Dear Eliana:

I read some of your posts as well as the other thread you started. Here is my summary:

You were born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome to an alcoholic mother, had “delayed emotional development and growth.”  In your first six years of life, she often left you and your siblings alone for long periods of time, neglected, as she went on drinking binges and your father traveled a lot. Your childhood in those first six years was “a very traumatic and neglectful childhood”. The courts took you away when you were six. After that you were taken in by your father’s sister and her husband who were “a wonderful, loving and stable well to do couple.”

You dropped out of community college when you were 22. At the time you were engaged to a man you were living with, a relationship that “turned very rocky and turbulent… All I wanted to do, was go to the beach and bars and party with my friends.”

When you were about 31, you decided to improve yourself, you wrote, and you completed your AA degree. You had “no emotional support” from your family or friends. At 40 you got your BA degree, still with no family or friend support (“no one would come to my graduation”). When you were getting your degrees, you were “busy going to dances, joining the college newspaper, athletics, honor clubs”. Following getting your BA degree, you took graduate courses but did not complete those because depression kinked in hard.

You have been “unable to sustain any kind of long term relationship. They are chaotic, intense on my part, I am clingy, co-dependent, have an intense fear of abandonment and perceived rejection. I do not know what a healthy relationship looks like. I want one so bad, but chaos is all I know.”

You currently 55, living in a small town, in a HUD building,  on a small fixed income (disability), are in intensive DBT therapy and two 12 step programs (one related to having had a traumatic childhood and the other is Codependent Anonymous, both taking place over the phone three times a week).

You wrote: “I’m still just now beginning to learn what healthy relationship means but can’t seem to find one or date.”

Can you share more about the nature of your mental illness (in the title of your thread and otherwise mentioned)? I wonder how you view metal illness in general and how you view your individual case of mental illness.

anita