Dear X:

My question was: “In an earlier post you wrote: ‘when I became a teenager, I was sort of jealous of my parents being together and enjoying each other’s company whereas I was kind of an additional alien element’. Can you elaborate on you feeling like ‘an additional alien element’?”

I had to pull your answer from your long, tree-filled recent post. Here it is: “if there are three of us, say, we go for a walk, my parents are together, hand in hand, and I am on the side, either forward or behind them, like a dog on a leash. Forward or behind – mostly because most sidewalks or paths are not enough for three people to walk together hand in hand. And so it is natural for my parents, as partners, to be together and I am sort of on the side.

And, if there are three of us, then, say, if I want to go to the left, my parents would most likely be in agreement and want to go to the right. So I have to comply……it is stressed everywhere that the relationship between the parents comes first”

My thoughts about your answer: your feeling of being “an additional alien element” to your parents’ relationship to each other was not limited to the times the three of you took a walk outdoors where the actual paths were not wide enough for three.

Your family unit growing up was made of three people: your father, your mother, yourself. Two of the people treated the third as an outsider often.

No doubt, parents should invest in having a healthy, loving relationship. It is healthy for the child to witness a healthy, loving relationship between the parents-

but if the relationship between the parents includes rejecting the child as an interference with their adult relationship, expressing to the child that she is in their way, that is damaging to the rejected child.

You wrote: “……it is stressed everywhere that the relationship between the parents comes first”- I disagree. The relationships between all members of the immediate family (those living in the home) should come first.

You wrote:  “at least this is how I feel (but my feelings may be deceiving..”- when you felt rejected from the family unit (your mother-father-you), an “alien element”- that feeling was not deceiving. The most accurate information about one’s childhood reality is in what a child feels. Reason is, the child doesn’t have prior experience which affects the perception of her reality. Therefore I trust your feeling of being an alien element in your family unit to be the reality of what was your childhood.

You wrote:  “I sometimes literally feel like I am drowning in all the minute details, when it seems that A is A, but if you look at another angle, then A is no longer A…mixed and tangled with so many nuances that I don’t know where to start or how to approach it”-

your drowning in details, seeing trees but not the forest, interferes with effective communication and function in relationships with others, I believe.

anita