Dear Ilyana,

you had a very difficult childhood, with an extreme pain of missing your father, whereas your mother purposefully deprived you of your father’s love and deceived you to believe that he doesn’t love you and doesn’t care about you. Your mother caused this pain in you, which she could have easily prevented, but due to her own anger and disappointment in her husband, she chose to keep you suffering. Her self-interest was more important than your well-being, than your legitimate needs for your father’s love. In a way, she sacrificed you due to her own blindness and stubbornness.

In such a constellation, it’s no wonder that you developed intense self-hatred and never felt worthy of love and acceptance. Your needs were denied, your pain was ignored, and “everyone laughed off your fears, especially of being murdered or kidnapped”. It’s only natural that a child whose feelings were denied and ridiculed would develop all sorts of fears, which then you needed to cope with alone, because your mother wasn’t supportive, on the contrary she was one of the reasons you had those fears in the first place.

Dear Ilyana, what you’ve experienced is severe emotional abuse at the hands of your mother, and it’s no wonder your childhood was such a painful, terrifying, hopeless experience. When you were a teenager, you mother gave you another blow – she went back to school and abandoned you emotionally, only disciplining you when you did something wrong. At the tender teenage years, you were left alone, again. Now it wasn’t abuse, but it was neglect.

I assume by that time you started developing problems in your behavior (you say “and I did do wrong stuff worthy of discipline“), to the point of needing therapy. She sent you to therapy and I guess she blamed you all along for your bad behavior, not realizing how her bad parenting created it.

Within you lives a very hurt and deprived inner child, Ilyana. She’s been through a lot and she needs to be finally embraced, protected, soothed, told that she matters, that her feelings matter, that her needs are valid, that she’s not ridiculous, but a beautiful, lovable, precious little girl. It wasn’t her fault that her mother abused her, none of what happened was her fault. You need to know that. And there is hope, Ilyana, because once you start attending to that little girl, your experience of life and of yourself will change. Amidst a dry desert, small, tender buds will start appearing, the buds of new life…

What’s with your father, Ilyana? Has be passed away too? Did you have a chance to have some sort of closing with him?