Dear Felix,

I am sorry about your childhood, you’ve been through a lot. It’s not easy to be ignored by your own father, and then to experience something similar by your step-father too. It seems you needed to “toughen up” pretty early, since you were on your own already at 16. Life has been throwing you curve balls already since that time… And although you say about your family that “Over the years, through ups and down, we stuck together“, I imagine that emotionally, you felt alone. Perhaps your parents helped you when things got really tough, but other than that, you were alone and scared, as you said.

Yes, title kid in me is scared, but just like Jordan Peterson asks in his book, we have to be our own parents sometimes and treat ourselves as if we’re our own parents.

The little boy just wants to be loved.

It’s good you realize it. And that you’re in touch with him. When you talk about being lonely to the point that it hurts (“I crave physical and emotional connection to the point where it makes me psychologically and physically ill, and “I crave intimacy and closeness like drug addicts and alcoholics crave their vices.”), the pain is so big exactly because of your wounded inner child. Those are his words, his pain and his craving. He’s telling you that the pain of loneliness is enormous, because it felt enormous to him as a child.

Now you’d need to be a loving parent to that boy, be there for him and soothe him. Make him feel that he belongs. Alleviate his pain. Once you do that, I am almost sure that you’ll start seeing your current loneliness differently too. It won’t feel like an impossible burden and almost a death sentence, but something that can be changed. It will become much more manageable and much less threatening.