Dear laelithia:

Regarding my mention of SSRIs, the stimulating Zoloft vs the sedating Luvox, that is something I hope you bring up to your psychiatrist. I really don’t know what will suit you, the stimulating or the sedating SSRIs. I was prescribed Zoloft specifically for my complaints about my obsessive thinking and it did give me a great relief. Unfortunately I didn’t receive psychotherapy during that relief and my functioning in life didn’t improve. My psychiatrist at a later time told me that Luvox was the original SSRI prescribed for the purpose of helping with OCD.

Regarding psychotherapy, I studied your previous threads. The following are quotes from what you shared there about your parents, particularly your mother, and after these, quotes of what you shared about your short relationships at the time. I thought you might want to copy it and bring it with you to your future therapist:

May 2017: “I longed so deeply to be seen by them, to be heard, to hear loving words… I tried so hard to get her attention, I would clean the house as a child during the nights to surprise her, I would work so hard at school, I would try to engage with her. But she was emotionally aloof, and often deferred to spending time with my sister. Over the years I began to resent my sister… July 2017: “I felt above all else, scared… helpless.. sad, lonely, neglected, unloved, jealous, grotesque. Like something was definitely wrong with me, not her or anyone else. I felt guilty, for not being ‘right’ and ‘good’ naturally. I also felt confused… I thought that I wasn’t good enough. But I also thought that if I tried hard enough, I could be. This is what I have been doing with men”

January 2019: “I felt Wrong as a child, a problem, a burden. I tried very hard in my younger years to rectify this with my mother by helping her with chores, caring for my siblings, anything I could do to make her happy. But after several years of realizing this wasn’t working, I became an extremely angry and sad teenager, and I suppose in many ways, emotionally I still am that angry and sad girl….It was more a negative feeling I got from her, that I was causing her distress. She would often shake her head or sigh at me, while simultaneously being so cheerful and encouraging to my younger sister. She often identified being similar to my younger sister when she was younger and told me I was more like the girls that bullied her in school”.

The following are quotes from what you wrote about your very short relationships at the time:

May- July 2017: “I met a man online, and we chatted constantly every day for 2 weeks .. we did meet.. I have never felt so strongly for someone so quickly in my whole life.. We spent the weekend together… he came back to see me and we spent another few days together…. we did have a few silly arguments (usually after having too much to drink).. before I knew it, my perfect man was saying he wasn’t sure if he was ready for a relationship after all… I felt so close, so attached and safe with him… I wish.. that I didn’t give him such a hard time for things that worried me… I wish I didn’t get so upset the last time I saw him… my desire to feel heard, loved and accepted seems still to be tied to him… Did my behavior last time I saw him impact his decision?.. he began dating/ replacing me the day after I left… I’m worried that I will always feel the pain of him betraying, replacing, and rejecting me… He was so beautiful, this perfect man of mine, I feel inconsolable that he’s now gone… I then start to ruminate about our last visit, and how I didn’t behave myself… I simply cannot believe this is the same person I was so infatuated myself. He seems like a totally different person to me now, and that what happened with us was all a dream… In my dreams I had imagined him to be so much more than he really was…(you then wrote him a letter:) I keep dreaming.. that the you I knew came back to me. This version of you is caring, attentive, loving, and most of all, mine… I was so happy when I thought you loved me, the happiest I have ever been… My heart longs for that ‘love’ again, to feel special, to have so much hope for the future… I have a hole, deep longing that never seems to go away… I find myself absolutely crushed, that for the very first time in my 28 years of life, I finally felt satiated, that I had the love I always wanted, and just as quick as it came, it was gone.. I miss the excitement, the thrill of wondering when I’d see my ‘dream guy’ again… it was not real love on his end, but it was real for me. I have never felt hat way about anyone before, so grateful to finally have that emptiness inside me filled”

Less than a month later, still July 2017, you wrote about another man: “I recently began seeing someone… We spoke on the phone a few times before meeting.. our first date was the best.. I mistakingly went home with him. We ended up sleeping together… more to do with pleasing him and trying to make him happy and like me… (about other women he was seeing:) “Like those women are ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘desirable’, while I am not those things… I am obsessed with thoughts of ‘what could have been’, of him wanting me… every minute that I do not call or message him feels like fighting some sort of addiction. I don’t even know what I would say, but the overwhelming desire to do something to change his mind”.

And now, a short input regarding what I think has happened and is happening in your mind and life: your little heart was broken when your mother rejected you, pronounced you (with words, sighs, comparisons to her bullies etc.) wrong, bad, and unworthy of her love,  while seemingly accepting your sister, pronouncing her right, good, worthy of her love. For a child, to be emotionally exiled from her mother, is a devastating experience. It created an overwhelming craving for the love you so desperately needed from her. You tried to get her to take you back into her fold, to love you, but you failed. Later on, in relationships with a few men, you got to temporarily feel the euphoria of being returned to your mother, being loved by her, no greater feeling in the whole world. You called this feeling, being satiated, “I finally felt satiated”- the hole in your heart was filled.

But then the man broke up with you, got together with other women,  and your emptiness returned. Basically, the men (take away the sexual element) are your mother, and the other women in those men’s lives are your sister.

I hope that in therapy you will gradually bring back to your awareness your experience with your mother, an experience from which you detached yourself best you could, feeling sort of okay in her presence, but within the presence or context of men, you keep re-experiencing this not in a detached way, but acutely.

Once you do a lot of work with a quality therapist, you will be able to enter relationships with men not as that desperate, broken hearted girl, but as a stronger woman, being able to pace herself, to get to know the man instead of immediately projecting your mother into him (again, minus the sexual/ physical attraction element). You will no longer compromise yourself greatly, trying so hard to please the man, and then get angry at him. Instead, you will be true to yourself and in so doing, you will not get angry with him either.

The more you keep your early relationship with your mother away from your awareness, seeing it in a detached, no big-deal kind of way, the more stuck you will be in dysfunctional mini-relationships with men.

Increase your emotional awareness of the your experience with your mother, see it as the very big deal that it was, and you will be able to finally place your childhood experience in the past and you will no longer re-experience it over and over and over again.

anita