Dear Lyla Drew:

It could be that you are repeating a dynamic you had with a parent: reaching out to an unavailable parent again and again, believing the parent doesn’t love you because it is something you did wrong, made mistakes, wasn’t good enough daughter. A child, brain still forming, doesn’t understand, wouldn’t believe that her parent is simply … not available to love, that is too threatening to believe. So the child believes instead that the parent is a loving person, only the child is not deserving it yet. So the child tries and tries to deserve it.

Is this the case?

anita