Dear Boris1010,

we’ve actually talked about the inner child on your previous thread, where you explained how your little paradise suddenly crumbled and fell apart when you were just 10 years old… I am glad that you like John Bradshaw’s book and that it seems to helping you.

With my departed therapist, I’ve learned a few things about myself. My issues with hair trigger anger/outrage are a learned defensive response to anything which feels threatening, anything which is diminishing of me. When I was a little kid, I was powerless over pretty much everything; anger *feels* powerful, even if it isn’t. Better to feel angry and powerful than to feel afraid and powerless. Or so my childish unreason went.

Right, you definitely felt powerless when that huge change came upon you at the age of 10 – your life was taken away from you and you couldn’t do anything about it. Everything that happened to you since was against your will, was violating you, starting from your father leaving, you having to leave your paradise island and move to a big crowded city, to a new school, with unfriendly class mates, and finally, having to live with a stepfather who belittled you and criticized you all the time.

This was a huge shock to your system. From a normal, happy kid you became “intensely shy, withdrawn, socially awkward and timid”. But inside of you there was a lot of anger and rage for these things having been taken away from you, and it hurts even more when we lose something we once had. You knew what happiness was, and then you lost it. You knew what joy was, and then you lost it. I guess it made you bitter and desperate and helpless… Later you started using alcohol and drugs to soothe or numb that pain.

But at the age of 30, you decided you need to stop, you didn’t want to become an alcoholic for life. When you stopped drinking, I believed what happened is that you cut off those emotions too: anger, rage, helplessness, desperation, disappointment, sadness… You couldn’t afford yourself to be destroyed by those intense emotions, which could only be tolerated with the help of alcohol, and so, you needed to cut them off, stop feeling anything. You said you stopped drinking in your 30s, and by the age of 36 you were diagnosed with clinical depression.

I believe that’s the reason you got depressed – numbing of the unpleasant emotions. And since we cannot just selectively cut off the unpleasant emotions, we cut off our feelings altogether and become incapable of feeling the positive emotions either: joy, happiness, love…

When you joined AA and met your lady friend, those emotions got unfrozen after many many years of hibernation. You started feeling joy and hope again at the prospect of being with her, and when she left without a trace, you were crying all the time, feeling a great loss – a loss that you already experienced when you were 10. You must have felt or are still feeling anger too, both at her, but also at your therapist (or the circumstances) for abandoning you. It’s almost like a replay of those old scenes, where you’re suddenly losing that which was dear to you.

She was a person you projected your hopes and dreams at – the hopes and dreams that are now awakened again. And it’s good they are awakened! It’s good you’re not frozen any more. But she isn’t the one to save you, she’s not going to lead you to your promised land (or your promised island). You need to do that for yourself, Boris.

I feel this has been already long enough, so we can continue talking about healing options. But anyway, my impression is that you need to allow yourself to feel all those emotions in a safe, therapeutic environment, and to have someone to witness you and contain you and be that loving, supportive, compassionate adult for you. That’s when the healing of your inner child will happen.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.