Dear X:

I believe it is possible for you to get clarity of thought-and-emotion, no longer be lost in the forest, “drowning in all the minute details” and “hitting a dead end”.

You will be then able to decide yourself what details are important at any one context, and what details are not important (and therefore do a disservice to effective communication). You will no longer leave it to the listener or the reader to decide which detail matters and which doesn’t (“I tend to give too many details.. I don’t ever know what might be important and what not.”)

I believe that the reason that you don’t know what detail is important and what is not is because there are certain very important Details in your life during those Formative Years of childhood that are too distressing for you to see, rationally and emotionally.

These are those Details, provided by you:

“my parents are together, hand in hand, and I am on the side… like a dog on a leash”

“this is exactly how they behaved – the two of them vs one (me)…”

” …an orphan as the protagonist. When I read those books, I would identify myself with the protagonist… And so I started to distance myself from my parents to the point that my mother still sometimes raises the issue of me treating them as if they were not the closest people that I have on this planet…”

Paraphrasing the above: you grew up feeling like an outsider, less valuable, like a dog on a leash to a couple of humans, like an orphan, alone.

You wrote that you distanced yourself from your parents- a child does that only after being already distanced by the parents repeatedly and for a long time.

In your original post you wrote: “What I hope to find out is a) what are the reasons for my more than weird choice of partners given that I grew up in a totally normal family with NO dysfunctional relationships.”

Well, clearly, being treated as less valuable is dysfunctional enough (in this context, dysfunctional means that your parents hurt you enough to cause you ongoing/chronic problems with mental clarity and relationships) .

So, I pointed to the Details, the trees that need to be seen. Well, you brought them up, you stated them, doesn’t it mean that you see them fully? No, it only means you are somewhat aware of them but not adequately. The seeing I am referring to is rational-and-emotional. As a child you felt significant pain which you distracted yourself from, dissociated from best you can so now, you don’t even remember what you felt then. Those emotions are way below the surface.

When you wrote that you felt like “a dog on a leash”- that doesn’t FEEL much to you now, does it? But as a child, it felt a whole lot.

In a healing process, if you take it on, perhaps in competent, quality psychotherapy, you will unearth those feelings, see with your mind (rational mind) and your heart (emotional mind). What will follow will be mental clarity and functional relationships.

anita