Dear Daniel:

Congratulations for moving to your own flat in 2 weeks !!!

“the feelings I have today have something to do with my relationship with my father”- I agree. On one hand you “don’t want to be like him”, angry. On the other hand, you are angry.

“I may have trouble seeing that I am in fact a bit like him”- I agree that you are a bit like him, angry. But you are a bit like every other human being in the world because everyone is angry at times.

As a child, your parents were your world. Your father was angry and you didn’t want to be like him. You had no way of knowing that it is not just your father who is angry but .. everyone. It’s just that not everyone expresses anger the very same ways.

Anger feels the same for everyone, different intensities at different times. It feels uncomfortable: it automatically follows with more blood output to the muscles, and it demands some behavioral expression, like the volume of the voice going up, and the muscles in our faces and bodies contracting, as we instinctively prepare to scare the enemy (sounding and looking dangerous),and fighting if necessary.

Some people yell and fight, some people go out for a run, other people distract themselves with hours of computer gaming. Many people hold the anger in, become silent and withdraw. But the anger demands expression. When you don’t express your anger, that demand unmet, the anger doesn’t calm down and disappear, it keeps being there, exhausting the person, and over time, depression is the result.

“Sometimes I yell at my mom and I don’t know why”- you yell because anger automatically causes the volume of our voice to go up (the purpose in nature is to scare the enemy).

“I’m still very afraid of the idea to see my father again”- fear and anger are closely associated. When an animal is angry, it is right after it’s afraid. First there is fear- then either an animal runs away (the Flight Response) or the fear changes to anger, making the Fight Response possible.

“I may be frustrated to see to see that life is not like I wanted it to be. That even now, as a 23 year old man, I still struggle almost everyday with sadness, anxiety, fear and anger”-

– our distressing emotions don’t go away or resolve themselves just because we get older. You can be in the same emotional state that you are in now, when you are 33, 43, and 63 (only older and more tired, and maybe even angrier and more depressed).

“I am almost always disappointed by others. Maybe I expect too much from them. That’s why I tend to think that I should rely on no one but myself”- if as a child you felt that you could rely on your father or on your mother; if as a child, your expectation that your mother would protect you from your father was met; if she didn’t disappoint you, you wouldn’t be feeling disappointed by everyone else as an adult.

In other words, it is not just your father that disappointed you, it is also your mother.

“I feel close to no  one and feel like no one among my friends really care about me (even when they tell me they do).. I have never truly been in a relationship”- you haven’t been in a close, trusting, mutually loving relationship with anyone, not with your father, not with your mother, not with anyone yet.

When you view the relationship emptiness of your life so far, you may feel that at times you and your mother were close, and there probably were moments of closeness, but rare and far in between: there was no solid, close, honest, loving relationship between the two of you. And it  was not your fault!

“I don’t agree that people want to help sad people. I think they run from them because facing them means facing their own sadness and insecurities”- this is your personal experience. I remember that you shared that at 16 you were heartbroken, very sad, and your mother didn’t notice the seriousness of how sad/ depressed you were. Is it that she didn’t want to face her own sadness and insecurities?

anita