Dear kiwiboy0897:

“Most nights I’d wake up in the middle of the night to them fighting.. one night I woke up hugging my older sister while she was crying and my brother was having a fight with my dad over it… my dad threw a glass cup at her face and she had to get stitches”-

– the child that you were was repeatedly scared many days and many nights, for a long time. All children get scared when they witness aggression between their parents, between family members, and they get scared when suffering aggression directly. If you didn’t suffer aggression directly, if you weren’t hit, then witnessing the aggression and violence in your childhood home is what I call the original fear in you= the core of your current anxiety.

This core is like embers that lie underneath your awareness. Sometimes you feel calm and you are not aware of those embers, of this original fear, but often, these embers catch a little fire and you feel  fear. But you don’t think of the aggression and violence of your home life as a child (your original fear), you think instead of your partner and Steve.

Your fear is currently associated with this topic of your-partner-and-Steve.

If there wasn’t this topic, there would have been another topic to associate with your original fear, because those embers I mentioned, they do catch fire once in a while, and this or that topic will trigger that fire. This is what anxiety is about.

Interesting, the current pandemic gives lots of people a break from their original fear, because the pandemic is a real-and-present danger, physically and economically, so many of us forget for a while that other fear.

“I remember feeling confused and having resentment towards my dad because of my confusion… we also knew the woman: she was a family friend.. her kids… she wanted him and used him for his money which is what made him spiral into debt”-

– empathy for your mother means that you shared her feelings of being betrayed by your father, plus I am guessing that you felt betrayed by your father for giving his money to another family- that woman and her kids, instead of giving his money to his own kids.

I wonder if you feel angry or jealous about your partner giving money or being generous with other people, people  other than you?

I will wait for your answer and your thoughts about what I wrote here, and if you want to, we will continue.

anita