Dear Ilyana,

I am sorry it’s tough for you again, but what you’re experiencing is completely normal. As Anita said previously, progress is not linear, we experience ups and downs, and sometimes it feels it’s just so hard and we’re never going to get better. But just the fact that you’ve started walking the path, that you’re aware of yourself, and that you’re attending therapy, is already a huge step.

There were days in the recent times when you felt better, e.g. when you experienced improved cognition, or when you met a woman in the FB group who like you experienced traumatic birth. You were also happy when you connected to your son, and he shared his problems with you:

My son seems depressed to me. He keeps saying that life sucks and that more bad things happen than good things. I am worried about him. But he is talking to me about it, and last night he said I helped him, which made us both feel good.

Your son told you you helped him, which means you’re not a terrible mother. You’re doing what you can, but the childhood wounding is still there, so you aren’t always at the top of your game. But you’re trying. Give yourself some credit for that. There will be better days again…

And also, it’s hard to suddenly let go of the old coping mechanisms. Those “trails” and neural paths are already engraved in our brain, they’re a part of our automatic responses, and it’s so easy to just slip into them when we feel a slightly bigger obstacle, when things don’t go smoothly. Perhaps it’d help to know that there’s another trail, yet uncharted, but it’s there as a possibility for you. You just need to keep putting one foot before the other, sometimes doing one step forward and two steps back, but eventually you’ll get there, you’ll switch to that other trail, you’ll have enough of the positive experience to not slip back into the old coping mechanisms and depression. There will be enough blue skies that you’ll know that the storm is just temporary and will go away…

Well, this may be too much metaphor 🙂  But I hope you can see that you should just give yourself time (and patience and compassion), and things will slowly start changing…