Dear miyoid:

(In boldface are your words taken from your most recent post of yesterday. Boldfaced and italicized are your words from previous posts and threads)

“Then I’ve traveled and came to the city my mom and her husband lives for a few days…  I was feeling neglected by my mother as well. Even though she was very happy to see me here as a surprise, and even though she was disappointed to hear that I’ll be back to work in a few days, she acted very cold and careless at night, when she was sleepy” –

– You shared long ago that when you were a young child, you needed your mother close to you if you were to fall asleep, so she stayed with you by your bed until you fell asleep. When you fell asleep, she left to be on her own. But the moment you realized she was gone- you got up and went looking for her. She was annoyed when that happened, and fast forward, during your most recent visit, she was annoyed again (“cold and careless“) when she was sleepy, and you again needed her attention.

I don’t think that the problem ever was that your mother didn’t like you. I think that the problem has been all along that she didn’t like being a mother- it was too much of a bother for her, so much so that she didn’t want any one of her daughters to become mothers: “I know that she’s seen children as something that would hold people back. Therefore, she never wanted us (me and my sister) to be mothers…  my mom used to be hard on children, like if someone is behaving spoiled. She didn’t like spoiled children… She was working hard and trying to raise us, do all the responsibilities at home as well“.

This is probably why she likes cats so much (“my mother currently lives with 7-8 cats“), cats are quite independent, they do not have those dependent emotional needs that children have.

As a child and a teenager, you often stayed up at night because your mother wasn’t there with you, either she was in another part of the home, wanting to be left alone, or she was out working: “I was spending my time alone at the house in the evenings, and she was working…  I remember her not being able to return home for a long period of time and I felt a bit bad. I wasn’t able to sleep cause I waited for her” – fast forward, last night you were up, typing your recent post at 2 am. Staying up at night by the computer is a behavior that was imprinted in your brain during childhood.

“Yes, she misses me, and she is probably content that I’m here for a while, but she doesn’t care for me the way I wanted to be cared for, this is not enough for me to feel safe… She only cares about animals and that’s all” – she doesn’t like to be a mother, never liked it. She doesn’t like having children because children are dependent. She likes having cats because cats are independent.

When a child does not get to depend on her mother, she becomes co-dependent, looking for a romantic interest to depend on: “The feelings of loneliness actually reminded me of how I wanted to see that care from somebody else. I actually remembered how my ex-boyfriend…  always supported me… I’ll always need that in my life and how I cannot have that from my parents” –

– I think that the beginning of your co-dependency can be traced back to the night when you were a teenager, studying for exams, alone at home because your mother was out working. You met a guy on the internet, a guy you never met in-person, but he took your loneliness away with his nice words: “I had somebody I could text with, and I have heard some nice words. I was literally over the moon; I even remember forgetting everything cause I was daydreaming the whole time…. I was able to get a higher grade than normal because I was feeling high“.

Back to last night, regarding your parents: “I realized that nothing will be resolved, cause the fact that they love me doesn’t mean they will want to change, and I don’t see that happening anymore” – I agree, you will never get your dependency needs met by your mother, or by your father. Or by romantic interests. The fear of being abandoned and rejected has been a lifetime fear and only the other night you had a dream: “I saw my ex-boyfriend in my dream. He was rejecting me, I was trying to get to him, trying to talk with him or face him. I was in need of some connection, someone who has understood me… It felt like the most powerful rejection I’ve had. I wanted to see him… I didn’t want to lose connection. But he didn’t want to see me and told me ‘I cannot help you.’“.

It just occurred to me for the first time that the reason you were so attached to that ex who, as you brought up and we discussed, fits the borderline personality disorder diagnosis (BPD) may be this:  you wrote in June 2019: “mom’s love was a bit unpredictable, exists and then disappears” – the hallmark of BPD is unpredictability. It could be that the shifts between him being understanding and supportive of you and being cold and cruel to you, caused you to want to change him, similar to having tried to change your unpredictable mother to… a predictable, reliable and dependable source of understanding and support.

“Also not being able to communicate very well with my current partner might have a role in this, since this has been the first time I went away after we’ve started the relationship… He is the reason why I manage to feel good, why I can choose to feel good… I know that I am a big reason for his happiness, and he is a big reason of mine, but I am really scared of losing him” – you are codependent on him, but maybe he is codependent on you, and this mutual co-dependency is likely to be the reason why you will not be losing him. But like I said, your early life dependency needs cannot be met by him. It will take you continuing to do emotional work where you connect to the child that you were, feeling that it was really you, scared and lonely, and feeling empathy and understanding for yourself.

anita

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