Dear Wanderer:

You are welcome and please feel free to post anytime, no such thing as a late response. This is a difficult topic and I am positively impressed every time you return to your thread. It takes courage and determination to examine what you are examining here.

I learned more about your mother in your last share, about her life before she was pregnant with you. “she definitely carried the attitude ‘me against the world'”. The arguments with you were her against her son. The arguments with your sister were her against her daughter.

Regarding your sister, I don’t know her, don’t know if she “has a healthier sense of self”. In my previous post to you I wrote if she has healthy relationships etc. You wrote that when you spoke with her several weeks back, you were “struck by how ‘grown up’/mature she seemed”. She may very well be mature, again I don’t know. But I do know that almost every person, no matter how troubled, anxious and unwell much of the time, he/ she has moments of appearing well, sensible, calm and having-it- all-together. This is why first impressions are suspect and better know the person over time and in different contexts.

There is no doubt though that your experience and your sister’s experience were not identical, there was that family of her best friend, she was closer to her father (I don’t know from what age), her mother treated her not in the very same way she treated you, and so on.

It may very well be that your sister hasn’t seen your mother as a Saint, not for a long, long time and so, she saw Reality better than you did, accepting it with some calm, and that does lead to better mental health.

Regarding “I can go on for months and feel content/ even happy with pursuing someone as long as I don’t sense they are ‘into me’. As long as they are cold/ distant type… these are the types of people who I will pursue… why would you want to seriously date someone who you potentially think is seeing someone else? It just doesn’t make sense”-

-it makes sense to me: if a woman is cold, distant, may be seeing someone else and is not into-you, then you are safe from being stuck, or trapped with her. You do remember the arguments with your mother, you described here on your thread very distressing times with your mother. You don’t want that trapped experience again.

You wrote: “I do not remember the vicious arguments as a young child. I have fond memories of growing up, cycling together as a family.. but things drastically changed when we went to secondary school”-

-children in distress remove the distress from their awareness best they can, forgetting events and/ or forgetting how they felt during bad events, the memories being dry and neutral. There is another thing about young children: they are full of life. That early youth life force, or spirit,  carries the child through a whole lot of misfortune and distress, still feeling joy over green grass and sun and joining other children in play. It takes years to break that spirit.

anita