Dear Josh:

A few days ago you wrote the following: “there’s so much before the age of about 16 that I just (don’t) remember. I remember some big events and small bits and pieces of things, but generally I can’t recall most of my childhood”. When we experience a lot of emotional pain in childhood, on and on, those emotional memories do not go away when we are adults, they come to the surface when events in our adult lives trigger those old emotional memories.

So you don’t remember your childhood, but you are experiencing now the same emotional experience you had then, and so, these emotional memories are telling you what happened then. You wrote in that post, April 25, I think it was, regarding the one-date woman this thread is about: “I think my soul has been yearning for the connection her and I had that night… getting a taste of what we shared that night”- minus the sexual element, your current yearning for this woman is the same yearning you had for your mother and/ or your father as a child, on and on and on.

“I still feel the tightness in my chest and almost nausea in my stomach. Still am not eating very much and it’s fatiguing me”- this is what you experienced as a child.. and forgot. As a child your chest was tight, you felt nauseous in your stomach, you didn’t want to eat and you were fatigued. These are old emotional/ physical memories that have come to the surface of your experience.

What to do now?

If you wait long enough, distract, persist in a exercise routine and especially if you meet a new woman, the experience you have now will move below the surface once again. You will feel better, the chest not tight, hunger will return. But sooner or later, the same yearning for connection you had as a child, a strong yearning because you were alone so often, not connected, this yearning will return to the surface. The only way to no longer feel this way, and no longer find yourself again, and again, in a similar situation is to heal from that extreme loneliness of your childhood.

It takes quality psychotherapy to do that. And a willingness to experience this pain in the context of reviewing your childhood. When this is done, over time, you free your present experience from your past experience a whole lot, being able to experience now something different from what you experienced then.

anita