Dear Katie:

You wrote that at 32 you “have a string of failed relationships”- how can it be not so? The three adults in your young life: your mother, your bio father and your step father were unreliable and abusive in one way or another. You, as a baby, were a clean slate. What you became was a result of your interactions with these three. Those years are called our Formative Years because our brain is formed, connections are made, many, millions of connections. Since the adults in your young life, in the two decades of your childhood were grossly incompetent, at the least, to parent you well, the connections made in your brain are understandably not congruent with a healthy relationship.

It can’t be otherwise until you weaken some of those connections and built others, in other words, it can’t be different until you unlearn old thinking and believing and learn new thinking and believing.

One thing to unlearn is the belief that you are unworthy. Who the three adults were in your young life was never an indication of your worth- they all preceded you.

It takes therapy with a competent, empathetic, trustworthy therapist to uncover the old core beliefs, the dysfunctional MOs and learn new.

You asked last: “What am I doing so wrong?”- here are possibilities and you are welcome to develop any or all:

1. You choose men according to whom your mother likes (as if she has exhibited good choices of men in her life)

2. You are still trying to reach out and get acceptance, worth from either one of the three (mother, father)

3. You are still not seeing clearly who your mother is, who your father is and therefore, you are not seeing who you are. The former is a condition for the latter: you have to see who your parents are before you can see who you are.

anita