In life, we face so many problems, issues and we stay happy and blissful. We never think that we always have problems, God has given all the problem to me and all. How much negativity we think, we feel sad and lost. Budhha said, If we want to be happy, forget, and forgive. That’s how we stay happy in life. Also, meditation is very important to adopt to our day to day life. I will share some basic steps for Meditation. Meditation should practise for a long time, then only we realize the results of Meditation. Firstly, we should run or jog for a few minutes in the early morning before sunrise.  Then only you feel you are opening your chakras in the body. After that, sit in a calm, fresh, clean place where you get the fresh air to breath. Then start inhaling and exhaling the breath and most importantly concentrate on breathing. That’s how you gain peace, happiness and success in your life where you are:-) Please go through the blog why meditation is good for you and its effect.

Dear Iris:

I will retell your story using the information you knew at the time, not correcting the information to fit what you found out at a later time:

You grew up in the Philippines with your parents. When you were 8, your parents left you in the Philippines and moved to America. You then lived with your older brother and with one of your older sisters who worked on a cruise ship with a second older sister.  Your second older sister married a man with whom she has a son, and you lived with her and her family.

When you were 12, your second older sister took you with her and her husband and son out of the Philippines and to Manchester, UK. At 13 you came across your birth certificate and found out that your second older sister, he one you were living with, is actually your mother, and that you didn’t know your biological father. You kept this new information to yourself for two years, during which you were “so unhappy and irritable”.

At 14 you moved with your redefined family out of Manchester and to a very small town within the UK. You hated living with your redefined family in that small town. At 15, you finally told your former sister, now mother that you found out that she was your mother two years earlier She told you that she was a single mother when she had you and your grandparents pretended to you and to everyone that you were their daughter, their “last child”, because they were ashamed, afraid of being negatively judged by society for having an unmarried daughter with child.

At 19, you moved on your own back to Manchester. At 21, you moved back to the small town and lived with your redefined family, the relationship with them was better than before. At 22 you moved to Sydney, Australia, where you lived with your UK born boyfriend. You “loved it then hated then loved it”.

By the age of 25 (your current age), you and your boyfriend, now fiancé, moved back to the UK and currently live in a city in Scotland, close to his family. One of his family members is his grandmother whom he sees often. You are annoyed about her asking him to do simple things for her, things she should know how to do on her own, like turning on her laptop. You have arguments with your fiancé regarding him attending to her too often, for simple things. “every time she texts him or calls him I get a little bit annoyed/ paranoid because she might go and ask him to go to hers”. She paid for part of the wedding you plan to have next year, and she is nice to you, but you feel that she is overinvolved in the wedding planning, and you feel indebted to her and guilty regarding how you feel about her.

You feel lonely, somewhat anxious and depressed, and lack direction in life. You wrote: “I have felt this in Sydney and also everywhere I move to which makes me think it’s not the place, it’s just me. My childhood history caused me to have anxiety and depression but traveling for me was great as I felt like I was running away from my problems”, and regarding meeting your boyfriend, now fiancé: “before I met him I was a mess I had no direction in life, I just wanted to travel and runaway”.

I don’t know if you are still following your thread and therefore, I don’t know if you are reading this. If you are here, reading this, please let me know if I retold your story accurately and if you would like, we can communicate further.

anita

Dear Iris (chezka21):

By “second older sister” I meant one of the two (or more) sisters, not referring to the order of your sisters’ ages. You had two parents and three older siblings: an eldest sister, a middle sister, and a bother for thirteen years. At 13, you found out that all along, you were your eldest sister’s daughter, and your two other siblings were your aunt and uncle. And that your parents were your grandparents. You later found out the reason: that your grandparents were ashamed of the evidence of their daughter having had sex outside marriage, and that evidence.. is you.

This is not an uncommon happening. I personally communicated for years with a member who also discovered that her sister was her mother, her siblings were her uncles and aunts, and her parents were her grandparents.

I imagine that when your parents (grandparents, that is) left you behind in the Philippines, you were upset and you missed them. You lost one home that you had by the time you were 8. Then you lived with siblings, one was often absent working in the cruise ship- no stable home for you. Four years after you lost your first home, the one with your parents, your eldest sister, took you with her and her family (husband and child) when they moved to the UK, and then moved again within the UK, still an unstable life for you.

And then, more of your stability was taken away from underneath  you: the shocking discovery that everything you thought was true.. was not. For as long as you thought that you were your eldest sister’s sister, it made sense that you were somewhat of an outsider to her nuclear family of husband and child. But when you found out she was your mother, I imagine it hurt and angered you that you were not a part of her nuclear family, that you were an outsider all along.

The results of this discovery and keeping it to yourself for two years were more anxiety, anger, depression and loneliness. I imagine the extent of the loneliness involved in keeping this shocking information to yourself for two whole years.

When you traveled you are distracted from the anxiety, anger, depression and loneliness. When settled in one place, you are not distracted, so you feel these things sometimes acutely.

Regarding your feelings about your fiancé in relation to his grandmother, here is a possibility for you to consider and let me know if it is true: you want you and your fiancé to be The nuclear family, a family of two (you and fiancé) and future child or children.  You no longer want to be on the outside looking in. You want to be central to your fiancé. You don’t want anyone to dilute your nuclear family. (?)

anita

Dear Iris:

You are welcome. You say that you “never looked at it that way before”, what specifically in what I suggested to you in the last post, did you not look at before in that way?

anita

Dear Iris:

I understand. You wrote in your post before last: “I really do not want to feel what I feel towards my fiancé’s grandma as I can see in the long run it wouldn’t be good for our relationship”- here is an idea that may work for you. It will not be easy but in the long run it can be helpful to you and to your relationship with your fiancé:

– instead of trying to discourage your fiancé from seeing his grandma, do the opposite: encourage him to see her, and spend more time with his grandma yourself. I imagine you will feel resistance doing so, but if you ease into it with time and practice, you will eventually feel more and more included and like you belong with your fiancé and his grandma.

anita

You are welcome, Iris. It is kind of you to return to your thread just so to thank me, I appreciate it. I hope you post again anytime, if you need to.

anita