Dear Hannah:

Thank you for your empathy. Yes, it has been a painful way to live. Those childhood emotional injuries do bleed into the present. More and more so, beginning in the last year or so, I do feel equal to others and it is a new feeling for me, very refreshing. I know that if this is how I felt in my twenties and thirties, my life would have been so very different for it. It is a different way of seeing everything.

Regarding how it is that I feel differently, that is equal, worthy, not inferior to others: I had to go back to my childhood and figure out what happened there. It took me a long, long time to do so. Finally, I was able to see my mother for who she was, and me, for who I was. I was finally able to see me not as who she claimed I was, but for who I was. I didn’t know until recently that I was not that Nothing she claimed that I was.

I re-read your first thread from January-February of this year. You wrote there: “I feel awkward crying in front of (your boyfriend). It is almost as if the pain will be worse if I have to verbalise it to explain why I am crying..”- that pain doesn’t go away when you don’t cry. It doesn’t get weaker. Instead, it keeps bleeding into the present, keep reminding us that it is there.

You also wrote: “I want to try to not feel ashamed of my life and my choices in front of my family”- you felt ashamed when you found out that your father read your journal, when he told others about it. That shame too keeps bleeding into the present. You don’t feel ashamed only around family members but around anyone, everyone, anytime.

I had to go back to my childhood so to see that it was my mother who was wrong, not me. In your case, you probably need to go back to the past so to see that it was your father who was in the wrong for reading your journal and sharing it with others. It was not you who was wrong. Shame, really was in his behavior, not in yours. When you realize this, you no longer “look in the mirror… see all my flaws. Too fat, too pale, too quiet”, etc. And so you don’t have this compulsion to change yourself so to no longer feel shame. You realize that you were fine from the very beginning, nothing to change.

You mentioned having gone to counseling early in the year, are you still going?

anita