Dear Dave:

Your fear of hurting your mother/ the women in your adult life on one hand (“I could not bare to upset her… My ongoing fears of.. making the caregiving females in my life unhappy or sad”),  and your fear of being alone on the other hand (“the fear of being on my own is definitely a theme for me.. I have struggled with abandonment issues for many years.. My ongoing fears of loneliness…I have never really lived on my own.. some kind of separation anxiety from my mother as a child”) have been quite pronounced since your childhood.

You shared about your experience when you visited your father, that he was: “very distant emotionally and tough on me.. my father just didn’t know how to comfort an upset child… I definitely walked on egg-shells around him so as not to make him angry”- I understand why you felt alone and lonely when you were with your distant father, why you were afraid of your angry father.

But  why did you feel alone and lonely and afraid when with your “very comforting and loving” mother, a woman who showed you “such love and compassion“: why was living with her.. not a good experience either, an experience that led you to fear being abandoned and left alone?

“I have always been so close with my mother“, you wrote. But was she so close with you, I ask myself, and it is clear to me that when she was very hurt, sad and/ or upset– she was emotionally distant from you, withdrawing her precious comfort, love and compassion away from you, separating from you emotionally=> leading to your anxiety about being separated from her.

“I felt trapped between two parents – my mother whom I wanted to make happy and shower with love and prevent from being upset.. I definitely wanted to run away from this“- you wanted to make your mother happy and shower her with love so to.. prevent her from feeling hurt, upset, etc., and in so doing, to prevent her from abandoning you emotionally. In different ways, you were abandoned by both parents, and you felt trapped alone. You wanted to run away from that dreadful experience of feeling so alone.

“(I) was acutely aware how hurt she had been by my father“- the acute part is that when she expressed being hurt by your father, she also withdrew from you emotionally, and you felt.. acutely alone.

“I could not bare to upset her…My ongoing fears of loneliness and making the caregiving females in my life unhappy or sad“- I think that .. again, you couldn’t bare to upset her because when she was upset, you were left terribly alone. You feared her hurt, sadness, unhappiness, upset-ness because these emotions in her meant that you were alone. Fast forward, you as an adult, fear these emotional states in the women in your life.

“I felt the need to protect her from my fathers hurt.. I felt such empathy for her real struggles, and wanted to protect her from the tough world“- I think that when alone and abandoned by both parents, you felt the need to protect yourself from being alone in the tough world by changing your mother’s mood, showering her with love, changing her hurt, sadness and upset .. into Happy.. so that you are no longer alone.

If you can relate to any part of what I wrote here, please let me know, and we’ll take it from there.

anita