Dear Lily27:

I think that you were very unhappy as a child, understandably. I think that that something-missing that you currently feel (“I always feel like something is missing”) is the same thing that was missing for you when you were a child: a stable loving home with two happy parents, happy to be with each other and with their children- a happy family unit. What you had instead was a divided family and lots of moving around: “moved houses often.. pack bags all the time to go  spend the weekend at my dad’s house or living at my grandparents for a while”.

You perceive your boyfriend to never had that missing-piece in his life: his “parents are still together and he has  lived with them in the same house his entire life.. His entire life has seemed the same up to now and he never had to deal with drastic changes.. never having dealt with divorce”

Your anger at your boyfriend is palpable: “I resent him for everything. Missing my friends and family, not having a good job while he does.. I basically don’t feel appreciated at all, he takes me and everything for granted. He never cooks.. He takes it for granted that I moved here with him.. it feels like I’ve put my life on hold to take care of him here. I don’t feel  like he wants to invest in me emotionally… And now I don’t know if I still love him”.

I think that as a child you were angry that you didn’t get to have the lives of other, fortunate children.

An unhappy and angry child turned an unhappy and angry young teenager and now, young adult: “I have been feeling unhappy since we got here.. it is not just our circumstances.. the quarantine.. .. The truth is that I was never really 100% happy.. I either was doing well in school but I was missing a boyfriend. Or either in a relationship while not doing well in other fields of my life.. deep down I always feel like something is missing. Because even if I am with a good guy, I still think it could be better”.

“I’ve always thought that I was okay with my childhood as nothing majorly tramatising happened”- we often think of trauma as having to do with blood and broken bones, starvation or incest. But it takes way less than those things to traumatize a child. A child is a very vulnerable little person.

Your experience was traumatizing enough, so much so that you wrote: “I don’t think that I’ll ever feel  ready to marry a guy and have children because of my parents… I don’t want to put them in the same situation as me”.

“But I don’t know how to recover from this childhood, if that’s even possible.. You have advice on how to truly dealt with it?”-

– it will take a combination of things:

1. More emotional understanding of your childhood; deep hurt and anger need to be expressed and processed so that they lose their intensity, be contained in the past, in the there-and-then, and no  longer project themselves into the here-and now.

2. Emotional regulation: you will need to further develop your ability to experience painful emotions and not get overwhelmed by them. This is necessary for #1 above, to be done, and it is also necessary as you control your anger from being projected at your boyfriend, that is, you learn to endure feeling angry at your boyfriend without turning that anger against him in covert or overt ways.

3. Understanding that the children of parents who did not divorce, such as your boyfriend when he was a child, didn’t have it that good. We only imagine that other people have great lives because they didn’t experience our specific challenge. But there are many ways to mess up a child in a home where married parents living together, even living in the same house and never leaving. Seeing that reality will help you feel less anger at your boyfriend.

There is more, but I will wait for your response and we can communicate further, take your time.

anita