Dear Gaia:

You are welcome. Yes, we do have a lot in common (I am glad you read your older threads).

“Do you feel it’s more easy now to build relationships with other? If yes what caused the change?”-

– it is difficult for me to answer this question because for one, I am so much older than you and what I refer to as my healing-process started in 2011 (my first quality psychotherapy) when I was way older than you already. There is a huge difference in social needs and circumstances between a 21 year old young woman and an older woman in her 50s: at this point in my life I am not attending school with people my age, I am not in the work place with co- workers around, I am not a parent making friends with other parents, I am not looking for a partner in life- dating and going out to meet people, and people my age (50s) are way less eager to make friends than teenagers are, or people in their twenties.

Having stated all that, I did make one relationship work and it is a healthy relationship, the one with my husband whom I married later in life, right before I started my first quality psychotherapy. The relationship was in trouble right at the beginning, this is why I attended that therapy I mentioned. It took a whole lot of work and time, and I made it, it happened and is happening.

“What caused the change?”- (the change being from my inability to form and maintain a healthy, close relationship to the ability to do so)- it is impossible to answer this question in one post, but over time it is possible.

I will start somewhere then, I will start with that “intense cringiness” you mentioned in your recent post, and with the following words (italicized by me) in what you shared previously: “I dread spending time alone with her”, “I have this repulsive feeling at the idea she might try to do deep conversations or inquire about me”, “I resent her for making me less carefree”, that her behavior “instilled a certain anxiety or heaviness in me”-

– the cringiness, the dread, the repulsive feeling, the resentment, the anxiety, the heaviness- all these have been your emotional experience with your mother and they were my emotional experience with my mother.

I experienced these same things with everyone throughout the decades of my life, same experience. This is why a close, healthy relationship (with a good and capable man) was not possible for me. I spent most of my life alone and lonely, daydreaming to music, imagining a love story I  never had in real life.

I kept cringing, kept dreading.. all those things when with other people and that experience didn’t change when I married later in life, 2011. My change started in March 2011 with my first quality psychotherapy. It continued with ending all contact with my mother: the last time I spent time in her physical presence was May 2011 (we live in different countries),  and the last time I talked to her was May 2013. The change aka my healing process continued as I started my massive, daily participation in this website since May 2015.

This healing process results in the gradual change of that reactivated-same-old-same-old-emotional experience with my mother –>  a different emotional experience: from dread to relative safety, from anxiety to increasing calm, from heaviness to a bit of lightness and a touch joy from time to time. There is contentment in finally trusting a person, and in finally perceiving myself as a good and trustworthy person.

The fragmented identity of before, being so confused and alarmed by my own behavior, feeling like a stranger to myself, unpredictable and impossible to understand, experiencing life from the outside, as if viewing a movie- that is gone now, completely (what a relief this is!)

I am finally living my own life, my way. (Finally, I have a solid identity).

anita