Dear Lisa:

My thoughts following Lisa’s Story:

I believe that your main lifetime and current problem is the frequent distress/ emotional pain/suffering that you experience on an hourly and daily basis.

You wrote: “I have kinda always hoped a therapist could end my suffering. They never can. I am really at the point now where I need relief that can’t wait.”

This ongoing, daily distress depletes your energy on an ongoing basis. You wrote: “Daily life, interactions, bills, work…I can barely pull them off and then I have nothing left… Most of my energy has been spent keeping a roof over my head.”

Depleted, you are can barely manage the most basic daily tasks. You are “always in survival mode with little bursts of ambition that fizzle out and then I just remain in survival mode.”

There are calm moments in your life, when you daydream perhaps. Sometimes nothing particularly distressing is happening, but you know, from experience, that soon enough “Something else will happen and it will be too much for me.” So the expectation is that a great distress is just about to happen, anytime.

It is my understanding that as a young child and throughout your living in your childhood home (until your mid twenties),your experience was that you were Alone (title of thread), that is, unattended to. Bad things happened to you and you didn’t understand why they were happening. It felt like people hated you, and you didn’t know what you did to bring it about. You didn’t know what you did to bring about painful experiences in your life and what you can possibly do to make your life better.

When you did things for others, like clean for them, do their laundry, you were at best tolerated, but not loved. You did not experience love, being valued for who you are. You experienced being tolerated, at best, for what you do for others.

Being unloved, being shown no empathy, you were not taught to survive, not to thrive (“I have learned nothing more than to just survive.”)

There was no empathy for you in your childhood home, no one cared to notice your distress; no one cared to find out your thoughts and feelings and help you. You were Alone. And a child cannot do more than survive, at best, being so alone on a regular basis. As a result, your anxiety fired up and expressed itself in the symptoms of ADHD, OCD, bed wetting, over-eating, depression and dysfunction.

What to do now?

Compassion for yourself: this is what you severely lacked in your life and this is what you desperately need. I don’t know if you considered this before, but I suggest you consider or re-consider applying for disability benefits (income, housing, medical)  so that you can stop working and so, reduce your daily, ongoing distress some.

Understand, with self compassion, that your first priority is to attend to your distress, to your suffering. You have suffered way too much and way too long. Intend to attend to that little, suffering girl that you were, the girl who is still you, still suffering. Look at her, in your mind’s eye, and tell her that you will help her, that you will do everything in your power to help her.

And then, help her, in any and every way you can.

anita