Dear Gigi:

Reading your words and using my life experience, this is what I understand about your situation to likely be:

This man wronged you, but he is not the first person to ever wrong you. Someone else repeatedly wronged you when you were a child. As a child, you bottled up lots of anger, day after day, month after month. Fast forward, this or that person wrongs you, including this man, and what comes up for you is not only the anger at this or that particular person, but your bottled up anger from childhood.

“I don’t want it to bottled up inside me… we did develop a strong bond”- I believe that the person who repeatedly wronged you when you were a child was someone to whom you felt a strong bond.

“I started obsessing about him and been sending him emails non stop.. asking him why he did what with the belief that I have a right to punish someone because he ‘wronged me’.. I will inform his wife. This was brought about my anger… I just wanted him to know how he made me feel”-

– your bottled up childhood hurt and intense anger have been fueling your adult obsessive thinking about this man.

“The problem with me is that I’m not able to process certain emotional states… when I feel rejected or lied to or wronged.. I’m not able to feel bad and then move on. My mind gets caught and I obsess. I become enraged and can’t stop”-

-I think that what happens when a person wrongs you is that you get overwhelmed by the recent wrong added to previous/ childhood wrongs, and all that massive wrong is massively enraging you, and you get caught/ stuck in the rage.

Do you remember being wronged, rejected and/ or lied to when you were a child?

I remember an incident when I was wronged, an incident that did not involve being beaten or yelled: it happened at a wedding event. One of the guests was a famous woman, a beauty queen, the first famous person I have ever seen in real-life. I was maybe 10 or 12. I was so excited to see the famous beauty queen and I wanted to have a picture of me taken with her in the background. My mother had a camera (no cell phones existed at the time), and I asked her excitedly to take the photo, but she was too busy talking to guests, having a lot of fun talking to them.

I pleaded with her, not wanting to lose this most special opportunity, but for what felt like forever, she dismissed me and kept talking to the guests. I cried, for a long time, and yet, she dismissed me.

It may not seem like such a terrible wrong, but this woman- my mother- told me many times before that incident that she loved me more than she loved any person, that her life was all about me, that I was the most important person in her life, that I was the reason she lived. But at the wedding, I was not at all important to her.

Finally she said to me angrily and with frustration:  okay, okay.. what’s wrong with you?..  And she begrudgingly took the photo. There were many incidents when she dismissed me, when she behaved in ways that showed me that it was not true that I was important to her, but the reason I remember this incident is because of the photo of me standing by the beauty queen with red eyes.

anita