Dear Michelle:

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words. I am not a therapist. I’ve been through good therapy for about two years, and I’ve been very active here, daily for over five years, communicating with many hundreds of people from all  over the world, from teenagers to people in their 70s, with the goal of learning about myself/ about other people, both- it is my online, self directed university, so to speak, and as a result, I am indeed wiser than I used to be.

You shared that his mother is “a sort of cold mother”. Putting aside who his father is, let’s focus on his mother because having a cold mother is powerful enough, in a child’s mind and life.

He “still seems distant and annoyed with them”- a child is  naturally close to his mother. The distance was created by her, not by him. She rejected his closeness to her, she pushed him away. As a result he was angry at her, angry that she rejected him, that she pushed him away from her.

“in his 20s, while he was travelling..they did not reach out to him much in 3 years to see how he was doing”- she pushed him away at an early age, again and again (a child doesn’t easily give up on his mother’s love, still hoping, still trying), and she never tried to undo the distance she created with him long ago.

“he feels that he has disappointed them in life, with his choice of work.. “- he looked for reason for his mother pushing him away, not understanding that his mother was cold all along, before she gave birth to him, nothing to do with him or his choices in life. (Children automatically take responsibility for how their parents treat them).

“When he stayed over and remarked that my kettle had disgusting limescale buildup and how could I be so slovenly. He found many other disgusting things wrong with my housekeeping skills”- I see his anger here, anger at you. He saw the limescale buildup and was angry enough to .. almost call you disgusting.

“Most of his life is orderly and well kept, so that he is able to feel in control”- his childhood experience was chaotic, out of his control.

“he actually put a lot of thought into our future, but mainly the reasons it wouldn’t work out, which seemed to do with shortcomings about me”- I think that his anger at his mother has been directed at you, not because you are not as clean as his mother, but because she rejected him, because she pushed him away from him repeatedly, over all the years of his childhood.

He came into the relationship with you angry at his mother and misdirecting that anger at you, so he’s been looking for things about you to attach his anger to. His anger at you pre-existed you (the music you like, the way you eat, clean.. your alleged shortcomings), just as his mother’s coldness pre-existed him.

“he might be trying to seek closeness, and he played the role of boyfriend so well”- as the social animals that we are we never really give up on seeking closeness in one way or another.

“I thought he might be opening up. Each time he had  me fooled, or he had himself fooled. I’m not quite sure”- I don’t think he cold heartedly fooled you. He wants closeness with the object of his affection and he gets angry at the object of his affection, both. He moves toward you (affection) and he pushes you away (anger).

Last evening you visited him and he “has not taking our separation well.. he looked utterly beside himself and depressed.. having terrible sleep”- his affection for you and emotional attachment to you is alive and well.

But so is his anger: “He started to walk away to go back inside and said sarcastically ‘yeah, if you’d want to see me'”- that’s his anger at his cold, rejecting mother directed at you. And he continued: “if I can’t do things the way that you want, then you don’t want any of this at all”- that’s him talking to his mother. He tried to please her, to do things her way so to get her to love him, but he failed. When he said “then you don’t want any of this at all”, by this, he meant his love for her.

You said it yourself: “It was kind of like seeing a pouty child talk”- like I wrote above (before I read the sentence I just quoted), he was talking to his mother.

When he told you repeatedly that there is another woman for him out there, an ideal woman, he was threatening to do to you what his mother did to him: she rejected him for some ideal concept of a son (so he thought, in his mind).

“He just seemed so lost and miserable today; like any colour he did have before had been sucked out of him”- you got a glimpse of how he looked as a child, living with his cold, rejecting mother.

“I feel an even greater need to tell him how loved he truly is, now more than ever”- imagine his mother felt this way, when he was a child, seeing him so “lost and miserable”, if only she needed to let him know that she loved him.

His need for love is still there, but it is heavily mixed with anger for not having received her love for too long.

“I know I give the most to people who give the least in return”- I suppose you repeat a childhood pattern as well, trying hard to reach out to a parent who did not love you in return, not enough. But you don’t have the anger mixed in, as he does.

anita

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