Dear llyana:

First, a time line: at 3, your father left your home, at 10 or 11, you had contact with him again, at 19 your mother died, at 26 you were diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder, at 34 you got married, at 35 you experienced a very traumatic birth and have been depressed since (no real mood swings for several years).

As a child your cognitive abilities suffered (“did poorly in school… I was not a good student, and compared myself with others who seemed to effortlessly write good essays and do well on tests”), then improved greatly at university (“did really well in university”), but declined in the last year or so (“For the last year or so I have been having serious cognitive problems- memory, concentration, and comprehension”).

Currently, you are 44, married for 10 years with a 9 year old son, experiencing lack of bonding with son and strained relationships with son and with husband. You practice poor eating habits, hardly exercise, drink too much alcohol, and smoke cigarettes and weed. You teach philosophy.

As a child (and still, perhaps), you hated the color of your hair and eyes, the texture of your hair, your height, you felt dumb, not normal, not like others, not fitting in (“I wanted to think like normal kids and fit in socially”).

“My whole life I have hated myself… I don’t remember a time when I didn’t hate myself”, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to love and accept myself. It’s such a foreign concept”.

Hate, Merriam Webster definition: intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.

I looked for the origin of your hate toward yourself in the little that you shared about your childhood, and I think I found it at the bottom of a bucket: “When she had cancer and was going through chemo, she would puke in a bucket with his picture super-imposed on a cancer cell in the bottom of it”.

About your mother’s anger: “Her anger toward him was incredibly profound… the anger at him was sometimes acted out on me”, “My mom would tell me we were better off without him, that she had given him an out and he’d taken it”-

– he, your father, took the Out and got to live away from your mother’s anger, but you were In, living with her and her anger.

You did poorly in school, while In with your mother, but after she died, when you were 19, you got your Out and your cognitive abilities greatly improved.

Wikipedia on Anger: “A person experiencing anger will often experience physical effects, such as increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and increased levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline”- adrenaline is also released when scared, and when experiencing manic episodes. Growing up threatened by her anger caused your body to experience an ongoing, chronic and damaging hormonal and neural arousal aka stress.

help guide. org/ stress symptoms, signs and causes, reads: “When you feel threatened, your nervous system responds by releasing a flood of stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which rouse the body for emergency action. Your heart pounds faster, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, and your senses become sharper…

“the common warning signs and symptoms of stress overload, Cognitive symptoms: Memory problems, Inability to concentrate, Poor judgment, Seeing only the negative, Anxious or racing thoughts, Constant worrying. Emotional symptoms: Depression or general unhappiness, Anxiety and agitation, Moodiness, irritability, or anger, Feeling overwhelmed, Loneliness and isolation, Other mental or emotional health problems, Physical symptoms. Behavioral symptoms: Eating more or less, Sleeping too much or too little, Withdrawing from others, Procrastinating or neglecting responsibilities, Using alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs to relax, Nervous habits (e.g. nail biting, pacing)”.

I am sure that you can see a whole lot of your state of mind and life in this quote. I have no doubt that the first thing you need to do is to lower your stress level/ undo your chronic neural and hormonal arousal and overload. This will take a lot of time, practice and patience because this overload is your body’s physical and chemical habit that has existed for decades.. The terms for this kind of practice in psychotherapy are Emotional Regulation and (incorporated into therapy later), Mindfulness.

The practice of emotional regulation skills and mindfulness will greatly improve your cognitive function, and it will make it possible for you to eliminate some, if not all of your harmful habits, with time.

“It feels like I am at the bottom of an immense mountain, and I have no idea how to get up”- start with the practice of emotional regulation skills/ mindfulness. We can talk more about it later, if you want.

Your mother was very angry at your father at the end of her life, 16 years after your father left the home. That’s a whole lot of anger for too long. Figuratively, throughout your childhood, she was looking at the bottom of that bucket, not at you. She did not see you. How did it feel to live with a mother who did not see you: “like crap most of the time.. like I want to die, like no  one loves me, and like I am doomed to be miserable”.

You wrote regarding the responses you got on your thread: “It feels good to be seen, even if only virtually”. You still need to be seen.

“I want a second chance at a happy life. I can see it, but it’s on the other side of that mountain I don’t know how to climb.. But there are just so many of them that need taking”-

– After enough progress in your practice of emotional regulation and mindfulness, you will become accustomed to the slow pace of healing, to the principle of one step, one day at a time, and to the fact that it is not going to be a complete healing.

You mentioned that you teach philosophy. I looked up Socrates quotes that may be relevant to you quest:

Regarding you hating yourself, finding it therefore the hardest to love yourself: “Those who are hardest to love need it the most”.

Regarding the process of healing that requires forming new habits in addition to examining the past: “The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new”.

*Following writing the above, I noticed that you posted half an hour ago, answering TeaK’s questions (but addressing the post to me, by mistake perhaps). None of what you posted in your most recent post changes what I wrote above.

anita