Dear Elizabeth,

My whole post here acknowledges what you have said here. I have sought professional help. It’s a long road but please help me get there. I need a lot of help. I admit that.

It’s great you sought professional help, and that you are aware of those patterns in your relationships. The first thing on your path to healing would be to try not to beat yourself up for making those decisions. Those were half-conscious decisions, influenced by your subconscious drives, hopes and dreams,  in other words by your inner child’s longing… by her longing for love and appreciation. That longing was valid, only directed at the wrong person… But now you know why you were attracted to the wrong type of person…. so try to forgive yourself.

Tara Brach has a term “radical acceptance”. Accept absolutely everything that happened, how things turned out, that you made some mistakes, that you didn’t know better at the time…. and that it still hurts and it’s hard to let go…. Accept yourself with all that baggage…

When you can do that, you will have found a place of compassion in yourself. From that place of compassion you can start relating to your inner child. You can be a loving and supportive parent to that little girl, give her love and validation she is longing for, and tell her those encouraging words that she needs to hear.

But for starters, have compassion for yourself and accept yourself fully, with all your perceived flaws, because that’s the beginning of healing…

Dear Elizabeth,

I am so sorry that your family was so unfair to you, that they treated you like a black sheep and accused of all of their problems. They felt better about themselves when they would put you down and denigrate you:

There was a point in time when everyone took joy out of bashing me. Because i was different i was used as a yard stick for badness. My own siblings would comfort each other by saying you are better off than Elizabeth.

They have also falsely accused you of the things you haven’t done:

I have heard my own father accuse me of lasting after my brother inlaw because i exposed his infidelity. My own sister accusing me of wanting her husband when i had never ever shook hands with him.

My other sister get so pissed that she got laid off instead of me. My father accuse me of being the cause of my sisters being laid off as well as his own retrenchment.

I can imagine how horribly alone and unloved you felt. To experience such bullying and hostility from your own family, from those who were supposed to love you and protect you.

That’s a terrible trauma, Elizabeth, but the good news is that you are determined to help yourself and heal… and you can heal, I promise you.

You said earlier:

When I started my journey of emotional healing I had no idea just how deep the wound run. Because I learnt a long time ago to self soothe, I never really paid attention to my feeling as I felt like me coming unhinged will be a great inconvenience to the people around me.

How did you self-soothe as a child?

I have suffered depression for so long but no one in my family knows. My sister once said to me my feelings are not important enough for them to care about.

That was just one more reason to feel unimportant, unseen, like nobody wants to know you and what’s really going on with you.

So I kept putting Bandages all over my heart. I tucked away and swept everything under a carpet. I never got upset or spoke up about what I wanted because I was worried that they would leave me.

I guess you didn’t dare to express your feelings and stand up for yourself in your adult relationships either? You were hurting but said nothing? That’s why you probably stayed with Christopher for 2 years, while knowing he is rather selfish and wouldn’t be there for you when you needed him.

One of the first steps in healing, besides accepting yourself fully, is to feel all your emotions. It’s best to do it in therapy – to allow yourself to feel your anger and your sadness and your disappointment and your disgust – at various family members for treating you so poorly. You don’t do it to their faces, you don’t knock on their door and start accusing them and attacking them – but you allow yourself to feel your anger in a therapeutic setting. Because validating our emotions is so important for healing.

Anita has already mentioned that your anger at Christopher probably stems from a deeper anger – anger at your own family. You have all the right to be angry at them, and you can process it in therapy. And when you’ve worked on it, you can decide what kind of relationship you want to continue with your family. Are you in touch with them, btw? How is your relationship with them at the moment?

My family scares me. My parents scare me even more.

I can imagine that, specially if you’re a little girl, who needs their protection and soothing, and all she gets is bashing and accusations. Now, as the adult Elizabeth, you have the chance to say No to their abuse and protect yourself. To cut contact even.

My biggest fear is they dont have my back.

They don’t. Not only that, but they are hostile towards you (The things they say about me behind my back are awful.) It seems they behave more like enemies than a loving family. So you’d need to set boundaries in your relationship with your family members – maybe with some of them you need to reduce contact to zero. To protect your mental health, and also to show that you care about yourself, that you value yourself. You are not a doormat for anybody, not even for your family members.

Dear Elizabeth:

On May 31, 2021, in a reply to another member, you wrote: “You need to redevelop a relationship with yourself. Get to know yourself“- I want to get to know you better, Elizabeth, through re-reading all that you shared this year here.

On Sept 14 and later, you shared that you are 37,  “a single mother raising a boy who is very sensitive“. in 2017, you lost your younger sister, a “very ambitious and a good girl.. my precious sister.. the only other person that I shared really deep secrets with“, to AIDS. You were shocked, feeling “extremely anxious and mostly guilty” when you found out that she had AIDS only a month before she died. You felt guilty because in the months before she died, she called you more often than usual to chat, to find comfort with you, but not knowing that she was dying, you weren’t adequately there for her and “had let her down“.

A couple of months later, Nov 11, I was surprised to read that you suffered from “being bullied by my entire family.. everyone took joy out of bashing me“, because your “entire” family, and “everyone” include your younger sister. I was surprised to read that you “always felt more comfortable among strangers than my own family.. My teens were miserable. My 20s were even worse. I have suffered depression for so long but no one in my family knows“, because it is not congruent with you having shared really deep secrets with your younger sister who has been alive during your teens and 20s.

You met Christopher more than a year after her death (“About a year and some months after her death I met Christopher“, posted Sept 14), corrected later to having met Christopher only one m0nth after your sister’s death (“I got the timeline of when I met Christopher all wrong. I have remembered so clearly now. I met him a month after my sister had passed“, posted Oct 20). Christopher worked in the same company you worked for. In the beginning he was “amazing.. attentive and kind and listened“, and you felt that you “made a friend for life“. The two of you then became lovers. But when your car broke down, and otherwise “things were not going so well” for you, feeling “lost and confused and needed him more than before“, and therefore, having “less and  less to offer him he pulled back.. and so he did everything to avoid me“.  Since then, you  learned that he is selfish, narcissistic, and that “hungry for success and he is the type that will do anything if it will help him move up“, including using you for perks in the company.

While he was doing everything to avoid you, you felt “utterly miserable.. not being able to take care of myself emotionally.. feeling like a terrible mother“. You then “got a not so clever idea in my head that if I got pregnant and had a baby instead I would feel a whole lot better“. And so, in early January 2021, you “finally fell pregnant“, and you were “very excited“. But soon, you were spotting, felt “sad and anxious all the time“, and miscarried about 8 weeks into the pregnancy. When you told Christopher about your miscarriage, you heard a relief in his voice, and you felt “utterly shattered… broken and sad“.

According to the above, shared in Sept 2021, you planned the pregnancy: getting the idea of getting pregnant, and finally falling pregnant. But a couple of months later, in Nov 7 & 11, you changed your story: “we never used protection..  he didn’t plan the pregnancy, neither did I.. I was not actively trying to get pregnant“. Perhaps the following sentence suggests the truth: “Yes, I am not innocent in the situation.. in creating the situation and dealt with it“, Nov 11)

Christopher broke up with you in early February 2021 (“It’s been eight months since we broke up.. when he was breaking up with me“, posted Oct 1, 2021), which according to the timeline above,  would be after your pregnancy and before your miscarriage. Or the breakup happened in April 2021, more than a month after your miscarriage (“It’s been over 6 months since Christopher and I broke up”, posted Oct 19, 2021). Before and following the breakup, you felt “so hateful.. lifeless and angry… spiraling out of control.. angry and highly resentful“, missing him still while in a new, long-distance boyfriend, a relationship that ended by this time.

My closing thought- you wrote about Christopher:  “he is emotionally stunted! He is a little boy on the inside still struggling to get approval by any means possible. It’s like what my son would do… He is a little boy stuck inside a grown man’s body. He craves approval from his mother“-  you are a mother of a “very sensitive” boy, a boy  who craves your approval, a boy who craves your loving attention, a boy who craves a mother who is  physically and emotionally healthy. Please be these things for your boy, so that he can grow up to be healthier than Christopher, and healthier than you have been so far. It is very difficult to be honest about things we are ashamed of, things we feel guilty for- it is true to me too- but this kind of honesty is necessary if we are to continue to heal.. if we are to continue our individual walks on our individual healing journeys.

anita

Dear Elizabeth,

I don’t know if you’ll be reading this, but I would like to say that I understand you and your motivations, and that I don’t think you deceived anybody here on purpose. I know that in case of trauma, people sometimes don’t remember exactly the timeline of their abuse, and have things mixed up in their memory in terms of what happened when. But besides the mixed up dates of when exactly you met Christopher and when exactly he broke up with you, I believe you told the truth of what happened, and that he indeed treated you badly and caused you a lot of suffering.

This doesn’t mean you had no part in creating the situation, because obviously you stayed with this guy, who wasn’t treating you well, and you had unprotected sex with him. But as I said before, you did it because you didn’t love and respect yourself enough, and you hoped that he might end up loving you and respecting you some day (which was the longing of your inner child). All that is a consequence of your childhood, of having being abused and put down by your parents, and developing a strong need to get love and validation from people who remind you of your parents.

That’s why you stayed in bad relationships, where you didn’t respect yourself, nor did the men you were with respect you. In the relationship with Christopher, you respected yourself so little that you 1) offered to hide from your family and the rest of the world that he is the baby’s father, and 2) you stayed with him even after his despicable behavior during your pregnancy and miscarriage. It was him who broke up with you eventually, not vice versa.

But it isn’t your fault because you didn’t know better – your own emotional wounds prevented you from standing up for yourself and leaving this selfish, callous man. I trust that you suffered greatly at the hands of this man, while at the same time being unable to untangle yourself and let him go. That’s why I must say I don’t agree with anita when she suggests you exaggerated some things – I don’t believe you did. Rather, you allowed bad things to happen to you because of your past wounding.

I do hope you continue to seek healing and deal with your childhood emotional wounds as well. If you ever wish to share your thoughts and feelings again, you are welcome.

Wishing you all the best!