Dear joanna:

Regarding medicine, or psychiatric drugs: I agree with you, they don’t cure a thing. For the 18 years I consumed heavy doses of three psychiatric drugs every day (excluding those times I tried to stop, failed and took them again, before my final successful withdrawal), at times I felt better, but my functioning in life deteriorated during all those years, got worse and worse.

Regarding your sharing about your mother: I understand better what you needed your father to see, to notice. Your mother attacked you when angry, yelled at you, used you to make a point… she scared you. Your father, he was indeed your hope. If only he saw you, if only he saw you scared and suffering, maybe he will help you.

But your mother didn’t allow you to visit him and then he died. Your hope died. But you didn’t and so, there is still hope. This man, not your boyfriend, I understand, was your hope, still is.

Not that a better life for you is possible through this man, but your hope is in him. Just like it was with your father.

If you re-read our communication on your thread (I just did), there are plenty of potentially helpful thoughts and ideas there. Please do re-read at times, when calm. Somethings that escaped you before when you read, may sink in a second or third time.

You wrote that you keep analyzing your thoughts and behaviors but it never helps. You never feel safe, you wrote. I have input about this safe feeling that I didn’t present to you yet, and it may be helpful: when we are children there is much magic to our thinking. We imagine safety to be more wonderful than it is, a happily-ever-after, all sunny, dreamy like experience. Because as adults we cannot experience such a magical existence (except momentarily, with the help of powerful drugs… before they stop working), we fail to experience the safety feeling that is realistic and possible for us to experience.

In other words, our expectations of what safety feels like are too high and unrealistic, and in comparison to that expectation, any feeling of safety doesn’t measure up.

When you find yourself alone, no one there to yell at you (like your mother did), when you, for a moment, are not yelling at yourself, when all you can hear is silence- there is safety in that moment. Isn’t there? Will you make a moment like this happen in your day, or night, listen to that silence and tell me about it?

anita