Dear llyana:

I don’t know if it is a good idea for me to post to you today, exactly a week after your last post and my last reply to you. But I figure that you can choose to read this or not, and that if you are reading and you feel distressed, you can choose to stop reading at any time. My purpose: maybe… just maybe, a little bit of a maybe- something I write may help just a bit. And I am fine with not receiving a reply, of course.

About your son and your relationship with him, you wrote April-June 2020: “I’m 44 and married with one child (9 years old)… I have been depressed since my son was born.. and my relationships with him (is) strained.  I had a very traumatic birth during which I almost died, and it profoundly affected by ability to bond with my son…..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. We are in family therapy to help heal the fractured connection we formed after my traumatic birth, and I am hopeful that if I get better… My son had a hard day yesterday. He kept saying that life sucks and that he wishes he’d never been born……my son.. is really struggling right now. He hates his life and wishes he were never born. He sometimes asks me to kill him. We have him in therapy… I have a lot of anger, and I don’t seem to be able to let go of it. I want to forgive.. but I am stuck. As you know, anger that gets held onto runs in my family. I am sure some of that anger is directed towards my son. I don’t want it to be there, I totally see that it is not his fault. I hate that I resent him, but I know that I do. I have done some good work around this in therapy. I badly want to repair the relationship with my son”-

– Anger doesn’t want to repair relationships, it wants to destroy relationships: it is in the nature of anger to destroy, not to build or mend or fix. Part of you badly wants to repair the relationship with your son, but the angry part of you does not want to do that.

“Often times I feel like I want to die, like no one loves me”- the little girl that you were.. she was very angry that no one loved her and she still is angry at others and at herself: “My whole life I have hated myself”.

“I am on a number of psychiatric medications, have been for many years now…But the medication is clearly not enough to make me feel less depressed. I am lucky to have excellent psychiatric care though.. I am working with 5 different therapists lately. I have a trauma therapist, an art therapist, and a psychologist. I also am still working with our family therapist and the couple’s therapist”- none of the medications and therapies resolved your anger, true to a week ago.

As I see it, there has to be a significant resolution of your anger, not of all of it, but of a significant amount before you can be truly motivated to make a significant improvement in your mental health and in your relationship with your son.

When your mother was dying, angrily vomiting into a bucket with a photo of your father attached to the bottom.. when you watched that.. I can  only imagine the horror. It makes me think of a time when I was a child, seeing the photos in the album with the head of my mother torn off from almost of the photos. None of the heads of the other people were torn off, only hers. I think that I asked her why. She said that she is ugly, that’s whys. You just don’t forget things like that. I don’t remember how I felt but it was one of those many times that made me sick.

Back to  you- maybe ever since you watched your now dead mother angrily vomiting into that bucket, you’ve been stuck yourself in that Bucket of Anger. And if so, to live life outside that bucket, you have to climb out of it and see what’s out there, outside that bucket.

anita