Dear Midnight:

Your feelings of distress when associating with others preceded romantic relationships. It happened with friends before it happened with romantic partners: “I sometimes had that reaction with friends too when I was younger, I would feel that the friendship or the person was somehow weighing on me and getting me anxious and I would find some way, or excuse, to distance myself from that friend.”

Your associations with those friends meant danger to you. How do I know? Because you wrote above, in your quote, that you were anxious (fearful) and you felt the need to distance yourself (flight is one of the three reactions to danger: fight, flight, freeze).

Why did a friend meant danger to you when that friend (and later romantic partner) was not abusive to you?

Because you had a prior ongoing experience with a person who did mean danger to you when you were very young, when your brain was forming (during those Formative Years of childhood). And so your brain formed a connection between a person you feel close to and danger.

You wrote: “I was feeling trapped and scared sometimes around my brother, he was a few years older than me and would terrorize me quite a lot when my parents were away. I did feel trapped in that situation with him when we were alone in the house, I kept waiting for my parents to get back from work so that I would feel safe again…I was scared and angry, feeling that I hated him and feared him and that I didn’t feel protected in that situation”

You wrote it and this is how I know it was your older brother who scared you; your older brother who was the danger in your childhood. It’s right there in your quote.

You wrote: “I also remember some fun moments with him, but to be honest I usually ended up crying because he would play with me sometimes when he had nothing better to do, then would get bored of it and would find some way to make me cry or feel stupid and worthless. So what was before a fun, exciting situation for me, playing with my big brother, would turn into a mess of feeling hurt and wretched. He would also hit me quite a lot.”

You looked up to your older brother. He was the one with you when your parents were out. When you had fun with him that felt wonderful and safe but that safety was shattered when he abused you.

You wrote: “but I guess all of that seemed and still seems to all of us as a more or less normal situation of siblings..” At the time, he was not an equally powerful sibling to you. You wrote yourself that he was “so much older and stronger so he had all the power”: no equal power sibling situation here. Reality was you were alone with a much older and stronger person who had all the power.

You wrote: “But even saying all that I find it hard to believe this could be the cause, because a relationship with a brother certainly can’t be as important and determining as a relationship with a parent, can it?”

My answer: yes, a relationship with a brother can be as important when the sibling is “so much older and stronger so he had all the power”- and you are often enough alone with him, unprotected and unsupervised.

Midnight, how long have you been seeing your current therapist? What do you think is the reason that such a crucial piece of information was not looked at by now in your therapy?

anita