Dear Sarah:

A few key quotes from your last post:
* About your parents during your childhood: “my parents were most of the time stressed and miserable.
* About your mother: “most loving mother ever”
* About your feelings: “I love my family that’s for sure, but I am very cold and not very kind or care-giving”

This is my understanding at this point. Hope you consider it and let me know what you think of the accuracy or lack of accuracy of my understanding of your childhood and your situation:

As a child you were neglected, unseen, invisible to your parents. They were not attentive to you. You were lonely. No matter what you felt, you were alone with your feelings. As strong as your feelings were, there was no one that noticed. There was this void, this island of aloneness, a little girl alone, unattended.

You loved your parents, emotionally attached to them, as children naturally are. You needed their attention, their noticing you, telling you what is going on inside of you, make sense of the thoughts and feelings that you didn’t understand.

But they didn’t attend to you. Without their attention, you were stuck with feelings that grew stronger and stronger, with no guidance so to understand what they mean and what you should do about them.

Those feelings were a mixture of love for them, a continuing need for them, anger at them for not seeing you, not attending to you, fear of your own strong feelings, your own anger, what your anger means about you (being a bad girl).

And now, at 25, you are still misunderstanding your anger at your parents. You think it means that you are “very cold and not very kind,” that you are “mean and cold.”

Reality is: you are misunderstanding your anger: your anger is about not having been attended to. It is about your love for your parents not having been returned. Your anger makes you look cold, unkind, mean but the valid message in it is not that you are a cold, unkind and mean person but that you were an unloved child who is still invisible to your parents, still misunderstood.

The reason you analyze anything you feel and doubt so much is because as a child you were left alone to figure out what your feelings meant and you were not equipped, as a child, to do so. You needed your parents’ help to figure that, and you didn’t get that help.

Your thoughts and feelings?

anita