Dear Louise:

You are welcome. You wrote: “Maybe it doesn’t even have anything to do with my childhood. Who knows.”-

I believe that you know. You just don’t know that you know, not yet.

I don’t see how it is possible for a young girl not to be strongly affected by a paranoid mother. I don’t see a way that her accusations that your father cheated on her, how these accusations could possibly have no affect and effect on you. It doesn’t matter whether he cheated on her. The fact that you were a witness to her accusations and her anxiety as she made those accusations are enough to affect you.

You wrote that you “talked about this to death in therapy” as perhaps evidence that your childhood experience is not the cause for your current predicament, correct?

Thing is, talking is not enough to undo core beliefs formed in childhood. If you believed, as a child, that relationships are unsafe, dangerous because you saw how anxious and disturbed your mother was in her relationship, then you still believe it. There is a feeling holding this kind of belief in place, like glue. It is strong glue, I am thinking. Since you are continuing therapy, maybe there is a different way to doing therapy, other than talking, to get in touch with that glue.

anita