Dear Seaturtle:

* I will be sending a series of shorter posts because my keyboard does not allow me to copy  (which I do before submitting a post so to not lose the text if the submission doesn’t work), and I don’t want to lose a long post.

“Last night I dreamt of him.. I was sad, feeling unseen, and he grabbed me, recognizing my sadness and genuinely asking me ‘what do you need?’, that is who I wanted him to be. I woke up.. didn’t miss him, in fact I recognized immediately that that was not him” (Jan 20)-

– this was/ is a pivotal moment in your healing, right there in that quote. If only F would have done what you needed him to do: to recognize your sadness and genuinely ask you what do you need?/ lf only my mother did that when I was growing up unseen, the loneliest girl in the world. Fast forward, we are both adults and there is no way to redo that unseen childhood. It’s too late.. we are not children anymore and our brains are already formed around the experiences we had.

When you woke up from that dream in which you tried to get from N what you didn’t get from F (projecting F into N), and recognized that “that was not him“, that’s the pivotal moment I am talking about: you recognized that N is not who you needed F to be, and neither was F.. who you needed him to be. A necessary part of healing is grieving what you never received as a child, and never will- because you are no longer a child.

anita