Dear miyoid:

“I cried reading this… Thank you for telling me about this, and I don’t know what to feel about it. I feel sad, maybe I am trying to be empathetic towards you“- you are welcome. Whatever you feel, and whatever you don’t feel about anything is okay with me. I know that you are a good person no matter how you feel at any moment.

“I know this is much more powerful and hard comparing what I’ve been through“- when I shared with you about my childhood, I did not at all think that my childhood story is harder or more powerful than yours. I can tell how hard a person’s childhood was by how much subjective anxiety and sickness are passed on from one’s childhood into adulthood rather than by the objective details of the childhood.

“I was never scared of my mom killing herself “- but you were scared of something, and I believe that the extent of your fear was comparable to mine. I told you my story because in my mind, although our stories are objectively different, our childhood (and ongoing) anxiety has been similar.

“I feel a bit of an anger towards my dad for using me for his own needs, he used to tell me about his miserable loneliness just to make me go whine to my mom. He was using me to reach out to my mom, and maybe make her feel bad again hoping that she would accept him back. She resisted, thank god. But I was in the middle, getting emotional all the time thinking that my dad is in a bad condition. He was alone, he was sad“- here in boldface is your experience as a child. What is not in boldface is your later-in-life interpretations of your childhood.

When a child sees a parent “in a bad condition”, the child fears that the bad condition will get worse and result in … the parent being incapacitated or dying, isn’t it? You went to your mother, scared and whining because you were afraid and you wanted her to fix his bad condition, make him better.

“He was not an easy person to be around, and he was strict. So I didn’t like staying with him, only me and him…  I had to think of what I’ll ask over and over again… I used to rehearse what I’ll say in my head, only after that I could ask“- maybe you were afraid that if you ask him for something, or if you ask him the wrong way, his bad condition will get worse…? Maybe you were afraid to contribute to his bad condition.

“He started to get sick after the divorce. Months of medicine, different diagnosis trials and then he was diagnosed with cancer“- so your fear that his bad condition will get worse came true, didn’t it?

“And now whenever he feels the need, he just gets a bit sick again…  he makes me feel bad on the phone, for having pain or being alone just for one day because stepmom visits her family.. I get angry“- so he keeps your fear ongoing, maintaining your fear, is what I am thinking. You feel anger but underneath the anger is the same old, same old fear that he will die, is it? Maybe you are so used to that fear that you don’t feel it as such….?

anita