Dear Bee:

You are welcome, good to read back from you. I am fine, thank you.

Apri 15: “I am still struggling with these feelings daily… anger at both my ex and myself… forgiving myself is difficult. There is very real grief and sorrow over how everything turned out and the harm that was done to both myself and the person involved with me… thinking about the past… I am constantly worrying my ex will have experienced trauma from our relationship and will be negatively impacted in the future. Like Gabor Mate writes, ‘the body remembers the score’” –

– we’ve been focusing on your young-adulthood relationship with your ex as the source of your feelings of guilt and struggles to forgive yourself, but I think that we’ve been focusing on the wrong thing all along.

You started your thread on April 7 with these words: “I do not intend for the background information to in any way excuse my behaviors, only to provide context. I had a rough home-life growing up. My father was emotionally rejecting and my mother was emotionally neglectful. The threat of violence loomed when my father was around. I learned to repress and ignore my feelings” – I don’t think that this is background information; I think that this is central information in regard to your struggles with guilt and forgiveness.

You wrote, still April 7: “I tend to blame and criticize myself heavily when things go wrong… I feel like a villain and as though everything was my fault” – the strong tendency to blame yourself and to view yourself as a villain took hold within you during your childhood, way before you met your ex.

Let’s look at what you posted today and how I think it relates to your still ongoing childhood emotional experience:

“I am still struggling with… anger” – anger at your emotionally rejecting father and at your emotionally neglectful mother, on one hand, and anger at yourself, on the other hand.

“forgiving myself is difficult. There is very real grief and sorrow over how everything turned out and the harm that was done” – You feel real grief and sorrow over how it turned out that you (mistakenly) believe that you harmed any one of your parents, or both. But truth is, the child that you were was harmed by them, not the other way around… and through no fault of your own.

“I am constantly worrying my ex will have experienced trauma from our relationship and will be negatively impacted in the future. Like Gabor Mate writes, ‘the body remembers the score’” – I think that it is your body that remembers the score, remembering your childhood trauma, a trauma that is still negatively impacting you. Isn’t it?

anita