Dear Girija:

I wrote to you: “your mother knows what sweet you like… but she keeps offering you bitterness“, and you asked: “are you speaking metaphorically?” – when I wrote to you that your mother knows what sweet you like, I was literal. It reminds me of my mother being generous enough to go through the trouble of taking a bus to a particular store that sold my favorite, expensive marzipan cake, and doing so repeatedly.

When saying that your mother offers you bitterness, I was metaphorical. My mother’s offered me painful histrionic displays of her misery, blaming me for adding to her misery (I was not at all guilty for such)- that was my mother offering me her bitterness, feeding it to me. If I was given the opportunity to choose, I would have easily chosen to see her happy over a million marzipan cakes!

“The fear of judgement that gets reactivated around people; how do I win over that? Both in the moment and long-term to ultimately not have it at all” – based on my personal experience, the first step to take is to no longer be in contact with your primary judgers (parents/ family members) who judged you when you were a child and who keep judging you still. Without no new contact with them, you stop to the ongoing stream of judgments.

Second step is to tackle the mental representative of your primary judgers, aka the inner critic. It’s the one that keeps projecting the primary judgers into other people, making you feel uncomfortable around people even when they don’t judge you at all (“once there are other people around, I just feel weird. Like I want to get away from them. That if I stay too long, they’ll judge me“).

I asked you if we covered the strategy of your mother controlling you by expressing that she is upset, and you wrote: “it just happened a moment ago. My mother brings up something about a cousin and what she is doing wrong, and I agree with her on some things and not others and my sister has to constantly interject like she is my mother’s attorney… They’ll have a conversation over me. My mom sometimes pretends I didn’t say the sentence I did and move on like I never spoke” – reads like your mother does not welcome your independent thinking, rejecting it, and your sister understands this, and wanting to please your mother, she sides with her.

“Why does my mom need backup, she is the strongest of the 3?” – your mother is not stronger than her two daughters. She abuses her power as a mother. This abuse doesn’t make her strong. It only makes her feel strong from time to time.

“I am going to reduce my interactions with them over time without catching their attention that I’m pulling away. It will help me see if I feel better away from them. I have trouble being by myself, the depression comes back but I’ll see what I can do to change that” – I have no doubt that if you move out and live away from your mother, when you do, it will not be an instant solution to your mental health challenges, and there will be plenty of times when you will feel worse, not better. This is why I am realistic about the process of healing. I know from personal experience how difficult it is. If I could go back in time, I would have looked for quality psychotherapy and I would have ended contact with my mother decades before I finally did.

anita

Dear Girija:

Maybe one day you will post here, saying: I moved out! I am living my life my way! That would be delightful to read!!!

anita

Dear Girija:

You can post anytime. I figure it’s probably tiring to have this ongoing back and forth conversation about your mother. I mean, you live with her so it’s not a good idea to get angrier and angrier when you can’t just get up and leave, for practical and emotional reasons. So, post anytime about anything, whatever you want to talk about.

anita

Dear Girija:

“I can’t help but think the odds are against me…. it would be looking for a needle in a haystack. But I’m afraid my needle will jump back into the haystack after seeing or getting to know me or that I’ll never find the needle” – you have cute ways of saying things (the needle jumping back to the haystack, funny). To state the obvious: there are plenty of beautiful women whose needles jump back into the haystack, just saying.

“I have already mentioned my looks. I could better them and they will only get better to a certain point” – I just imagined your looks, as you described it, but you are still cute. Okay, not pretty- but cute, with cute expressions. Don’t underestimate cute!

“The way she described intimacy was so beautiful. I’m scared I will never experience that… I am afraid I won’t get to live a life with intimacy and love” – interesting, you are not experiencing intimacy with a man in the present time, yet you are afraid that in the future you will not experience it. You are not afraid now about not experiencing it…  now?

“The dilemma is do I wait and possibly never find the needle. Will I know when I’ve found the needle?… This has me torn” – your dilemma is whether to wait or to be looking for the needle now?  I say: look for the needle now. More precisely: look at needles, get to know needles (outside the physical intimate context!) Don’t settle for any needle: choose the best available needle for you because your cute self deserves the best! All this will take time, so might as well you start looking tomorrow!

anita

Dear Girija/Samy

I have been following your story on this forum (and many others too-like Dave F “stuck in loneliness..” amazing conversations ) because I feel that I learn a lot about myself and my emotional world/wounds through the communication you and others have shared on this forum. Having followed your story, I repeatedly see a pattern where you are stuck (for lack of a better word-sorry if it feels offensive) in a thinking that love/intimacy issues can be solved with finding a partner -and finding a partner is dependent on your physical attributes. I get you, you want to experience love with a person, and I want the same for you. I think you are as pretty as you choose to see yourself as pretty (if it makes sense). I dont want to hijack your story with mine, but maybe offer another perspective to the way that you view “being pretty” and relationships.

First being pretty is overrated and doesnt guarantee a loving relationship! Pretty people feel very lonely too, sometimes even more lonely! I am writing to you not as someone that feels sorry for herself  but as a sister in this world, that cheers on you and wants you to see yourself differently. Second, most of the body related things you can change with diet/exercise /make up- if you wish but most importantly, you need to see yourself in the mirror beautiful and deserving of real caring and true love. Love that will not leave you if you have a bad stomach flu one day, or feel depressed and defeated by life.

I am often seen as someone pretty by the conventional standards, yet I am single after 3 long-term relationships (in my late 30ies now).  My 5y partner left our engagement because I am too driven and in his own words “too fit and pretty” so he left me and married my best friend (she is overweight -no sorry needed, i am over it). In my last 3y relationship that i am recovering from -my partner initially loved everything about me for 3 months, then spent 2.5 years breaking me down ( from my intelligence to my looks/self esteem -i have been in therapy for 1.5 years working on myself and understanding why I allowed it). Men that approach me see me as a trophy to win. That is why i dont date on apps and my walls are still a little bit too high now, but im becoming more open to love as months go by…

Even my boss has tried to downplay my work achievements by saying in meetings that the only reason why I get opportunities/invitations by companies to give a talk, is because I am good looking (note; i work really hard and have sacrificed a lot for my career). It hurts a lot, so many times i locked myself into work bathroom crying wishing they would see how much I care about my job/how much passion I have. Yes I can now finally accept who I am and laugh at all that because of the work I have been doing on myself. But my message is, yes being pretty opens some doors but most of those doors you would wish later that you never opened.

I am aware of the arranged marriage culture ( even if I am not from that culture, my 3 year partner was), and living with your parents -in laws and extended family until married. I know that it is hard to break free from that, emotionally complex because of shame/guilt and feeling abandoned by the only family you only know. Also many of our ideas about how things are or should be come from the values/ideas rooted in our families so it can feel like not knowing who we are if we leave those beliefs behind. But it seems to me that you want something different, you want to build a life you choose for yourself, you want to find your type of people and grow emotional intimacy  with a person (not only physical). Work on finding real caring friends that allow you to practise being emotionally available (safe friends if I may suggest so you dont have to worry as much about attraction or if someone just wants you for sex). I like how you are trying to change things by working out and changing diet- it is important for our well being more than our looks. And by changing our well being, it changes the way we view ourself and the way others perceive us, because our energy suddenly irradiates postive vibes/that we are enough on our own. And that is very attractive! all my love to you

Dear Girija:

You are welcome and congratulations for going to a gynecologist, discovering that you suffer from PCOS and starting treatment. A couple of the well-documented symptoms that apply to you: thinning hair on the head and depression. Also, it reads that weight gain is a symptom and that excess weight worsens symptoms, so I guess losing weight is at least part of what you meant by working on your lifestyle. You started taking a supplement that the doctor recommended, and you feel more grounded, plus a joy in your chest. Excellent!

What you expressed in your recent post, as I understand it, is that you used to think that the emptiness that you felt in your chest was about the absence of love (of loving relationship), but now that you took the supplements and feel a joy in your chest (as well as feeling more grounded and in control of yourself), you figure that the emptiness was the result of a hormonal imbalance, and correcting this imbalance through supplements and lifestyle changes will take care of the void.

Your thinking makes a lot of sense to me because sensations and emotions are made possible by chemicals, mainly neurotransmitters and hormones. An imbalance of hormones easily explains a messy emotional experience, such as you described since 2019: “My constant fear is that I am a raging, emotional and unstable person… I want to know how to fix this. How to be normal. Every new thing I do sucks because of how abnormal my brain is… Always ready to go into a frenzy” – I am not a doctor, but I think that PCOS/ hormonal imbalance easily explains most if not all of this. A normalized hormonal imbalance should take care of your quest, identified in the title of your thread:  “I want to be normal“!

You wrote earlier on this thread: “My excitement to me used to feel genuine and open. Now, I feel it is chaotic. Just desperate and needy” – could be that your excitement felt genuine and open before your hormonal imbalance came to be, but after it came to be you felt chaotic, desperate and needy.

Fast forward to the present, you took supplements, and you already feel the opposite of chaos and desperation: you feel more grounded, in control over yourself, and no longer desperate: “I feel like I have control over myself. This gave me a new perspective on my last comment about my looks. I am who I am, and people… If they like and love me, that’s great. If not, I feel enough, and they can go love someone else” – I am very pleased to read this!

Your intent: to love yourself “and love living and take life as it comes“- post anytime you want to share about life as it comes!

anita

Dear Girija:

“It is hard to tell whether the years of stress lead to this illness or the illness leads to the stress and anxiety. I think it is the former. My symptoms get worse when I am anxious“- it starts with the former, years of stress leading to an illness, and then the symptoms of the illness get worse with added stress (anxiety= ongoing negative stress). Many of the illnesses created by ongoing stress cannot be reversed and cured, and management is the only option.

“When I said lifestyle – it is losing weight – low-carb diet and exercise, and also stress management” – excellent plan. I consider myself an expert on low-carb ways of eating, so you are welcome to use my (undocumented) expertise!

“Telling myself, nothing is more important to me than myself makes me feel better” – nothing in your life, should be more important than… you, for crying out loud!

“I am trying to get as calm as possible. I want to become a person who is not easily shaken by external circumstances” – this is key. The way we get easily shaken by external circumstances is that our bodies chemically overreact to external circumstances, producing hormones and such that make us feel panicky and we can’t think rationally when panicked. When you keep yourself as calm as possible, you literally calm your body’s chemical reactions to circumstances.

Emotional Self-Regulation is part of this chemical intervention, you can read about it on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Four strategies for us to regulate our emotions are: Situation Selection (effective avoidance of stressful situations), Situation Modification (making effective changes within a stressful situation), Attention Deployment (effectively directing your attention toward or away from an emotional situation), and Cognitive Change (effectively re-appraising or re-evaluation a situation and in so doing, altering its emotional meaning).

anita

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