Dear Narsil:

I will combine and retell your story (two posts), and offer you my thoughts and advice:

When you were a child, at times your parents were very affectionate, but at other times they were abusive to you: yelling at you (“She would yell at me for taking a B”), physically destroying your property (“tear my homework apart”),  and they harassed you emotionally by pressuring you repeatedly to be what no child can be: perfectly perfect- not only at school (“If I took an A- in a test, they would ask ‘why not A?’…tear my homework apart if it wasn’t perfect”), but also outside of school (“I also had loads of extracurricular activities which I had to do to be perfect”).

They pressured a child to be perfectly perfect while not bothering to correct their gross imperfections as parents. A perfect parent wouldn’t yell at their child for any reason, nor will a perfect parent tear her child’s homework for any reason. A perfect parent is not aggressive.

“They are loving parents and show loads of affection”- it so happens that all that affection does not make up for aggression. Aggression scares a child and affection in between aggressive behavior does not delete the fear.

Your fantasy regarding your future time with your  boyfriend being perfect (“every moment spent together was so perfect.. I thought we were absolutely perfect”) was as unrealistic as your parents’ expectation that you get an A in every test, the perfect score. But this fantasy was a place in your mind where you found comfort at the thought that at some time in the future, when the two of you will unite, then you will finally experience calm, contentment, peace of mind and heart.

Then he spent six months with you in London and it wasn’t perfect; you moved to Rome and it never was perfect, still isn’t. Far from perfect. The very day you moved in with him, you had “the worst panic attack I had ever experienced in my life”, you wrote. It was the day when Fantasy met Reality.

Fantasy: when our childhood experience was troubled and scary, and we keep experiencing anxiety as adults, a change in our adult life circumstances will take away the anxiety and we will live happily ever after.

Reality: when our childhood was troubled and scary, we keep re-experiencing it until we heal (a long, long process). Our emotional experience as adults has a whole lot more to do with our emotional experience as children than it has to do with new circumstances and new people in our adult lives.

“I want to stress my boyfriend did nothing to encourage this kind of behavior, on the contrary he always told me I had to think more about myself and my life and what I wanted”- you needed to hear his words from your parents when you were a child. But they said different words, so their words stuck. A child’s brain is ready for her parents’ words, once their words are in a child’s brain, they are there to stay no matter what anyone tells us as adults.

Even if our own disapproving parents tell us something different when we are adults than they did when we were children, it makes no difference. (What our brain accepts as true is time sensitive).

“I still have obsessive thoughts every day, which analyze every single aspect of my relationship and my boyfriend: I focus obsessively on his flaws… all I could do was thinking that I had to leave”-

– this is what you experienced as a child, you wanted to leave, but it was unthinkable, where would a child leave to. So the child wants to leave but doesn’t think it, feeling it without the words. So you want to leave your home with your boyfriend in the same way you wanted to leave your home with your parents. Only now you have words, so you obsess using words, lots of thoughts using lots of words.

“I have lost interest in my job and in all the things I used to love. I feel useless and like a failure”= a re-experiencing of lots of your childhood experience, isn’t it (if you substitute school and extracurricular activities for the word job)?

My advice:

1. Seek psychotherapy so to address your childhood experience, see your parents as they were, peel of the fantasy that they were loving, and adopt the reality that they were aggressive. Express the fear and sadness of the child that you were, in that home.

2. I assume that you are in contact with your parents, limit it significantly for the duration of your therapy.

* I am wondering, do your parents approve of your boyfriend, is he A in their minds, or an A-?

anita