Dear Mia:

I went back to your previous threads. In one a year and 7 months ago you wrote about your mother:

“she is very volatile and I don’t trust her happy moods. I think there is always anger and sadness underneath. It’s hard to love her because she is very demanding of me. she often makes her happiness my responsibility. and I am a bad daughter ungrateful/cold/demanding/selfish etc etc if I can’t meet her needs. I am very anxious about her being angry or suicidal again.”

No wonder you chose imaginary relationships with others: the real relationship with your mother, the most powerful relationship you ever had (because it formed you as you were a child, in your “formative years)- was so painful and so demanding, impossible to satisfy.

You asked here: “How do I get out of my head and connect with people properly?”

Competent psychotherapy is necessary for you, I believe, considering the horrific experience with your mother. Children- and later the adults we become- minimize horrific childhoods, but in reality my childhood and your childhood as I read it, was indeed horrific. So it takes healing, gradual, over time.

In the safe environment of therapy, with a competent, empathetic therapist, you get involved in the first safe relationship in your life- the one with your therapist (if he/ she is, again, competent, reliable, trustworthy)- and from there you get to evaluate people in your life and take beginning steps of forming good relationships with others.

Please post again, anytime.

anita