Dear Romeo:

Welcome back.

Feeling useless and incompetent.. and depressed (it is depressing to feel useless and incompetent!) is not new in your experience, isn’t it. I mean you felt his way as a child and ever since, outside maybe a break or time-out here and there?

We all keep re-experiencing our childhood experience. If that experience was distressing, and it is for so many of us, then we keep re-experiencing the same distress until we do enough healing from that past experience. Healing is very tough to do, to engage in for as long as it takes.

When your mother had her breakdowns, and you were a child, you tried to help her and failed, feeling incompetent then, am I correct?

If I am, then “Feeling incompetent” (the title of your current thread) is this re-experiencing of the same old, same old childhood experience in the context of adult circumstances.

anita

Dear Romeo:

“What can I do to make things better again… to get back to my confident self again?”- before I give you my answer, I ask, regarding the word again:

When were things better and when were you confident?

anita

Dear Romeo:

Will you tell me more about that “sense of power” with your most recent girlfriend, power in what way, over what and how  long did that feeling of power last?

And regarding working in the cabin crew, what was that like and how long did that good feeling last?

anita

Dear Romeo:

The way I understand it our experience in adult life is most influenced by our childhood experience. Distressing childhood leads to distressing adulthood.

Within the experience of a distressing childhood there are times of pleasure, of comfort. And within the experience of a distressing adulthood there are also times of pleasure and comfort, even confidence, hope.

The external factors in our adult lives: whether we are in a relationship or not, if in a relationship, then who is the person we are involved with. Other externals are where we live, alone or with roommates, who are the roommates and so on, as well as whether we are employed or not and if we are employed, what is the job we are doing. Some jobs are congruent with mental health, we feel good doing that particular job, working with these particular people, and other jobs are not congruent with mental health, doing a job we strongly dislike and working with people who are abusive, let’s say.

Living a good life, a better and better life has to do with these two things: healing best we can from a distressing childhood and seeing to it that the external factors in our lives are congruent with mental health. It is Both.

And so, “Feeling incompetent” has to do with the internals and the externals, and feeling competent will be about healing from the internals and managing your life best you can so that the externals fit your mental health, your well-being.

anita

Dear Romeo:

I re-read all your posts on this thread and previous ones, slowly and attentively.

This is my current understanding: a very key experience, a major experience in your childhood, one that affected you greatly for years to come, to the present is this: “My mom was really broken back then.. I saw her crying and constant breakdowns… Sometimes she gets angry easily”

Children are strongly inclined to take things personally, and so, you believed that it was your fault that she was so sad and angry, and that it was your job to fix it and make her happy and pleased with you. When you failed to make her happy, when she got angry yet again, you felt powerless, a failure.

It didn’t help that as a teen you were called a stick for being skinny and small.

But you went to the gym and you changed the latter, becoming fit and strong. You felt good about it, powerful. And when you helped the two women you were involved with get rid of some of their pain regarding their previous relationships, you “felt like a ‘real man’ helping them and being their rock… almost felt like a drug or something that fuels me”.

With your ex girlfriend, it reads to me that the reason the conversations didn’t flow is that you didn’t like her that much, there wasn’t much of a meeting-of-the-minds-and-heart for you. As I read your interactions with me and with other members replying to you on your threads, I see that you are a very interactive, very pleasant, sensitive man. Your conversations here do flow. I figure it was an incompatibility that conversations didn’t flow with your ex girlfriend.

If it wasn’t for your pre-existing guilt, you would have left the relationship long ago. Instead, you … submitted to her, really. Staying and Submitting so to please her.

You wrote: “I felt the most confident before I got into a relationship, before I met my ex… After I got into a relationship, I started questioning myself, doubting myself”. Months after the breakup, you are “still fighting this guilt for breaking up with (your) ex gf”. It is the guilt, same that you experienced as a child, watching your mother break down and experiencing her anger at you.

You now know why she was angry, that it was because she was betrayed by her siblings. But as a child, you must have taken her anger personally, feeling you did something wrong, that you failed to do what is right and that is why she was angry with you.

My input from yesterday, put in simpler terms is that this guilt of your childhood needs to be resolved. If it is not resolved, for as long as it is not resolved, it will keep interrupting your life as it has already. To be able to choose a woman who is compatible with you and to have a relationship that works for you, that guilt has to be resolved.

And then, there is the issue of power. You need to feel reasonably powerful in your own life, not powerless, in relationships, in the work place, in the gym and elsewhere. This need is not negotiable. Submission doesn’t work for you.

The guilt and the powerless feeling, these will continue to interrupt your life whether you are in a relationship or not, whether you are performing this job or that job. This is what I meant by the internal work that needs to be done.

The external work that needs to be done is about making wise choices about the woman to get involved with (one compatible with you, one you genuinely like) and about the job that fits you better.

Please let me know if I was clear today.

anita

Dear Romeo:

There is a core belief you have that is producing the feeling of guilt, and that core belief is that you were responsible for your mother’s sadness and anger. This is what I believe to be… your core belief.

My question to you at this point is: do you feel and think that this is indeed your core belief or do you think that it makes sense but you don’t really feel it?

anita