Dear Dougaldog,

you are welcome. Wishing you well!

Dear Sam,

I’m emotionally tired and really needing a place to vent, but if anyone has any advice about how I should handle them, that would be great.

I don’t know if you’re reading this, since you haven’t responded to anita, but I understand your frustration. You’re trying to help your family members, but they refuse help, they refuse your advice, even though just days earlier they were complaining to you, even raging, about somebody mistreating them.

I know the feeling: my mother complains a lot about having so many chores, and she is already elderly and gets tired easily. But when I suggest she could hire someone to help her occasionally (she can afford it financially), she refuses. She rather complains, portraying herself as the victim. This is just a small example, but she has been doing that forever, always finding reasons to be unhappy, and yet never doing anything to help herself.

I’ve learned to let go of trying to make her happy and help her, because it’s in vain. She’d rather be miserable.

With you, I believe you too would need to learn to let go of trying to help, because it seems like your family members prefer to remain in their anger and rage, portraying themselves as victims, rather than do something to help themselves. You’d need to let go of the urge to help them, even though it’s a normal urge – to help the people we love and care about. But sometimes it’s just impossible, and the only thing we can do is to disengage – for our own good.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear Rachal,

Yes, we are only happy and content because we are living in US and tend to forget about this problem but we have planned to tackle it once B is done with his therapy that he has just started. I dont know after all this how do I leave him but if not that then probably we will have to take couple therapy because I am still disgusted and dont know how ro feel about and what to do.

It’s great that your boyfriend has started therapy, to deal with his issues related to his parents. Is he clear on the goal of therapy? What would he like to achieve? Is it to be able to better cope and eventually resist his parents’ pressure, and feel free to enjoy his relationship with you?

Also, what about your plans after graduation? Do you want to stay in the US or return to India? Do you both wish the same?

I think these are all questions to consider. Perhaps at this point it would make sense to give it some time and see how his therapy is progressing. His sexual fantasies might lessen too, once he resolves the core issues with his parents.

Dear Rachal,

you are welcome. I am not anita, btw 🙂

The situation with his parents does seem pretty complicated. You said you’ve been together for 12 years and living together for 4 – does it mean they have been against you all this time?

I dont know if I should neglect all the good things in him and the fact that he has kept me so happy throughout 12 years or should I go ahead with not getting involved with this man at all? I am in a big dilemma because both of our families have been involved and everything.

When you said this, I thought your families were tightly knit and that’s one of the reasons why you are in a dilemma. But it seems the opposite is true, since his parents don’t like you at all:

his parents are against me and they have stopped picking up his calls, his mother writes to him every now and then accusing him of ruining the family name and ruining his dad’s health,… they just dont wana agree to this marriage

That’s pretty bad. The conflict with his family, which has been ongoing, seems like a much bigger cause of stress than his work stress… He is forced to choose between the woman he loves and his parents, whom he loves too, but who see you as someone who is ruining their family. Perhaps this conflict even has to do with his sexual fantasies, in which he basically wants to humiliate you and degrade you to a sex object — it might be a part of him who wants to please his parents. I don’t know, just a thought…

So definitely, a lot of therapy is needed… But also, how are you feeling in all this? How are you feeling about his family being so mean to you and rejecting you?

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear Elizabeth,

I don’t know if you’ll be reading this, but I would like to say that I understand you and your motivations, and that I don’t think you deceived anybody here on purpose. I know that in case of trauma, people sometimes don’t remember exactly the timeline of their abuse, and have things mixed up in their memory in terms of what happened when. But besides the mixed up dates of when exactly you met Christopher and when exactly he broke up with you, I believe you told the truth of what happened, and that he indeed treated you badly and caused you a lot of suffering.

This doesn’t mean you had no part in creating the situation, because obviously you stayed with this guy, who wasn’t treating you well, and you had unprotected sex with him. But as I said before, you did it because you didn’t love and respect yourself enough, and you hoped that he might end up loving you and respecting you some day (which was the longing of your inner child). All that is a consequence of your childhood, of having being abused and put down by your parents, and developing a strong need to get love and validation from people who remind you of your parents.

That’s why you stayed in bad relationships, where you didn’t respect yourself, nor did the men you were with respect you. In the relationship with Christopher, you respected yourself so little that you 1) offered to hide from your family and the rest of the world that he is the baby’s father, and 2) you stayed with him even after his despicable behavior during your pregnancy and miscarriage. It was him who broke up with you eventually, not vice versa.

But it isn’t your fault because you didn’t know better – your own emotional wounds prevented you from standing up for yourself and leaving this selfish, callous man. I trust that you suffered greatly at the hands of this man, while at the same time being unable to untangle yourself and let him go. That’s why I must say I don’t agree with anita when she suggests you exaggerated some things – I don’t believe you did. Rather, you allowed bad things to happen to you because of your past wounding.

I do hope you continue to seek healing and deal with your childhood emotional wounds as well. If you ever wish to share your thoughts and feelings again, you are welcome.

Wishing you all the best!

Dear Ryan,

welcome back, good to hear from you! How did the move go? Are you satisfied with your new job?

As I said, I don’t question your words, I trust that you wouldn’t invent these things, but that truly, the women you are attracted to are quite similar (perhaps professionally successful, but emotionally insecure, with low self-esteem, sometimes depressed). And that they see you as a great guy, but you don’t see yourself as one, and after a while you leave.

The other problem seems to be that you can’t seem to get to the root of your emotional problems (specially “lack of empathy and lack of feelings of love”), and that you don’t recall anything disturbing from your childhood, which might have led to those problems:

I am filled with sadness and pain. I have never found out why. 15 years have passed since I first walked into a therapists office, and while I’ve learned techniques to manage my depression, I’ve never been able to find it’s possible emotional roots.

I hoped he could unlock some memories from my childhood that may be have hindered my emotional growth.

Do you really not recall any instances where you felt hurt by either of your parents? Or where you felt scared, or misunderstood, or treated unfairly? Do you remember your childhood pretty well, or do you feel there are large parts missing and you don’t have memory of it?

Dear Elizabeth,

I am so sorry that your family was so unfair to you, that they treated you like a black sheep and accused of all of their problems. They felt better about themselves when they would put you down and denigrate you:

There was a point in time when everyone took joy out of bashing me. Because i was different i was used as a yard stick for badness. My own siblings would comfort each other by saying you are better off than Elizabeth.

They have also falsely accused you of the things you haven’t done:

I have heard my own father accuse me of lasting after my brother inlaw because i exposed his infidelity. My own sister accusing me of wanting her husband when i had never ever shook hands with him.

My other sister get so pissed that she got laid off instead of me. My father accuse me of being the cause of my sisters being laid off as well as his own retrenchment.

I can imagine how horribly alone and unloved you felt. To experience such bullying and hostility from your own family, from those who were supposed to love you and protect you.

That’s a terrible trauma, Elizabeth, but the good news is that you are determined to help yourself and heal… and you can heal, I promise you.

You said earlier:

When I started my journey of emotional healing I had no idea just how deep the wound run. Because I learnt a long time ago to self soothe, I never really paid attention to my feeling as I felt like me coming unhinged will be a great inconvenience to the people around me.

How did you self-soothe as a child?

I have suffered depression for so long but no one in my family knows. My sister once said to me my feelings are not important enough for them to care about.

That was just one more reason to feel unimportant, unseen, like nobody wants to know you and what’s really going on with you.

So I kept putting Bandages all over my heart. I tucked away and swept everything under a carpet. I never got upset or spoke up about what I wanted because I was worried that they would leave me.

I guess you didn’t dare to express your feelings and stand up for yourself in your adult relationships either? You were hurting but said nothing? That’s why you probably stayed with Christopher for 2 years, while knowing he is rather selfish and wouldn’t be there for you when you needed him.

One of the first steps in healing, besides accepting yourself fully, is to feel all your emotions. It’s best to do it in therapy – to allow yourself to feel your anger and your sadness and your disappointment and your disgust – at various family members for treating you so poorly. You don’t do it to their faces, you don’t knock on their door and start accusing them and attacking them – but you allow yourself to feel your anger in a therapeutic setting. Because validating our emotions is so important for healing.

Anita has already mentioned that your anger at Christopher probably stems from a deeper anger – anger at your own family. You have all the right to be angry at them, and you can process it in therapy. And when you’ve worked on it, you can decide what kind of relationship you want to continue with your family. Are you in touch with them, btw? How is your relationship with them at the moment?

My family scares me. My parents scare me even more.

I can imagine that, specially if you’re a little girl, who needs their protection and soothing, and all she gets is bashing and accusations. Now, as the adult Elizabeth, you have the chance to say No to their abuse and protect yourself. To cut contact even.

My biggest fear is they dont have my back.

They don’t. Not only that, but they are hostile towards you (The things they say about me behind my back are awful.) It seems they behave more like enemies than a loving family. So you’d need to set boundaries in your relationship with your family members – maybe with some of them you need to reduce contact to zero. To protect your mental health, and also to show that you care about yourself, that you value yourself. You are not a doormat for anybody, not even for your family members.

Dear Elizabeth,

I have been reading over all the posts I made over the past month or so. and I have seen a trend. as sad as it sounds, I think I have been trying to fix my first relationship because all four men I have dated in my life have been a replica of him. my first ghost.

Usually when there is a pattern in our relationships, it’s not that the first guy traumatized us (although it can be pretty significant too), but it goes even further back, to our childhood. It’s the emotional wounds from our childhood and the unmet emotional needs that drive us to try to satisfy them in adulthood. And we try to get it from people who remind us of our parents. Anita talked about it already.

I think you’ve described the main problem here:

Growing up, I noticed that my parents had very little regard for my opinion and even less interest in getting to learn about who exactly I was and my thoughts. What made it worse is my parents were the type who would use your pain to manipulate you into submitting into acting in a certain way or to them. I may have been young, but I had a strong head on my shoulders. Had my parents taken time to get to know me, they would have realised that I was capable of taking care of myself. Being a precocious child, my body developed much faster than most. and so from a young age, I started being propositioned by men old enough to be my father. Which is disgusting if I may add.

I found out pretty early in life how frustrating it is to try and get someone to notice your intellect when their focus is on your body. That offended me so much so that I felt like I needed to fix these disgusting men. And there lay my problem. I would give men who found me physically appealing a chance all in the hope that I would win them over with my genuineness and kindness into seeing me as much more than a sexual object. That they would see me as a person worth taking seriously and not some sexual object.

You were attracted to men who saw you only as a sexual object and didn’t care about your intelligence and your other values, such as your kindness and genuineness. And the reason why you were attracted to those superficial men is that you craved recognition from people who reminded you of your parents – this is how our emotional wounds work.

Your core wound seems to be one of not feeling valued for your intelligence and your true self, but being seen as a sexual object. The wound of unworthiness. In order to heal that wound, you’ve been trying to prove yourself to various undeserving men.

The real solution would be to give validation to that little girl who felt unseen and unworthy for who she really was. You, the adult Elizabeth, would need to be the parent to that little girl and tell her how brilliant and amazing she is, how proud of her you are, how worthy and special she is. This is what she needs to hear. That’s how you can liberate yourself from seeking to hear those same words from men….

How does this sound to you?