Dear Nikkole:

This is my understanding:

You are a 25  year old woman who has worked since 14 years old, in the same company. Financial security has been  a significant concern from your early youth, so you worked a lot, and hard. In your early twenties you attended a  nursing program in college because you wanted the job security of a nursing career. But while in the program you were miserable, crying every day. You quit that program two years ago, at 23, but you beat yourself up for leaving the program.

At 24 you started  therapy, “the best thing  for me”, but you still feel “a bit depressed” and you “can’t seem to shake this uneasy, underlying anxiety that always seems to be in the background every second of every day”.

You don’t know where  your life is going, “unsure  of what to do with my life.. can’t figure  out what I would like to do for a living “. You are thinking about going back to college, but “unsure  what for”, and you are jealous of women who don’t have  to  work or worry about money and who “have the day to do as they please”.

You wrote: “I’m sorry if this ‘problem’ seems trivial, I would just  like to find some peace since my mind keeps seeking answers for this so-called issue”-

I would like to communicate with you beyond  this one post, to have some back and forth communicating because there  is more here than what was presented so  far. At this point I ask regarding  the sentence I quoted last: some  voice  in you says to you that your problem is  not a real problem (therefore the quotation  marks around the word problem), saying to you that your problem is trivial and that you don’t have a real issue (therefore the “so called” qualifier)-

Did someone in real life, a  parent perhaps, communicated to you that your problems, your issues, your feelings are  not important, not real  problems; did a parent/s focus so much on money that nothing in comparison seemed  important to them?

anita