Dear Peter:

Basically, you are afraid and you have been excessively fearful for a long time. Fear is a very powerful emotion, the most powerful emotion there is, I believe.

Your first sentence in our original post is: “Even though I was raised well and had a lot of options, my life is a mess.”

Well, you were not raised well, unfortunately. The foundation, the way you were raised, was not solid and this is why your life is a mess.

How can this help you, this exploration of your childhood, you asked. My answer is: it has to be looked at, understood, so to heal from, manage, live better with the excess, ongoing fear (anxiety). There is a need to go back to your childhood because there is a scared little boy there, waiting to be rescued and YOU are the hero he is waiting for.

Your mother may very well be a good woman who has never mistreated you but she was weak, scared herself. Your parents divorced and she was your primary caretaker, as I understand it. You needed a strong mother and she was not. Therefore you were scared as a child. And you still are.

You may be as or more talented than the students you helped years ago who are now successful career wise, but they probably had a stronger caretaker, parent and so they were less afraid than you are all along. It is the fear that stops us in our tracks.

How does this help you? How could it help you? If you explore this further with a competent, empathetic psychotherapist- or otherwise- you will get the understanding that you need to be very gentle, very empathetic and very patient with yourself. You will understand that there was nothing wrong with you; that there is nothing wrong with you but fear. With Empathy for yourself, with the understanding your difficulties stem not from a faulty character, but from fear and fear alone, you will practice these things that you need to practice: empathy, gentleness and patience with yourself.

With those three things you have a good chance to shrink that anxiety. Take small steps, fit those steps not to what you are supposed to be doing at your age, but fit them to a scared boy, the scared boy that you are.

Is this something you can do?

anita