Dear ally:

I understand that you are the only one in your family to be doing the hard work that you are doing. Thing is, there is more hard work to be done and … you are doing it. You are in that long, long difficult process. It takes a long, difficult process to heal.

You wrote that you wonder “why we do that to ourselves?”- why still trying to make people change, which is impossible.

My answer: because we believe deep inside, and have believed for many years, that the way for us to move on is to first change these people in our original family. We don’t believe, deep inside, that it is possible to move on before these people are changed.

The reason for this core belief is that for a child, it is reality: the child needs the parent/s to be okay so to be fed, sheltered, etc., just like the young of other animals. This is why we as children focus on the well being of our parents, if they are struggling, and as adults, we still do. We don’t realize that we no longer depend on parents for our survival.

anita