Dear Niv:

“Very Done with Life” is a powerful statement, very, not just done. “I’m the one that never got to be loved” is another powerful statement. And another: “The only reason I haven’t ended my life is because I still have hope of justice for me one day, that I have been there for so many people.. but the Universe has not been there for me”.

I will repeat your story in my own words, including quotes (it helps me process information to do that):

Your childhood home consisted of

1. a grandmother who was in her seventies. She was “BPD… she has always been verbally and emotionally abusive” and saw you “as the enemy for my mom’s affections”. (Her abuse was excused and minimized by other family members).

2. a mother who was lost, dependent on her mother for necessities,  didn’t know how to take care of herself, let alone you. She “couldn’t provide basics for me including even my nutrition, not because of money but because she also doesn’t really take care of herself in that way”. She was depressed and “emotionally absent in general”. She didn’t have any friends and barely left the house.

To you, she was “like a friend, or a partner, or a sister”. Presently your mother still lives with her mother, 97 year old, in your original country.  You often talk to your mother via facetime. “We are more like friends than mom/daughter”. She complains to you about her mother, your grandmother. She “can’t/won’t provide me advice especially on very emotional matters”, and you “try to explain to her all the things I’ve learned about life, to see if she wakes up and changes her reality too”

Living with the two, you were “a very angry child”, didn’t have anyone your age around at home, and at school you weren’t “very accepted” because you were “a lot smarter and school-oriented than other kids and it was difficult to form bonds because of that. I never fit into the culture of the country I’m from.”

At 30, you are “totally alone in life”. You had dreams of “being a successful person in academia”, but you are afraid you  might “have to put down” this dream. You “never had a romantic relationship”.

You expressed that you were “always usually considered as someone who doesn’t follow norms or the social and that is something that always sort of made me proud” and that in the past you were “trying to fight fights that weren’t mine or trying to be some sort of savior”, as well as being the “female version of a nice guy”.

My input at this point:

1. You clearly expressed interest in about 25 people and rejected by them. At 30 year old, I don’t think there is a woman in the modern world who was not rejected by at least 25 people. You were rejected by 15 people in one year of online dating. I was rejected by many more than 15 during my time online dating. I should have asked you how many people you rejected. People rejecting and being rejected is a normal part of dating. For some of us being rejected in the dating world is devastating. For others, it is a necessary and normal part of dating. During my online dating I expected rejection and aimed at meeting as many men as possible (for coffee, in a public place), knowing out of a dozen, maybe one will be interested and maybe I will be interested as well.

I am inclined to think at this point that you are one of the people for whom any rejection is devastating and very painful, so much that you don’t see rejection as a normal part of dating. Each rejection activates your childhood experience of rejection.

2. Congratulations for surviving your childhood! It is interesting how so many of us don’t thrive there, in our childhood, we survive it the best we can. I had a BPD mother myself, and it was horrific.

You were formed during your childhood in the context of the interactions between your grandmother, your mother and you. The emotional experience you had then is the same that you keep experiencing, including the rejection, depression, loneliness, and including your love of school/  academia.

Looking closer at those interactions, based on the very little information available to me (and I am sure the following is simplified, but basically, it may be true nonetheless): your grandmother was the enemy (you wrote that she considered you her enemy, your word, so I figure you considered her the same). Your mother, on the other hand, was your friend. Again, it is a word you used. I understand that your grandmother was the loud, aggressive one and your mother was passive. In this context I think that your empathy is with your mother, you want to help her. But you don’t want to be passive like her. You want to be strong (what appears as strong), like your grandmother. Thing is, in that context you were not attended positively by either one: negatively attended to by your grandmother, as competition for your mother’s affections, and not attended to at all by your mother. All your efforts as a child to help your mother did not bring her attention to you, did not make her love you.

Alone and lonely, I think school was were you thrived, academia. Later you made it your life. You even want to date a woman in academia. Recently you’ve been discouraged about your academic career and I suppose that intensified your depression and desperation.

I will stop here and hope to get your input regarding what I posted to you. Remember the simplification here- it will be impossible to figure out everything, not here and not even in 10 years of excellent psychotherapy. There are simply too many neuropathways in our brains to be able to map. I am looking for the basics, the basic neuropathways within the complex massive webs of pathways.

anita