Dear Kmittens:

You are very welcome. I hope that you will feel better soon! You wrote that you think that I am right about “feelings of unhappiness and discontentment from childhood leading to unhappiness and discontentment in adulthood“, this means to me that you were indeed unhappy and discontented as a child. I too was an unhappy and discontented child- lonely, sad, anxious, conflicted and angry, and these feelings/ states of mind carried on into my adulthood and persisted for many years.

You didn’t share anything about your childhood in your 4 short posts. I want to re-read them and see what I can guess happened in your childhood based on what happened in your 10 years relationship with your ex:

“We fought… I would get very frustrated at never being heard or listened to. This would lead to big rows… When we disagreed or had conflict, it could escalate to nastiness and bitterness… I would also give the silent treatment and lose my temper” –

– I am guessing that as a child, you were not heard or listened to, that you repeatedly tried to tell your parent or parents things that were important to you but again and again, they did not listen to you. As a result, you felt alone and angry. Maybe at some point you gave up on trying to be heard, so when asked a question, you didn’t bother answering, or you didn’t bother answering truthfully.

“I am still really struggling to move on, let go, and stop thinking of him. It’s been a year and I don’t know if it’s normal to still be feeling this way, and whether I will always feel this way (Feb 22) … I am still hurting and find life very difficult. I feel like I will never be okay again and I can’t work out why this is (April 1)” – my answer to your why-this-is question is: unfinished business from childhood. Let’s say that my guess above is correct, and currently you live with, or you regularly visit your parents, and he/she/they still talk about themselves or other people, but they don’t listen to you or talk about you, and so, you still feel invisible with them, unheard, unseen… as if you don’t exist. Let’s say that this is true (again, I am only guessing here), then every such visit reinforces your unhappy and discontented state of mind.

If I am correct, then because you experienced a severe lack of positive attention as a child, and because you experienced many good moments with your ex over the span of 10 years, intoxicating moments (in between the fights) when you felt heard, moments of a very deep connection that led you to think of him as your best friend and soulmate (“I spent all of my 20s with my best friend and who I thought was my soul mate… We had a very deep connection“)- you still long for those moments a year after the breakup with him.

It is also possible that some of the ways your ex treated you from day 1 were similar to the ways your parents treated you (“those problems were always underlying in our relationship from day one… He would never take accountability for his actions… would taunt me sometimes or refuse to apologise, or listen to me“), and these similarities got you hooked on him as you tried, by proxy (through a substitute), to make your parents take accountability for their actions, to make your parents apologise, to make your parents listen to you. In other words, you tried to finish your childhood unfinished business in the context of your romantic relationship (a very common subconscious motivation).

What do you think/ feel about what I wrote here?

anita

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