Dear DaveF:

You are welcome. It is a pleasure for me to communicate with a person as kind and gracious as you. This will be a long post because I want to attend to different things before I answer your question best I can. You may be less grateful to me as you read this post because I will bring up things that I imagine will disturb you. Please take your time reading, and you are welcome to stop reading at any time. My purpose is not to disturb you, but to bring up ideas that may improve your life-experience long- term if you evaluate, process and accept them to be true or partly true.

You shared that you were “too young” when your mother and father divorced, that you and your mother lived in the U.K. while your father lived in a different country for 2.5 years, and you didn’t meet him until he moved to the U.K., when you were “a little older”. When you met him, you were “very scared and hesitant towards him”, your mother says.

“I always felt acutely sad for my mother when we were with my father and the woman that he had an affair with when with my mother.. I was always torn when going to my dad’s (and his new partner’s) house, because they both hurt my mother so much (affairs etc.)”-

– your father had an affair with a woman “when with (your) mother”- I don’t know how long your parents’ marriage lasted legally, but reads like practically, they lived together for a short time, a few years at the most, and were separated when you were too young to notice or remember (maybe you were only a  baby). And yet, you felt “acutely sad” because your father had an affair or affairs at a time you can’t remember, too long ago.

I am assuming that your mother told you about the affair or affairs when you were a young boy, otherwise, you wouldn’t have known. It would have been a good thing for you, to be shielded from this unnecessary information. If you were shielded from this information, you wouldn’t have felt acutely sad for your mother and perhaps feeling guilty for visiting your father, and having to be nice to the people you believed hurt your mother so badly.

If I am correct, and it is your mother who told you about an affair or affairs,  then she had burdened you unnecessarily, placing you in a very uncomfortable position whenever you were around your father, and otherwise, being acutely aware of what a child should not be made aware of. When a mother expresses to a child in his first decade of life, that she is very hurt and sad, if she does this excessively and repeatedly, the child is not mature or objective enough to not sink into his mother’s hurt and sadness, and drown in it, so to speak. A child feels too intensely for his mother, her hurt is magnified in his mind.

Acutely made aware of your mother’s hurt, you did not want to cause her further hurt, you wanted to make her happy and shower her with love  (“I did not want to cause my mother any further hurt.. I wanted to make happy and shower with love”)- you wanted to make it up to your mother for what she did not receive from your father, (or from any other man, I assume): (1) protect her from hurt, (2) shower her with love.

“I could not bare to upset her.. I felt responsible often for my mother’s happiness as a child because I knew how hurt she had been by my father”- this is a recipe for a bad childhood, to have things turned upside down: the child feeling responsible for the mother, instead of the other way around.

About your father, you wrote that during your visits at his home, he was very distant emotionally and tough on you, that he had a temper and disliked children, that he got “very angry at normal child-like things, such as dropping something”, that you “walked on egg-shells around him so as not to make him angry”, that you constantly fought for his approval and never felt you had it.

“I was a sensitive child”, “I am admittedly a sensitive person, and I feel emotions very acutely, especially empathy, and I often feel others’ sadness strongly”- I don’t think that you were born more sensitive than other babies, I think that you were made more sensitive than other children because your mother exposed you to information that would greatly disturb any child. She exposed you to too much of her hurt and sadness, and that would disturb any child as well. And you were then exposed to your father’s temper and dislike of children during your visits at his home.

Parents need to contain their strong emotions so to not overwhelm their child, because the child’s brain naturally magnifies his parents’ emotions. It seems to me that you were overwhelmed by your mother’s expressed hurt and during visits with your father- you were overwhelmed by his anger.

“I definitely wanted to run away from this, and I felt so lonely when away from my mother.. have been so emotionally distraught with being left by people and this definitely is compounded with friends and close relationships as well”-

–  when you started feeling responsible for your mother (to protect her from further hurt, to shower her with love), there was no longer anyone to acknowledge you as a child, a child who needs the protection and love of a protector. The child that you were was left alone while you tried to be an adult for your mother, an impossible task for any child.

“the comparison with my mother – the female care giver whom I didn’t want to upset, and my current partner, the now female care giver whom again, I do not want to upset. Knowing these things really is helping in understanding why I am struggling with these matters. Is there anything you would suggest that helps with these feelings?”-

– You shared earlier that you cannot afford therapy. If you could- therapy with a competent, quality therapist would be best. Other than that, let me know what you think/ feel about what I posted here today. Posting here in your thread may lead you to a better understand of yourself, and that will be a good thing. I suggest that you take it a post at a time, at your pace (no rush). Posting and reading will at times be distressing and maybe overwhelming, so take your time and remember: reading and posting here is a matter of your choice, you can stop any time.

anita