Dear Justina (J):

You are very welcome and thank you for your kind words! I am fine, missing pre-social distancing time, when I took the comfort of being around people for granted. I want this pandemic contained soon. But like all of us, I have to wait. Better wait relaxed than wait anxiously, so I try to keep myself relaxed best I can.

The good news for you is that you will be graduating in three weeks. The not so good news is that you are now living with your mother, and that your plan to get a job and your own place has to be adjusted to this unwelcomed pandemic.

“my father is a workaholic who cannot say no to my mother and has almost no healthy boundaries. I don’t know why he still goes to work when others are working from home (he tells me he ‘needs to..)”- maybe he goes to work because he feels safe at work, and there,  he can say no to people and exercises healthy boundaries.. so work for him is home, and home is.. not home. He needs home, which for him..  is work.

Your therapist believes that your father “is working despite the danger so that he can have some attention on himself”- and have less of your mother’s attention, I am thinking. Can you imagine that he perceives your mother’s attention as more dangerous to him that a virus’s attention, that your mother’s attention is .. worse than a viral infection, for him?

anita