Hi Lily,

I’m with Anita on this one – she has a really good explanation of how children feel guilty for their anger towards a parent, even when that parent is mistreating them.

I would not characterize slapping a child in the face as “light” punishment like you did, using a term to minimize the abusive treatment. There’s never any reason to slap a child in the face. It is not at all surprising you hit your sister. Children copy what they see their parents do. You’re carrying a lot of guilt that belongs to other people. By all means, acknowledge hitting her was wrong, but then feel free to let it go. You were a kid. It’s over.

As far as your therapist disappearing on you, sometimes it helps me to take things out of the personal context and put them into a different context so I can see them clearer. For example, what if we were discussing your mechanic, not your therapist?

The mechanic says you probably need a different mechanic for your car’s problem, then he is unavailable to you because he has a health problem, then he never sets up another time to look at your car again for months.

Would you be worried about the mechanic rejecting your car? Would you think, “I guess my car is too broken to be fixed”? Or would you think: “Well, this isn’t really working out with this mechanic, he seems to be too busy or preoccupied to help me with my problem. I’m going to need a different mechanic.”

As an outsider, based on what you’ve said, I’d guess the abuse you suffered in your home and school has given you a lot of hesitancy to judge other people’s treatment of you (not knowing how to handle a small interaction with a flatmate, ie). I have had trouble with this, too.

So I do this mental exercise when I feel too close to a problem: either put the issue into an impersonal setting, like the mechanic. Or I try to think about what I would tell a friend who is in my position, because for some reason it’s a lot easier to think about how to help other people.

I hope you can find a new therapist that actually helps you, if that is what you want. The shame cycle of being unmotivated/wasting time is a pretty hard one to break out of, but it’s definitely attainable and it does get easier. I still go through cycles but they are shorter and shorter these days.

It comes from adjusting my goals. If your “two hours of work at a time” system was not working, did your therapist help you set a smaller goal? That is the key to making progress.

If I can’t do two hours, maybe I can do fifteen minutes.

When I commit to fifteen minutes of something, I often end up doing the whole two hours. But if I keep trying to do two hours and failing, I just feel bad and procrastinate all the time. I will even sometimes set a timer for fifteen minutes. If I know I am “free” at the end of fifteen minutes, then I am not so averse to sitting down and trying.