Dear lk09,

I could not figure out why I felt sad, I think I have a little idea now. I was belittling myself again, unknowingly.

I am glad you recognized the negative thoughts that might be fueling your feeling of sadness.

I feel otherwise light and happy within but there still remains a void

Pay attention if that void shrinks when you tend to the toddler within you, and tell her how lovable and precious she is. If you have an old photo of yours from that early period, perhaps you can put it somewhere where you can see it, and send positive thoughts and feelings to that little girl.

I am glad your parents let you off the hook for now. You’re 5 years younger, so if I were you, I’d insist on getting more time to find the man you love. You can tell them that your sister was given till the age of 32, so you too should be given at least a few more years. Be adamant about it. Till now your sister has always had better treatment and was tolerated much more than you were tolerated. It’s time this changed – demand equal treatment because it’s an issue of great importance to you.

And try to relax, dear lk09, you still have plenty of time in front of you, and you’ve made great progress in understanding yourself and taking care of yourself. You’re doing great. And it’s not your fault that your boyfriend left you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re perfectly capable of being a great companion. And you deserve someone who can fully appreciate you. That someone will show up, perhaps when you least expect it, but they will show up, for sure. In the meanwhile, it’s important that you think positive thoughts about yourself, that you love yourself, value yourself, and all the rest will follow, just give it time….

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Tee.

Dear Javier,

regarding your health issues, have the symptoms you’ve mentioned (burning lungs, exhaustion, fever, tiredness and fatigue, palpitations, brain fog muscle pain, and chest pain) subsided over the past year, or they’re still bothering you? You say now it feels like chronic pain, and you can only walk for short distances. This can be due to long covid. Apparently simple breathing exercises have helped people with the same symptoms you listed, so you might want to take a look.

The scariest thing is that my inner child is still stuck in the past. I’m tired of living and dwell on the past. … I’m scared that my inner child will never heal.

The inner child can only heal if there’s a loving, compassionate adult to see it, comfort it, give it love and caring attention that you haven’t received as a child. You were living in a mortal fear of your father harming and perhaps even killing your mother. Probably that’s where your fear of losing your mother stems from. You weren’t comforted, and your mother didn’t or couldn’t leave the situation and take you and the kids away from your father’s threats. You had to live in such an environment for many years. Do you remember when you father stopped threatening her? How did the situation resolve?

I believe your inner child would need soothing and comforting above all other things, because fear seems to be your biggest issue. And now, after covid, you’re even more afraid what will happen with you, since your health has deteriorated. This new situation in which you’ve found yourself only exacerbates you old fears and your old sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

You’d need to soothe your inner child, but it might be difficult right now, feeling rather helpless about your health. Right now, you might be completely identified with your inner child, reliving your old fears. If so – if you cannot find a positive, compassionate, protector figure within yourself – you’d need to find such a figure outside of yourself. It can be a therapist, but since you didn’t have a good experience with therapy, you might look for a health coach or someone to help you with your immediate health problems, and in that way, indirectly, soothe your inner child as well. Or if you’re religious, God can fill the role of a loving, compassionate parental figure, who’ll soothe your pain and give you hope.

Do you have an idea how you could soothe your inner child? Does anyone come to mind?

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Tee.

Dear Felix,

you’re very welcome, I am glad you feel heard and understood.

As a 7 year old child i found myself a way with that water… i feel that if i dont found that method, maybe i’ll be more screwed up now… and i feel emotional typing this.

It shows you were a resourceful and smart kid. You solved your own problem when the adults, including psychologists, couldn’t for full 4 years. Thanks to that, you can now eat almost anything, as long as you drink water with it. That’s not a small success! In the next phase, you can try techniques such as EMDR and EFT (tapping) because they are supposed to work with these types of traumas. Look it up if there’s a therapist who applies EMDR or an EFT practitioner in your area and inquire if they can treat a problem with swallowing.

Rest assured you’re not the only one in the world with this problem. There are people who can’t swallow either due to physical or psychological issues, and I am sure you could find them online if you’re interested. But you’re definitely not the only one, don’t worry.

I think the problem of me struggling with my height is due to that my mother always force me to have good grades as a child… as she saw i have weakness in eating and i have to be better at something. And since then, i really dont wanna be left behind. And due to short height, i feel like i’m left behind with “people that i should be in front on”.

It appears you felt deficient, and your mother treated you as there were something wrong with you. You felt like a failure because you couldn’t meet her expectations about eating. Maybe she was telling you something like “I am so sad about you not eating, I worry about your future. What will become of you? At least you should study well and have good grades. If you had good grades, I wouldn’t worry so much.”

I imagine she had this aura of disappointment and worry about you (the opposite of eagerness and having faith in you), which can destroy a child’s motivation. A child’s self-confidence. If you’re a disappointment, why bother with anything? Why bother with school, with good grades, when you’ll never be good enough for your mother. That’s how a child is reasoning. Why bother with sports either… and so you become lazy and unmotivated. You become someone you’re not proud of, neither are your parents proud of.

But it’s the result of how you were seen by your mother. It’s the result of her seeing you like a disappointment and a reason to worry. And then you started seeing yourself like a disappointment too, and behaving like a disappointment too.

How did you do in school? And later at the university? Did you have good grades, or not so much? What did you study – is it something relevant for your father’s business? Is there a position in your father’s company that interests you the most? I am asking because you could help and work beside the employee who’s currently filling that position, and learn how to do it well, so you can take it over sometime in the future.

As you’re helping in the company, you may also be noticing what needs improvement, and can suggest ideas for improvement to your father. What I am trying to say is that if you’re interested in continuing your father’s business, you can start thinking about how to improve it, modernize it, expand it, innovate it etc… you could bring your personal stamp and contribution to the business. You might be surprised how resourceful and creative you are – just like that 7-year old kid who saw a bottle of water!

When you stop seeing yourself as a disappointment, but as full of potential – things will start changing for you. Do you think you can do that? Do you think you can get rid of the “I am a disappointment” label, and put another one: “I am smart, creative and resourceful – I am full of great ideas”?

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Tee.

Dear Javier,

I am glad your relationship with your mother improved somewhat in the last years. What you’re expressing now is the voice of your inner critic, listing everything you did wrong and how your messed up your life, as well as the relationships with your loved ones. This inner critic is telling you that “I have failed as a son, brother, grandson, nephew, cousin, and friend“. It’s berating you for using drugs as a teen, and then for using work as an escape and neglecting your family for an entire 10 years.

What this inner critic isn’t saying and isn’t even interested in is WHY you used drugs as a teen, why you struggled with depression, why you needed to escape by sailing off to for-away countries. It’s because of the pain you encountered as a child, living with a father who abused your mother and threatened to kill her. It’s because of growing up in such horrendous, frightening circumstances.

You say that you mentally broke down in your 20s after your then-girlfriend had an abortion (I was devastated, heartbroken, and had a mental breakdown. For almost a year I was numb and dead inside.) But I think it was just the final nail in the coffin of your misery and pain, caused  by your traumatic childhood. You say it has always been your dream to have children, preferably in your early 20s, to see them grow up and have their own children, to be in their life for a long time, to see your grandchildren grow.

I believe it was a dream of a better life, a different life than the one you had as a child. You romanticized it, you put all your hopes in it. But when it was so rudely shattered, all your dreams shattered with it too and you went numb and depressed. What you saw as your ticket to a better, happier life wasn’t going to happen. And it broke you. But as I said, it wasn’t the only reason you broke down, it was just the last straw.

The inner critic is judging you and condemning you harshly. But what you’d need to understand is that everything that you’re condemning yourself for is a reaction to your pain. It’s a reaction to the pain of that little boy who had to endure a childhood with such a father, in such horrible circumstances. Your addiction, your depression, your escapism – it’s all a reaction to your pain.

You’d need to acknowledge there’s a wounded inner child in you – this boy is still living in you – and he needs your compassion, not judgment. He needs your understanding, not scolding. He’s been hurt and doesn’t need another punch in the stomach, another cut into his wound – rather, he needs you to see him and have compassion for him. You need to protect him from that inner critic who wants to keep slamming him.

How does this sound to you? Can you find compassion for that little boy who suffered so much while growing up?

Dear Boris1010,

you’re welcome, I am happy to have helped. It’s unfortunate that you haven’t felt protected by your mother, even though she didn’t criticize you herself. Maybe she didn’t want to get into conflict with your stepfather? My father was a little bit like that – he never attacked me or criticized me, but he didn’t defend me much either from my mother’s criticism, so I felt somewhat betrayed. He always tried to be a “peacemaker” and never took a stand, and never really stood up either for me or for himself, for that matter. Maybe your mother didn’t speak up for herself either?

It’s good you’re seeing yourself with new eyes and setting boundaries (I assume with your wife?) of what’s acceptable and what’s not. That’s a great progress, just keep at it!

As for your lady friend, I am not sure she ran away and disappeared because of you. You said that after she moved to another part of the country, she participated in the Zoom meetings for a while, and then she stopped that too. Probably she’d relapsed and felt ashamed to join… But she does have a sponsor now, so I guess she rejoined AA, perhaps with another group? I assume that if she wants help, she can get all the help and support she needs, so don’t blame yourself for her “jumping ship”.

Dear lily,

I go out on dates with people who seem kind, honest, loving, and willing to give more, and yet I feel ZERO attraction or chemistry with them.

It’s because you (the inner child in you) is still attracted to people who remind you of your mother. The inner child hopes that our partner – who is similar to our parent – would finally give us the love we craved but never received from our parent, and that this way we would have a happy ending. That’s the inner child’s unconscious reasoning. That’s why you’re attracted to people who give you very little, who criticize you, who have strong political/religious beliefs, etc.

With people who are kind and loving there’s no chemistry because the inner child doesn’t recognize similarity with your mother.

In order to heal, you’d need to be a loving, compassionate parent to your inner child. This would counteract the harsh, inner critic, which I assume you have and which is the internalized voice of your mother. You’d need to give your inner child love, care, positive attention, freedom to express herself, and a sense that she’s worthy and special (i.e. validation). This will “demagnetize” your craving to get love from someone like your mother…

Dear Boris1010,

you’re welcome. I actually read about that same research about the injured prefrontal cortex which then results in the inability to make decisions. I’ve just looked it up again, it was discovered by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and it’s called somatic marker theory. He discovered that when the prefrontal cortex is injured, the information from our emotional centers in the brain (the limbic, aka mammalian brain – hypothalamus, amygdala etc) doesn’t reach the thinking part of the brain – the neocortex, and without this crucial info, we cannot make decisions. That would be like not having the gut feeling (or in case of injury, the gut feeling not being relayed to the thinking/decision making part of the brain).

It’s good to know you do have a gut feeling with mechanical systems. It’s probably because you know those systems so well, you’ve been working with them for decades, so you can almost “feel” them. If you knew people so well, and primarily, if you knew yourself well – on the emotional level – you would have the same ability to feel things, to read cues… to have emotional intelligence, I guess.

I don’t think I’m “cut out” to mesh well with others. STILL far too self-absorbed, bouncing around in my own little world, which I have to be yanked out of if she wants my attention, for the most part. It’s just how I am, not a deliberate choice. It’s my “default state,” to use a programming term (not a programmer, just familiar with what goes into it). I can haul myself out of it, but it’s an effort of will, and requires steady attention. It’s “work,” not something that comes naturally.

Well, you did manage to yank yourself out of your autistic little world for the sake of your lady friend. And she didn’t even need to do much, you were eager to reach out and open up… So yes, I think your experience with your lady friend was a “jump-start” on getting back in touch with your feelings. It’s good that it happened, and maybe it’s good that it ended too, because you wouldn’t have been ready, you still need to do work on yourself. But you’re moving in the right direction.

To help yourself, you can think of what is it that you felt when relating to her, what is it that made you eager to communicate and open up? You said there was a mutual understanding (“I’ve done that too!”), after which you didn’t feel so guilty any more. I guess you developed some compassion for yourself, when witnessed by another fellow traveler/sufferer?

You’ve never received compassion from your stepfather (as a side note, I don’t know about receiving compassion from your mother, and in general how your mother treated you after the divorce?), on the contrary he criticized and condemned you all the time. With your lady friend, and I guess in the entire AA community, you haven’t felt criticized – you felt understood and listened to, you received positive attention, you received compassion and understanding, you received support and encouragement. All those things you lacked in your childhood… I think the AA community allowed you to open up, it was a supportive, loving environment. And then your heart leapt to one particular woman there. But it was AA that enabled you to feel safe to open up.

So I guess that’s the precondition for you opening up to people and coming out of your shell: a loving, supportive environment. If your wife offers a hostile, criticizing environment, that’s something to consider. You’d need to be seen with new eyes, but before your wife can do it (if she’s able to do it at all), it’s you who’d need to see yourself with new eyes. See yourself as this loving and caring, enthusiastic person, who’s reaching out, helping others, sharing his story honestly, sharing his pain and struggles, and being his authentic self… See yourself as the new you, the real you, who’s been hiding in his shell for so long, but now his time has come… Do you think you can do that?

Dear Boris1010,

you’re welcome, and it’s Tee-Kay 🙂

I’ve been wanting to mention your marriage, because that’s what you’re left with and what you’re living every day… Your relationship with your wife is important and I wonder if you’d like to talk a bit more about it.

You’ve said you got married at the age of 19, that you were quite immature for marriage, and that in your 30s you stopped drinking. Which means that you’ve been drinking at the time you got married and in the first more than a decade of your marriage. But your wife tolerated it? Or you were in the navy and not so much at home in those first years? Was it your wife who forced you to quit drinking in your 30s?

After you quit drinking, you became clinically depressed and numb, a little like a robot. Is it then that your wife started having affairs with other men? How come she never wanted to leave you? What do you think you provided for her? Security? She must also have a feeling of superiority, always mentioning your past transgressions, as if she herself didn’t have any. And you have a sense of inferiority, believing you’re hollow, cannot think straight, cannot trust your judgment etc etc… So the two of you are a match in that sense. As long as you feel inferior, she’ll be bringing it up and reminding you how flawed you are indeed…

If you’d like to talk a bit more about how your marriage got to be the way it is, please do so, it might turn out helpful.