Dear Molly:

First, a summary of what you shared here so far: you are 28,  have a job that is incredibly meaningful to you, you make great  money, decent savings, and “everything I want  materialistically”. You work only 18 hours per  week, using the rest of the time to do what you enjoy, art classes, road trips, snowboarding and camping. And you have “very close and  amazing friends”.

And yet, “on most days, I wake up sad…  I just don’t  want to feel so sad”. The only reason you figure responsible for your sadness is that you’ve been single  for seven months. You felt sad before, but this current sadness feels much more physical”, it “feels physically painful”,”physically overwhelming”. It makes it “incredibly hard to get out of bed and  engage in what is meaningful to me… so engulfed in sadness and anxiety, it’s very difficult for me to take action”

You wrote: “I have a really hard time remembering my  childhood. I have a very poor memory of it”. You asked me regarding methods, to recover lost memories, you mean, and  uncover childhood trauma?

If so, I do have a way to make progress in this regard: look at your own words, your childhood  is alive in your current words: “I’m very good at being independent and have  never been the co-dependent type. If anything, I lean towards being too independent. But I have noticed that I feel envious and  resentful towards my  two best  friends that recently started romantic relationships”-

These sentences lead me to think of the following: as a child, you felt very much alone, couldn’t depend on a parent or parents (caretakers), you were hurt and  angry at them, so you decided to be Independent, as  in: I don’t need anyone!

This Independent had served you well, but because you are human, a social animal, you need people, you need to depend on someone, somewhat. So you struggle: depending feels dangerous because as a child it meant  falling into an abyss perhaps, having no  one to hold on to. And yet you still  need to hold  on to someone.

The sadness, physically painful and overwhelming, is probably that same sadness of the child that you were and still are (the emotional experiences of your childhood are alive and well in your brain where they vibrate pain).

Because you are financially well, what better use of your money than quality psychotherapy, so to address, acknowledge, express and  release those repressed emotions, so that they hurt less and  less?

anita