Dear Cat:

Good to read from you again. I will quote from your recent post and ask/ share my input with you.

“I felt like I had become like everyone else who is also happy all the time”- do you believe that everyone else, or a single person in the world is indeed happy all the time?

“She (your mother) was always so focused on taking care of him (her father), and was mean to us all of the time”- that is business as usual, for an adult child to care and still reach out to a parent’s love while neglecting and hurting their own children.

“I feel like that experience (being locked in a closet) is more terrible than the experiences that I’ve had… Whether I am right or not, I cannot say”- a child being yelled at by a parent gets scared. She does not have the other children’s experiences to compare. She is not able to say: oh, my mother is screaming at me but it is not so bad compared to being locked in the closet. She can’t say that because she wasn’t locked in a closet and doesn’t know that experience.

It is a retroactive comparison that you make after your childhood, as you expressed in your recent post. So it is an intellectual comparison with no relation to the reality of one’s childhood.

Regarding your grandfather writing a card to your sister mentioning her wife’s name- you suggested that this behavior means that he changed somewhat. In reality, he changed a specific behavior. Before in a card or otherwise, he did not mention a name. Recently he mentioned a name. That is all of the change evident. Anything else you assume he changed is just that, an assumption.

And regarding your manic feeling- we all want to feel good. We don’t succeed but we sure want to. As a matter of fact, if there was a pill in front of me that will cause me to feel good all the time, no coming down from it, no negative consequences, I will take it. Won’t everyone?

See, no matter how strongly you believe that you deserve to suffer, you still want to feel good. Same with me, having had a similar core belief that I deserve to suffer, I still needed and wanted to feel good. The core belief doesn’t cancel this natural, instinctive-like desire to feel good.

anita