Dear Aislynn/ Reader:

In my post before last, I wrote regarding your mother: “she didn’t really know you, didn’t really see you throughout the years when you were growing up. If she saw how anxious and all alone you were, how overwhelmed you were, she would have helped you”.

Later, I came across something you shared that validates the quote above regarding your mother (and stepfather): “they’re oblivious to other people’s struggles. They don’t see how hard it is to get me to even ask a sales associate where to find a particular item… they don’t see how much I struggle with it, how much discomfort it causes me. To them, it is as though if they cannot physically see the ailment, it does not exist... My mother is the kind of woman who if she saw someone park in a handicapped parking space, and saw them get out and walk just fine, would make a snide comment about them, not taking the time to realize that perhaps they have cancer, a mental disorder, heart disease, etc.”

On the other hand, as a child, you did see your mother beyond seeing a physical ailment: “I did identify with my mother’s struggles and hurt… I saw her as vulnerable“, etc. And you did your best to help her with her hurt and struggles.

You attributed your mother not seeing you struggling emotionally to her being ignorant of the issue of mental disorders- but as a child, you were not educated about mental disorders. The reason you saw her emotional struggles was that your child eyes were open and focused on your mother. You saw her. Her eyes, on the other hand, were closed to you. She looked elsewhere, so she did not see you. (This is often the case with parents and children).

When your father left the family in the U.S., having moved back to Mexico where his parents lived, your mother was left alone to pay the bills, wasn’t able to, so the small family, consisting of your mother, yourself (7) and your sister (5) moved to her mother’s home. Anywhere from a few months to a few years later, your mother met another man and the four of you lived as a family. A baby boy was added to the family 5 years after your father left.

In December 2015, you were 20, your sister was 18 and your brother was 8. In your first thread at the time, you shared about an ex-boyfriend of yours who sent you a message a few days before you started the thread. Right at the beginning of your writing, you expressed a combination of Anxiety, Guilt and a Motivation to Help People with Issues: “It’s giving me anxiety thinking about what I’m going to reply to him, and it has my stomach in knots…Part of why I was always so eager to let him back into my life was because I wanted to help him. I didn’t want to give up on him, I wanted to be able to help him get through his issues...  Another part of what kept me holding on was guilt. It was after we broke up four years ago that he started drinking, getting high, partying excessively. While we were together, he did not do any of that, hence the guilt. At times I cannot help but think that it is partly my fault for the way he is now”.

You wrote: “However, the rational part of me says that I cannot blame myself for his actions. Because they are just that, HIS actions, not mine” – however, what drives and motivates us is our emotional part, not the rational part.

We then discussed the emotional part and you figured that when your father left the family, you felt guilty about his leaving: “for many years I blamed myself, thinking I did something to push you away” you wrote to him in an unsent letter.

You then suggested that your father left the family because he had issues that were not fixed, and that you are romantically attracted to men with issues, men like your father, and your motivation is to fix their issues/ problems: “I am likely to be attracted to men who need help or have issues. I’ve been with quite a few, and I always tried to help then fix their problems…I always saw them as projects, and I tried to fix them“.

You then wrote to me: “Thanks to your advice I will now do my best to steer clear of men who have problems. I really do need to stop getting in relationships only because I feel the need to fix them“, but a month later, in January 2016, motivated by the same-old motivation to fix a man (and not by the rational thought and decision to steer clear of men who have problems), you longed for your ex: “It seems I am stuck with this feeling I cannot move past… I strangely find myself wanting him to reach out to me, to send me a message. This has been going on for about 2 weeks. I’ll wake up, see that I have notifications from Facebook, and I find myself hoping that I have a message from him“.

Again, what motivates us is our emotional part of us, not our rational part.

When your father left, you felt that it was your job to “protect and take care of my mother and sister… I being the eldest child felt that it was my job to step up and do all I could“- your sister was 5 at the time. Fast forward 13 years, and you still felt that it was your job to protect and take care of your mother, your 18-year-old sister and your 8-year-old brother: “My sister is 18…  Yet, I feel that I need to stay with my family because I do not want my brother to grow up alone. So, in a sense, I’m still doing the protecting and fixing“.

When I suggested to you to resist choosing a man who needs fixing, that in the next relationship, you should be “a little bit of the carefree, taken care of ‘weak’ child, the one that needs the strength of another”, you responded: “I like the challenge and I accept it. Although I will admit that I don’t like feeling like the weaker person in a relationship. It makes me feel vulnerable and I hate that. However, you’re right, I do need to pick a stronger man than the ones I’ve been with. It’ll be a nice change. I was once with a stronger guy… He was a really nice guy who helped me out a lot… He made me feel safe, like nothing could hurt me… and while he loved me, I didn’t feel the same way… Now that I understand why I am drawn to guys with issues… my question is, how would I develop feelings for a stronger guy when I meet him?…  I have always sought out weak guys, so that I can make them strong in order for them to protect me, care for me” –

– what I now understand, more than six years after you wrote the above, is that when your father left, when you were 7 (and perhaps before he left), your mother expressed weakness, so you didn’t have her as a source of strength. You felt vulnerable and it was a very bad feeling, so you took on the role of taking care of your mother and siblings, fixing their problems, etc., being a source of strength for them… which made you feel like a source of strength. It made you feel strong.

Notice, it didn’t make you strong, it made you feel strong, from time to time.

Since then, your sense of strength is attached to the role of taking care of and fixing others’ problems. It is other people’s problems that are… your source of the feeling strong, sometimes.

In the above, you wrote that you once dated a strong guy who loved you, but you didn’t love him back, and you expressed that you are not attracted strong guys, but to weak guys. The reason for this, as I understand it, is that your feeling of strength (an attractive feeling) is attached to weak people (your mother, your younger siblings, weak men). With a strong man, you… don’t feel strong.

The last sentence in the above: “I have always sought out weak guys, so that I can make them strong in order for them to protect me, care for me” – I now understand that it is not the case that in a relationship with a weak guy you remain weak, fixing-and-waiting for them to be fixed and then able to protect and care for you. What it is, is that while trying to fix them, you already experience a feeling of strength, and you are driven to feel it again and again.

“You’re right, that dynamic made sense back then, because I saw my mother and sister as being weak and needing someone to protect them” – you didn’t really protect them, you were only 7 years old when this dynamic started. You helped when you cooked and cleaned and looked after your younger sister and then brother, over the years, but you didn’t protect them really. You took on the role of protector primarily as a way to feel strong. Your mother wasn’t strong… someone had to (feel) strong.

“While I do not want to talk to my ex-boyfriend, and have no intent on communicating with him, I strangely find myself wanting him to reach out to me, to send me a message. This has been going on for about 2 weeks. I’ll wake up, see that I have notifications from Facebook, and I find myself hoping that I have a message from him” – motivated to feel strong, you are seeking your source of felt-strength: the guy with the problems that need fixing.

A feeling of strength is not the same as strength. In your third thread, you shared plenty about your anxiety/ weakness: “While in high school I entertained the idea of being in the field of forensics. However, I was quickly shut down by my uncles saying I wouldn’t make a decent living from that. That was enough to scare me away… I then considered psychology, as the human mind interests me a lot. Once again, I was shut down by my uncles, they said it was too much school for such small pay. Once again, I was discouraged…  I had finally decided to settle on nursing. I would be able to help others and make a decent wage. However, I was intimidated by all the sciences … So, I then considered nutrition. I wanted to become a dietitian. However, then I got to thinking, while I am interested in all of that, I am about 10 pounds overweight. So, who would take me seriously…I thought about it and said to myself, well engineering sounds great, I could be an environmental engineer, it sounds great. Then I though about chemistry, physics and all the labs I’d have to do, and math. That scared me away…I finally settled on becoming an English major. I love reading and writing…. However, I am scared. What could I possibly do with an English degree? …I feel the need to help others. That is what drives me, I want to help others” –

– the drive to help others is about the drive to feel strong.

In your fifth thread on Jan 2016 titled social anxiety, you shared plenty about your anxiety/weakness: “I am about to go into my 4th semester in college, and as usual I am very nervous. Not just nervous about the classes themselves, but about my interactions with other students, how I will be perceived, how I might not make any friends, etc… I was just reading the rubric for my class, and I found out we have a group presentation, in front of the class. Now, this is enough to send my nerves over the roof. I have never been good with presentations in class…  I am very nervous about the first day of the semester, and the rest of the semester to be honest. What can I do to calm myself down? How can I get my anxiety to subdue?…

“I would add what it is like for me on a regular basis. Usually, the night before the semester starts, I can barely sleep. Then in the morning I am a nervous wreck, knots in my stomach, feel like vomiting, loose stools, and despite being hungry I cannot eat because I just cannot stomach it. Once I get to school it all intensifies. I feel this nervousness…  I might plan to walk slowly, to make sure I am going to the right room, getting all the things I need, but my anxiety takes a hold of me and I do things faster than I intend to and sometimes forget to do other things I had intended to… Throughout the rest of the semester, I still feel the same way, regardless of if I actually make a friend, or I am doing good in class… the anxiety is not as intense, but it’s still the same thing, every morning. It’s very draining… OCD. If I may confide in you, I believe that I may have it. I have many things that I do in repetitions, and disturbing thoughts that drive me to keep doing them. I haven’t seen a doctor about it because I am scared. Worried about what it means. I fear that it will just escalate even more or that they won’t understand. Aside from my social anxiety, I also have general anxiety…I try to quiet my body, to take my time, but my brain is going 90 miles an hour, and the worst thing about that is that I can’t quiet it…

“For as long as I can remember I’ve had anxiety. I would count the letters on every sign I saw, or street address, not just once, or twice, but more than 6 times. I hated odd numbers, if I found a word with an odd number, I would add to it or make it a sentence and I wouldn’t stop until it was even… I would have to check the stove, and go into each room more than a few times before leaving the house because I feared something bad would happen if I didn’t… If I went to a place regularly and something was out of order, I’d freak out and think I was going to have a bad day… I can relate to feeling spaced out and not paying attention. For me, it happens all the time. I could be talking to someone, listening to them talk while my mind is elsewhere. It happens more than I’d like, again, because my mind just doesn’t know how to stay still. At any moment, I’ll be thinking, speaking to myself about whatever is on my mind, or just dazing off”.

I wrote to you: “I used to think that being sick with anxiety was me… (as) if THIS is me… a brain defect”, and you responded: “My thoughts exactly, about myself. That my brain is messed up, that I am ill” – anxiety is the opposite of strength; strength heals, anxiety makes a person ill.

*** If you are currently in a relationship, or next time you are in a relationship, the man you will be with will have problems, everyone has problems, I do, you do, he does. Question: is the relationship such that the two of you are helping each other, or is it a relationship that at least one of you is harming the other?

Let’s say the relationship is harming you for now, but you are hoping that it will change. Question is: what is your hope based on: is it based on evidence that he is motivated and able to help himself and be good to you, or is your hope the same old childhood tragic-fictional hope: to successfully fix or help an anxious, weak parent (a parent projected into your romantic partner)?

Separate fiction from science: look for real evidence, don’t let fiction rule your life. Nothing feels more euphoric than imagining a strong childhood desire actualized, but that euphoric feeling drives a lot of people into wasting their lives.

Commit yourself to living in real-life, seeing, hearing, noticing what is real. Commit yourself to becoming strong, aware, assertive, wise, more and more so each and every. Focus on you becoming strong, assertive and wise. Don’t focus on him, hoping, wishing, dreaming… of a happily ever after.

anita