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.

Dear Kibou,

it’s okay to respond whenever you feel like it, without feeling obliged. I do like it when people respond, but the relationships here are not the same as relationships with one’s friends and relatives, so no need to feel obliged. It’s okay to write only if you feel like expressing yourself and sharing.

From what you’ve said, it appears one of your core wounds is your unmet emotional needs, and feeling that you’re a burden if you express those needs at all. You were there for others and didn’t expect, or didn’t dare to expect, that others would be there for you.

When you comforted your mother when you were just 2 years old, the child doesn’t do it because they have developed empathy at that age, but primarily because they fear that their own existential needs won’t be met. If something happens to your mother, you as a small, helpless child wouldn’t be able to survive on your own. That’s why a child tries to do everything in their power to comfort the parent, to make the parent happy, so the parent could continue to take care of them. It’s a coping mechanism, a survival mechanism for the child. If you help your mother the best you can and don’t represent a burden to her, there’s a greater chance that she’d take care of you, and that your own survival would be ensured. That’s how the child’s mind works, unconsciously.

So I believe you became an empath, i.e. attuned to other people’s needs, out of necessity. You too had needs but you suppressed them, basically to survive. When you got a little older and when the thinking brain started developing, you probably started rationalizing why those other people (your parents and siblings, later your friends) can’t really be there for you when you need them – because they are hurt people, you told yourself.

This continued for many years, where you’ve tried to help various hurt people whom you met on your journey. You would involve in “deep conversations” with them and offered to be their shoulder to cry on. This was your way of bonding. You didn’t ask for much in return, just that they keep in touch. When they wouldn’t, when they would ghost you, that’s when you finally felt hurt and abandoned.

I also understand now that some of those people might really be wounded (suffering from social anxiety, as you said), that’s why they would often ghost you. But also, many of your relationships seem to be long-distance, with people whom you didn’t spend much time with in the first place, since you do move a lot, so that’s also something to consider. It’s good that you’re now better able to set boundaries and not feel the pressure to reply immediately, but to honor your own needs and timing.

It’s also great that during your group healing sessions in 2020, you could allow yourself to change the dynamic from always being a helper to asking for help yourself too. At first you were sharing your painful experiences with a smile on your face, not wanting to be a burden, but then the group members made you realize it’s okay to be needy. They encouraged you to ask for help. That’s a great progress.

You said you’ve done most of your healing with the theta healing modality. I don’t know much about it, I’ve just checked it now a little, and it seems it works on uncovering one’s false beliefs. Does it work with emotions too, and how?

When you do feel an emotion, it’s good that you can name it, but it might be good to also stay with it for a while, without immediately rationalizing it and trying to get rid of it. Try to see where it’s coming from and which need of yours hasn’t been met. Try not to immediately explain it away, telling yourself that yes, you’re hurt but the person who’s hurt you is hurt too. Because by doing the latter, you immediately overwrite your own pain with empathy for the other person, while your own pain and your own need remain unaddressed.

Dear Elie,

how are you? I’d like to address something which might be stopping you from continuing the conversation here. In your previous thread, you wrote:

Eventually ends up making me feel like I’m not capable of being understood due to my own complications inside. And always have deeper feelings beyond what people try to comfort me by.

On this thread, you reached out for help again, expressed your pain, but you didn’t describe the reasons for your pain. It took several rounds for me to understand roughly what the problem is, to sort of pinpoint what the dynamic is that’s causing you pain. You were thrilled that I “figured it out” (Yes that is very spot on as I’d say, I love how you could figure it out). Perhaps for you it meant that finally, someone understands what you’re trying to say. Because in the past you had the experience of people not understanding you “due to your own complications inside”.

But when I mentioned it wasn’t easy to figure it out because you were mysterious, and Anita mentioned that you express yourself in a vague manner, perhaps you got the impression again that you’re not understood, or that you’re criticized for being you, for expressing yourself the way you do. So this might have felt like another rejection for you, similar to what you’ve already experience in the past, with your parents or other people.

I’d like to apologize if I’d hurt you with my remark. I realize now it might have not been on purpose that you express yourself vaguely, and that you talk more about your feelings and impressions and less about the “facts” of what’s going on. It does make it harder for others to understand – specially people who don’t know you – but it’s your style. So I’d like to invite you to keep sharing here, even if you can’t express it super clearly and factually.

So far you’ve shared that your parents are rather materialistically oriented and have trouble understanding that you don’t have the same ideas about what an ideal job or career means. They put pressure on you and your brother, and it causes both of you stress and harms your well-being. It appears your brother is trying to please them, but he’s breaking down. With your choice of studies, are you too trying to please them? Is it something they think is best for your future career, or it’s something closer to your heart? Please share more if you feel like.