Dear Tee:

When as children we feel unsafe, uncomfortable, miserable, lonely, unattended to, for a long time, this emotional experience does not change as we become adults. Instead, we keep re-living the same emotional experience of childhood.

This is your current emotional experience: “This year going on our 4th year together.. it felt so sad, painful, and lonely.. sad or frustrated… I’m still feeling sad and lonely.. I just want to feel I guess warm  inside and feel safe.. make the pain go away”.

(The words  to which I added the boldface feature, are your current and childhood emotional experience).

More about your childhood emotional experience (you wrote this about your childhood): “I knew I was sad and wanted to help“- you needed help. A child wants to help a parent so to make the parent strong enough … to help the child.

“I remember trying to tell her (your mother) to stay strong and maybe fight back if she could”- you needed your mother to be strong and to fight back, because you felt weak and unsafe. You needed someone to fight the enemy (your father), so to make a safe home for you.

“Both my parents had to work at the time.. If she was late just 10-15 minutes coming home from work he would be very angry”- you were alone when they both worked. When your father was home with you, waiting for your mother, you were afraid of his anger, hoping there will not be a fight when you mother was back home.

You needed a safe, quiet home where one or both parents give you their time and attention, in a calm, loving way, to make you “warm inside and feel safe”, but there was none of that for you.

This unmet need for positive, calm attention is the reason why your need for your boyfriend’s attention is intense: “I told him to just give me at least one day out of the week to hangout and spend time… to text me more throughout the day.. 2 hrs of undivided attention“.

As a child, you “studied hard and did not question much since I didn’t want to give them another reason to argue”- you did your best to minimize their arguments so that either one, or both, will finally give you the positive attention that you desperately needed.

Regarding your boyfriend, you wrote: “I felt like I was the only one feeling, doing the most in the relationship with trying to make time.. He told me he realized as well that he wasn’t putting as much effort.. His response really hurt because I figured maybe it was a misunderstanding.. but it came to be true”- this parallels your childhood experience: you, as a child, made all the effort (examples: study hard, give them no trouble, take care of your injured mother) so to get your parents to  pay attention to you, to give you their time in positive ways, but they didn’t make the effort back.

You missed them/ needed them so much, but they didn’t miss you or need you back much; it is this lack of reciprocity that still hurts in the context of your boyfriend: “I felt like I was the only one feeling, doing.. trying to make time… I just miss him more than he does”.

You wrote: “I hope one day I can truly leave  this emotional self torment behind and be  happy”- this emotional self torment is your childhood emotional experience. To leave it behind, you have to bring it closer to your awareness and process it, meaning, to connect this “emotional self torment” to your childhood circumstances, and free your current life circumstances (particularly when you no longer live at home) from that emotional experience of childhood.

“I kind of repressed a lot of memories to be honest and it is a bit hazy”- you will need to express these repressed memories, this is what I mean by bringing your childhood emotional experience to your awareness: from repression to awareness. It will not be important to remember details and events, these may be lost. What is important is to remember how you felt then, to  connect your current feelings to your childhood, and free your adulthood from the same-old-same-old childhood emotional experience.

anita