Dear Juanita:

You are welcome.

“I was stuck in the same loop with him as with my mother= still hoping…. I was starting to think I had hung on to your marriage because a relationship with someone proves I am worthy of being loved (= disproving my mother)”-

– a child sees her mother as a god, a perfect, powerful being. She needs her sense of value to come from that god entity.

When a child is unloved by her mother, she grows up looking for a god to love her, that is,  someone as powerful as mother (or father). She needs someone as powerful and perfect as mother (in her child’s mind) to love her. When we, unloved girls turned women, have a good enough man, but not perfect and powerful, we punish him, as if he did us wrong by not being the god we need him to be.

“I would like to ask how you achieved your understanding on the emotional level?” – when I first attended psychotherapy in 2011, I was newly married (50, at the time). My therapist focused on healing the relationship, which was in trouble at the time, right after the marriage. And this is key and my answer to your question: we need one healthy relationship so to believe that we are worthy.

As the social animals that we are, we can’t see our worth unless we look in a mirror. As children our mirrors are our parents, particularly the dominant parent in our young lives. When we don’t get to see our value in that mirror, as adults, it is still possible to find that mirror, but we first have to understand that the mirror we are looking at (the man in our lives) cannot be the same as the one we looked at as children: we no longer have the child-mind capable of seeing a human as a god entity.

We have to learn to appreciate a different kind of love by a different kind of person, a human, one far from being a god.

anita