Dear calisister:

What a surprise and a delightful surprise to read from you. I didn’t know if I will ever have this valuable experience again, communicating with you. I am very pleased that you are back to your thread!

Congratulations for standing your grounds with your parents, asserting yourself as you did. That “sense of power that (you) did not have before… control of (your) life…new feeling”- that sense, that control, that feeling is most valuable, most important to your well-being.

Glad you are participating in therapy regularly, feeling a lot better, learning many skills and making healing your priority.

About your loneliness, you wrote that you are “an empty hole… so alone all the time. Anywhere I am… The feeling overtakes me. It is the same feeling I have felt since very young. This feeling feels like it will never leave, and I want it so badly”- when a child suffers alone time does seem endless and the experience is that of being stuck in an eternity of suffering. Notice wanting the feeling to leave “so badly”, at this point, better aim at not wanting it to leave you so badly. If you learn to accept it and endure it, then it will leave you, with time. Try to get rid of it desperately, and it will stay.

“This loneliness is deep rooted. I was never nurtured or raised with love. Never raised to feel safe…the feeling of loneliness is not worse in this new city. It is the same feeling I felt back home too” – it amazes me as I realize more and more that how we experience life has so much to do with past experiences being reactivated in our brains, the there-and-then, and so little to do with the reality of the here-and-now. You keep experiencing, re-living your childhood now.

“I crave love. I crave safety. I crave understanding. I crave empathy and sympathy…maybe my expectations are too high?”- if you expect to feel enough love, safety, understanding, empathy to make you feel all good anytime soon, then such an expectation is unrealistic. There is no way to go back in time, twenty years ago or so, and take that little girl that you were, hold her, hug her, take her away from that home and give her a new one, a safe, loving home.

I think that you will need to come to a point where you accept with equanimity, a peace of mind, the fact that you did not have that safe, loving, empathetic-to you home that you needed. At that point you will no longer feel angry for not having those things. With acceptance, with sadness of the loss, you will be able to appreciate the later-in-life safety and love that is or will be available to you.

* When you do sense empathy from others, or love, do you feel that it is too little too late, and you get angry because you need so much more?

“I am on the right path. I work out… hike more.. cook.. breathe.. meditate.. attending therapy and completing homework.. excelling at work… But this loneliness is a demon that follows me”- I see the need to grieve all your years lost in loneliness, grieve and accept.

Your experience with your dog that died, being home alone with the dog’s smell and toys, “these memories of me and her alone in the house… still haunt me.”

You came up with the word evil to describe your mother. Your accounts and your sister’s account make this word appropriate for me, to describe her and your father (the two operate together, as a unit). Evil as in lacking empathy, lacking empathy to such and extreme, and so consistently, that yes, evil is the right word. And to add to the lack of empathy, the dishonesty is overwhelming, her dishonesty. Anything that came out of her mouth and anything that will, all is suspect to me. She will say anything that suits her, no consideration whatsoever of the truth.

In her communications to her own two daughter, Truth is and has been of no relevance to her, and empathy is and has not been a practice of hers.

I appreciate your with-love ending of the recent post. I like you and I hope to read from you again and again.

anita