starting to work together in unison.”

If you want to truly love yourself, you need to embrace your wounded inner child. You need to validate his feelings, validate his pain, and truly see him, rather than push him away (which is quite the opposite of how your parents treated you). Only then can you truly love yourself.

Dear Peter,

I think I understand what you’re trying to say – that we can help ourselves by changing our perspective, by looking at things differently. That’s true up to a point. But if we step on a piece of glass and hurt ourselves, we can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt. We can’t look at it differently and say “no, I’m not in pain.” It’s pretty simple with physical pain.

With emotional pain it’s a bit trickier, because we can actually tell ourselves that it doesn’t hurt. We can rationalize it. We can try to “transcend it”. But the inner child is the part of us which still feels the pain – and the pain is very real. It’s like when we step on a piece of glass, only the glass is in our soul, in our heart. We can try to ignore it but it comes out in different other ways.

“Because perhaps it’s true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason, you’re theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.” ― Fredrik Backman

It’s true that a child loves their parents unconditionally, because it depends on them completely.  They are the source of love,  nurturing and protection, and the child depends on them to meet their physical and emotional needs. Without the parents or care-takers, the child wouldn’t survive.

Parents or care-takers (or siblings) on the other hand, don’t necessarily love the child unconditionally. Sometimes they withdraw their love when the child doesn’t behave in a certain way. Sometimes parents can be physically and/or emotionally abusive. The fact that someone is our parent doesn’t guarantee they love us unconditionally. We might have been wounded  by the very people who were supposed to love and care for us, and that’s why it’s so painful. We need to heal those wounds if we want to have a happy, fulfilling life.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Tee.

Dear Peter,

Part of that process is pulling back our shadow projections and ‘becoming our own mother and father’, learn to nurture and protect ourselves. Or set healthy boundaries. Having the best or worse parent, the task is the same. Finding peace with our parents inevitable failures while creating healthy boundaries.

I agree that we need to become a loving, compassionate parent to our own inner child, and learn to nurture and protect ourselves, as you say. Eventually we need to forgive our parents, regardless of how inadequate they might have been. What I was saying is that we can’t forgive by simply changing our thinking – we need to also process it emotionally, i.e. work on those unmet needs from our childhood, i.e. our wounded inner child.

The memory of the pain we felt as we step on the piece of glass is just that a memory. Perhaps their is even a scar and a lesson to be more careful around broken glass.

Until we heal our wounded inner child, i.e. give ourselves the love and affection we didn’t get as children, the wound will be active and festering under the surface of the skin. It first needs to be cleaned in order to start healing and a scar developing. Only then can it become a memory which doesn’t hurt any more. We can then truly forgive our parents and hold no resentments, because we know that they too were just a wounded children themselves and didn’t know better.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Tee.

Dear Peter,

A stumbling block many have may be associating the idea of forgiveness with the idea that a forgiven person can no longer be held accountable. That would not be Love or a path to healthy boundaries. Unconditional Love becoming a unhealthy unconditional allowing.

I agree. Unconditional love or unconditional forgiveness can be just an empty phrase, and is sometimes used by spiritual people who find it hard to face their pain (or to accept responsibility for their actions), so they’d rather transcend their pain and pretend that all is love and light. I also agree that true forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing others to abuse or disrespect us, or to cross our boundaries. Even if we forgive our parents for having treating us badly, it doesn’t mean we’ll allow them to do it again. If they don’t want to change, we need to protect our boundaries and e.g. reduce contact with them.

I also wonder if that some times instead of healing our wounded inner child the tendency isn’t to cling to them.

Many people react from their wounded inner child. Actually, according to Internal Family Systems, our wounded inner child is only one part of our personality – the most fragile one, which was hurt by the lack of love, care, appreciation, support etc in our childhood. But we have other parts, called the protectors, which serve to protect that wounded inner child from pain. A protector part is e.g. when we act tough and distant in a relationship because we’re afraid of intimacy, we’re afraid of actually being hurt again. So we use various defense mechanisms to protect our wounded inner child. Those mechanisms are dysfunctional, they don’t help us, but still, we believe they shield us from pain.

So yes, we can cling to those defense mechanisms for a long time, till we decide to feel the original pain and heal it, so that we don’t need the false protection any more. That means that e.g. we heal from the fear of intimacy, which enables us to become open and vulnerable in a relationship. We aren’t playing defense any more. As a result, we can have deeper and healthier relationships.

What makes you wonder if Felix hasn’t found his way to heal the wounded child?

I don’t feel comfortable talking about Felix without him participating in the discussion. But I’ll just say that whenever we don’t want to look into something, it’s a sign that a defense mechanism is at work.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Tee.