Dear Maile:

You are welcome. I know very little about your childhood, nothing about your father or your older brother. I know that your mother was an OB nurse. You mentioned a comment she made to you about teenage pregnancy. You had a nursery with a lot of dolls. Later you collected dolls. Your family moved to a new home when you were about 7 or 8.

I will do my best with the little I have:

You wrote about the time you were 4, 5 or 6: “The only weird thing that stands out is a doll that I had that I used to kind of be  mean to. I can still remember what the doll looked and smelled like”-  an angry little girl, expressing her anger at a doll.

You wrote about your adult relationships with men: “little by little I get attached, lose myself and want more than they want. Only I don’t ask for it, I continue to play aloof, meanwhile inside I’m dying.. I hide it very well… aside from occasional jealousy and passive aggressiveness… I realize my need to find my voice and courage to show who I am so that it doesn’t escape only as jealousy and passive-aggressiveness“- an angry woman, playing aloof,  hiding her anger, but it escapes as jealousy and passive- aggressiveness (anger is what fuels jealousy and passive-aggressive behavior).

In all your descriptions of your suffering, you didn’t use the word anger. You used these words: “inside I’m dying… black hole in my heart of misery and sadness… a lot of sadness, anguish, anxiety…grief and pain”-

-I think that you are comfortable with recognizing your sadness and fear, but you are  uncomfortable with recognizing your anger (most women are). I think that feeling angry, especially as intensely as you feel it when you do, makes you feel/ believe that you are a bad person, and believing that you are a bad person is that “black hole” in your heart.

“I can’t stop thinking about my ex being quarantined with his family. Resuming life.. constant painful images and thoughts of him being happy with his family are overwhelming”- you are angry at him, and you wish him to be unhappy, but it makes you feel like a bad person for wishing him to be unhappy, and feeling like a bad person is very painful to you.

To stop feeling that you are a bad person, you did the following: “I did a meditation .. I wished for him to be happy, for his wife to be happy and his family to be happy and the pain went away”- the anger went away, and with it the pain of believing that you are a bad person.

“During that meditation, I came back to this space of feeling more alive and purposeful and less sad as I focused on sending love out or wishing for him to be happy… It’s been a few hours now and I haven’t had that deep sinking feeling of sadness or the thought of him and his family”- relieved from anger and from the painful belief that you are a bad person, you felt alive and purposeful.

To make up for that perceived badness, your “whole purpose in life as far as career goes has been to alleviate suffering by helping the marginalized, less fortunate.. took on so much for so little, hoping to give back and help others.. doing things to help others seems to be the only meaning I feel in life”- you are trying to neutralize that perceived badness with good actions, with altruism.

You wrote regarding your mother: “When I was in high school, every time I went out she would seriously say, ‘Don’t get pregnant?’ I had to hear from her about the teens who had given birth, always with a tone of disappointment. At that point I decided I never wanted to have kids”-

– at that point, and at many other times when she made this and other indirectly disapproving and accusatory comments, your heart broke and a black hole in it filled with anger.

I see your childhood filled with a painful combo of fear and anger: “I do feel like that fear and dread of not wanting my mom to go to work at night and the sadness after she left and I was sleeping in my parents bed in the dark is probably similar to that feeling of not wanting him to go away”-

– angry at her and afraid to lose her; angry at the man and afraid to lose him.

“when in relationships, I feel that needy and conditional love”- your anger is in that conditional love. “I wish to have these feelings of unconditional love”- I think that by unconditional love, you mean: the love without the anger. “but I know that I eventually get back into wanting and needing”- I think anger is in this wanting-and-needing.

Let me know what you think/ feel.

anita