Dear IpkRO9:

I re-read some of our previous communication on another thread and was reminded of/ impressed by your intelligence, insight and kindness to me and to others in your life. I was also reminded that the relationship we are discussing included repeated fights and distress, and that it was long-distance much of the time: at one point you didn’t see him for eight months. There was some romantic (maybe more) history between him and your sister, yet he was seeking her approval of his relationship with you. I hoped back in 2019 that he was wiser than what he appears to me now. Overall, it was an unsatisfactory relationship.

Yesterday, at 27.5  years old, you wrote that ever since you were a kid you “always felt lonely.. lonelier around couples.. so envious.. wanted one particular person just for me.. want someone who could.. appreciate experiences and me”. You told that your mother told you that when you were young, you looked up at the sky, and when asked why, you answered: “I am missing my person”. You wrote: “(I) crave my own person”.

April 12, 2019, exactly two years ago, you had a bad day: “the man I am seeing and I, we had a bad night yesterday and a bad day today. Yet he was there, still caring. I have never experienced this, people still caring for me when they are angry. It is not a trait I have seen in my parents”.

You shared on that same day that you were taught, by your parents, to “keep things bottled up inside”, and as a result, you were “always miserable.. caged.. unable to break through”.

What keeps us lonely is keeping things bottled in inside. We can be around people, but as long as we live in an emotional cage, we cannot enjoy a togetherness with others. It is the honest, safe emotional exchange between people that makes it possible for people to enjoy and thrive in togetherness.

I think that when you craved your “own person”, you craved one other person with whom you can break through your emotional cage.

On April 26, 2019, you shared regarding your mother, father and older sister: “since a small age my parents have bound all three of us strongly.. even if we don’t like some aspects of each other… you have to.. since she is your sister”-

– Problem is that this unit of three included an older hostile sister (“she has hurt me and my parents many times by her harsh words and deeds”, etc. December 2018) and parents who were submissive to that sister. And so, an honest, safe exchange of emotions was impossible for you, and you had to live in an emotional cage, isolated.

Even though your recent relationship was far from being satisfactory, it was a better social unit/ a better kind of Togetherness than what you experienced in the unit-of-three at home. In comparison, it was better because you had moments of honest, safe exchanges of emotions with him, and they must have felt heavenly.

Back to yesterday when you expressed your loneliness. I think that it’s the experience of being in that emotional cage where you’ve been all along, venturing out at times but back in too soon.

Question is, how to exit this emotional cage for good. I think that the adequate undoing of your loyalty to that unit-of-three is a beginning.

anita