Dear Kaylen:

Your regret is focused now on gymnastics, but what it is really and primarily about is your regret for not “engaging with others as a child”, at home, feeling alone and lonely, disconnected from any parent figure. You needed your mother to talk to you, play with you, teach you, show you, raise you (“I was literally raised by the TV).

There is no stronger need a child has than her social need to interact with her mother. It is true not only for humans but for other highly social mammals, stronger from the need for food a lot of the time.

Another need you had was to feel safe while interacting with your parents and while they interacted with each other, but you felt punished when interacting with them, and they fought with each other.

Your solution as a child to not feeling safe: “being in front of a tv, not engaging with others felt safe for me then”, but you still very much needed to interact with others.. safely.

Notice this, you wrote: “I love my parents, they ae my #1… But when I think too long about childhood experiences, I just.. wonder if I would have made the choice to be a gymnast would things have been a little different”-

– we people don’t like to think about our parents in any negative way, we really don’t like to entertain thoughts like that they didn’t like us, or love us.. or that they were selfish or whatnot. It makes us feel guilty, as if it means we don’t love them. So we don’t entertain these kinds of thoughts, and instead we focus on something else, something that distracts us from thoughts that hurt most. In your case, you focus on gymnastics.

If you did  engage in gymnastics as a child, you would still be lonely, because nothing, not even food, not gymnastics or anything else substitutes a child’s need for safe interactions with her main caretaker, usually it is the mother.

I am glad to read: “Where I am right now is so much better than were I ever was”- to be even better where you are right now, you have to access, express and process your real and primary regret: not having had safe and loving interactions with your parents. Because you are only 20, better you attend psychotherapy. With a good therapist, it doesn’t have to be for long, but if you do, it will greatly improve your life experience for decades to come.

anita