Dear Jim:

Here is an exchange that happened on your thread between you and another member:

Jim: “I’ve been in therapy for the last ten years or so but it doesn’t seem to help.”

Mark: “Are you saying NOTHING helped from that decade of seeing a professional? Nothing has changed? You did not get any insights or revelations about your issues and who you are? You felt the same way as the same person today as you did when you entered into therapy? You came away with no tools, techniques or methods to deal with your anger, resentment and other negative parts that are showing up?”

Jim: “Mark, I did not receive any tools to deal with it. It helped to open up and talk about it but really no things I could do on a daily basis. Maybe I should be looking for a more helpful therapist.”

First, the obvious: it is possible to attend psychotherapy for ten years and learn nothing.

Second, you are 64, Jim. From previous threads I know that you live in the US, have a stable, good paying job and no financial difficulties, none that would have prevented you from attending quality therapy in the past ten years and before that, decades before that.

I ask myself why would you attend therapy for ten years when it taught you nothing. I ask myself why did you not think that you “should be looking for a more helpful therapist” before (and will you now)?

There was something you got out of attending that therapy you attended. You felt better talking (“it helped to open up and talk about it”). It helped you feel better.

We all want to feel better, all motivated to feel better. I feel better when I learn new things about me/ people. There is a whole lot in common between me and you, Jim, between me and any human reading this, so there is a lot to learn. I feel better when I learn so I am motivated to learn.

I am thinking that you don’t feel better when you learn about you/ people. So you are not motivated. This means that this very thread is very unlikely to be a learning experience for you. Parts of it feel better, parts feel worse.

Now, to the content of your thread. You expressed here what you believe: “No matter how loving your adoptive parents are, adopted kids seem to have abandonment issues”- you believe that your parents were loving but because you were adopted at birth, on the same day you were born, you have suffered from abandonment issues for decades, still suffering.

I challenge this belief. I think that you suffer abandonment issues because of your relationships with your (adoptive) parents, not because you were adopted at birth. There was something less than perfectly loving and great about your parents.

But it doesn’t feel good to think that of one’s parents, be the biological or adoptive. We all, at least at some point, are heavily invested in viewing our parents as great and loving, perfectly loving, safe to be with, all good.

To challenge this early belief doesn’t feel good. And so, we come up with alternative explanations.

anita