Dear Cat:

Earlier in your thread you wrote: “I feel guilty for simply living my life… because my parents never had that freedom… if they can’t have it, why should I?… I feel so sorry for my parents for not having these opportunities… deep down I feel responsible for it all, and I really feel like a massive moral weight on my shoulders… it’s like being morally and soulfully contracted to carry out a life under their pains and misery, and feeling like I am harming them if I choose to love myself and therefore cut them out of my life”.

Yesterday you wrote: “If my sister didn’t suffer, yes my suffering would end. I would feel at peace knowing that she was living a happy life… If she is not the reason I suffer, what is the reason I suffer?”

I am ready to answer this question: you suffer because as a child your parents imprinted in your brain the core belief that you are a bad person if you don’t suffer too. That you must suffer until and unless they no longer suffer.

If your sister no longer suffered, that would be a relief for you, but your suffering will resume when you notice that someone else is suffering, triggering your core belief formed in your formative years, those years of childhood,. This core belief will not go away if and when your sister no longer suffers.

You wrote: “When I was young, my great gran died and I stopped listening to music, as a punishment… she couldn’t have the joy of listening to music anymore… which meant I didn’t deserve to.”- The purpose of you punishing yourself is to be good, to punish the bad you and be a good person.

In your most recent post you wrote: “I tell her (your sister) that she needs to focus on herself”- but can you do it yourself, focus on yourself, not on your sister?

When your sister overdosed and your parents’ reaction was to have “a go at her for ‘ruining their night'”, they lacked any empathy for her. That is why they were able and willing to “bully and belittle their children, and take all their anger out on them”.

Your mother complained that you were selfish and didn’t help her. But when you “tried to help (your) mum would be like ‘no it’s fine. I’ll do it’. So I could never win”- you could never win because she had to win at your expense. Her goal in criticizing you for not helping her was not that you do help her. Her goal was to cause you pain. If she allowed you to help her, she would have failed to accomplish her goal.

In summary: this core belief will continue to inflict you with suffering for as long as it exists. There will be good days of hope and positive motivation, but unless you take on the slow and difficult process of healing, that is, changing the many neuropathways in your brain carrying this core belief, the misery will return.

There are no short cuts. There are helpful things, aerobic exercise, meditation, mindfulness… but nothing to take the place of the healing process that needs to be done, probably not possible without the help of a quality psychotherapist.

anita