Dear noted:

The last part of your two posts above is: “When I’m around him I feel safe and happy, but also sometimes like I’m forcing or pretending because I’m so numb inside. I’m like a shell of a person”.

I live in an area where there are lots of trees around, a forest. I observed trees that are in distress (not enough water, nutrients, sun, space) When a tree is in distress it sheds its leaves, then it sheds its branches until all is left above ground is the trunk. The reason for this shedding is to keep the minimum of the tree alive, the roots and trunk.

In a similar way you lived in distress for too long (verbally and emotionally abusive father and a mother who relied on you and your brother to mediate and protect her from your father). Because of that ongoing distress, you shed lots of your emotions, keeping the minimum (body, thinking brain) alive.

You still have emotions but they come in bursts of desperation and are otherwise not there when they are … supposed to be there. It is an emotional dysfunction.

You wrote: “I would feel numb that I’d freak out and force myself to ‘accept their love and attention’. I’d find myself panicking over my sexuality and telling myself that I was lying to my partner and myself and that I was truly narcistic and manipulative and hurting everyone for my own amusement”-

You felt nothing, then you felt something: fear. Next you thought that you must be an evil person. You misunderstood your lack of feelings. Your lack of feelings indicate the shedding I mentioned, an automatic and natural reaction of plants and animals to long term distress.

“Except everything felt wrong, and any decision I made felt like a mistake”-

Without emotional functionality, we get confused and keep being confused. We try to figure the reasons, but we can’t because without emotions we can’t really know anything, we can’t be sure of anything. We live in a twilight zone state of sorts, asking ourselves again and again: what-is-going-on? and what-is-wrong-with-me?

The solution is to become emotionally functional, to exit the numb/ depersonalized state. This is not a short term aim, it takes months and years to make significant progress, but it is doable. Healing is available to all living things, and  it is available to you too.

I hope you post again with your thoughts and feelings and we can communicate further, if you want.

anita