Dear Lindsey:

The following requires reading (or re-reading) at a place and time when you are calm and comfortable:

When you were a child, your mother paid a lot of positive attention to you. For a whole decade you were her only child. Then when you were a preteen and a teenager she had a second child and a third child.

What happened during that first decade, when it was just you and her?

Imagine the following- you are small and you can’t sit by yourself, you are hungry. You cry a bit,  she picks you up, her warm, strong hands holding your small, weak body, and she takes you close to her chest, feeding you. You don’t have words so you don’t think- you just feel. What is it that you are feeling toward those hands and that chest your face is touching as your hunger for food gets satisfied?

You are lying there,  uncomfortable, wet and itchy, you cry. She comes to you, and those same warm, strong hands pick you up and remove that itchy thing from you, the wet diaper, cleaning you and placing you in a dry, comfortable diaper- what a relief! She talks to  you a bit, you don’t know what she is saying, but her voice sounds gentle and kind. What is that baby feeling about those hands and that voice?

The baby grows up, what does her mother mean to  her? Food, and warmth, comfort, help, everything.

An then came the other child and you watch her taking care of someone else, it is no longer you and her. You feel jealous because someone is taking away from you what was only yours, before. Then there is a third child, and soon after—

— game-over: “she pretty much said you are on your own now and they moved into a new house without a room for me. She emotionally cut herself off from me overnight”- they moved to a new house, meaning your mother and her other two young children. How did it feel?

This is what I believe you felt and thought when the above happened: “I feel sick to my stomach… Everything about that situation.. makes me feel sick to my stomach.. I get upset all over again.. (She) probably does not think of me at all..  glad (she) doesn’t see me anymore… I feel like someone is punching me in the stomach.. I feel hurt.. I feel betrayed besides hurt…I feel like (she) it trying to hurt me… It’s unfair. (She) has set up a new life/ new family.. moving things along.. at ‘warp speed'”.

The quotes in the above paragraph are taken from what you shared in March-April 2019 regarding M, a co-worker you were involved with for a short time who bought a drink at a bar for “a tall blonde female at  our office”, and from what you wrote Feb 2020 regarding the father of your children having a girlfriend. (I changed the pronoun he to she in the quotes above).

The reason you felt so very jealous, so very upset about the blonde woman in M’s life and about the girlfriend in your ex husband’s life, is not because you were wanted either one so badly, not because the relationship with either one was great, but because the two women in the lives of these two men activated your great jealousy and distress over your mother abandoning you and betraying your trust in her- for her new family, a family that didn’t include you.

You are re-experiencing the same upset that you experienced in your second decade of life. If you understand this thoroughly, you will no longer be so reactive to your ex husband, and so upset about him having a girlfriend. You will be way less upset, and at one point on, not upset at all, because your awareness will take all that upset and place it where it belongs, where it originated, in that life changing, real life experience of abandonment and betrayal.

anita