Dear Lea:

“whenever I talked about my feelings or problems to my mother, and my sister was with us, she jumped in to put me down by indicating they were not important”- your sister was wrong to do that, and your mother was wrong to not stop her from doing that.

What you shared here is significant as to explaining your dissociation because being criticized/ put down is very hurtful for a child, and the child responds to it by withdrawing (“I stopped talking about everything”), and over time, dissociating (“I don’t feel that connection to my own body and other humans”), so that there is “no danger of getting hurt”.

“I really love my sister tho and we have an amazing connection!!”- if the connection does not include you telling her, at length, that you were hurt by her put downs and her sincerely apologizing for it and trying to make it up to you over a long time,  then you must still be angry at her and pushing that anger down (the anger being dissociated).

To have an amazing connection with the person who put you down for years, without correction, means that you are paying a high price for that amazing connection: continuing to bury her anger at her, and continuing to be withdrawn and dissociated from yourself and from everyone else.

“my best friend always talks about how she feels.. she says I can’t express how I feel but she knows that the connection is mutual, but I simply don’t feel it”- that’s the price you pay for keeping that “amazing connection!!” with your sister, as I suggested above.

“Can I ask you what you did to help yourself? Did you talk to a professional?”- I finally talked to a quality professional and had quality psychotherapy when I was much older than you, nine years ago, and that was the beginning of my healing process. My dissociation took a long time to ease up and my experience now is very different from before, much more associated/ connected than before.

One of the things I did to make my healing possible was to end contact with the person who, for decades, put me down and never apologized for it. Other than that, my therapist put me on a diet of guided meditations by Mark Williams, introducing to me the concept of Mindfulness and Mindfulness exercises, and I expressed some of my very intense emotions in his office (he didn’t criticize me, didn’t put me down and instead, was empathetic (he was a bit scared at times, seemed to me, when I expressed intense anger).

anita