Dear Alice:

“I am reaching out to see if anyone else has felt like this”: “Loneliness.. Nothing makes it go away.. an inner restlessness, gnawing at me and the feeling of being alone.. so alone.. I felt this void type loneliness my whole life. Like the feeling I ought to be somewhere else.. Life feels very pointless and plain boring right now”.

I’ll tell you about the loneliness I’ve known for year and decades, and you can tell me if it is similar to your loneliness: time seem to go on forever, a whole eternity stuck in a day. Or in a night. Time does not move like the air flowing, it is stuck like solid, heavy. Looking out the window on a summer evening, seeing couples walk hand in hand, going somewhere, while I am going nowhere.. I want to be them, I want to be there.. laughing, crying, whatever they do, loving too. But I am stuck where I am, exiled from life, watching it but not living it.

???

anita

Dear Alice:

I want to try to understand how you felt as a child, growing up with your parents, by repeating your words in a different order, and adding in parentheses my words/ changing of a few pronouns:

I am not close to my family, emotionally; no one emotionally close to me and wants to understand me, to connect emotionally. No one has actually ‘seen’ me even though they would be talking to me. (I) feel invisible and like I want to run (away) and cry in the bathroom. I am needy. I need attention and validation or praise, feel lost without praise. (Don’t) have anything in common with my parents. It’s like we are talking two different languages. I just don’t feel connected to anyone really. It doesn’t feel right being with (them), the feeling of living the wrong life. I look out on other happy (homes) and feel jealous but don’t know how to create that in my own life or even if I should or deserve to.

I feel an inner restlessness, gnawing at me, the feeling of living the wrong life or being very unsettled and restless, a lack of inner peace feeling that is with me all the time unless I am asleep. An inner loneliness that is with me whether I am doing chores, or exercise, eat right, and lonely if I don’t do those things. Like a ball of loneliness wherever I go, nothing makes it go away. I have felt this void type loneliness my whole life. Being on the surface of life, rather than diving in, feeling I ought to be somewhere else. I’m not getting out of (life) any joy or lightness, though I am trying my best. How is this all that there is?!!.

And now, my input: seems to me that you are still living (as so many of us) the same emotional experience that you had as a child, which is similar to mine. I will express mine as I think relates to yours: all the thoughts and emotions I had were not noticed by anyone, which amazed me  because I felt so strongly, and even stronger because no one noticed. It was like living in  a vacuum, a whole world of thoughts, emotions, fears, wants, hopes, desires, a living imagination.. and all of that trapped by a vacuum that surrounded me. No one sees me, no one hears me, no one notices. All the hurt I felt, and the anger.. they were all mine and mine alone, torturing me, and the desire to connect so strong, suspended in that vacuum.

You wrote regarding your current relationships with friends and your boyfriend/ others, that you need “constant attention and validation or praise”, that you “like a lot of attention”- that’s because you got so very little attention, validation and praise. The desire for attention, validation and praise grew stronger and stronger in the years-long- absence of these things, as a child.

“It is not a good part of me”, you wrote regarding needing so much- I say it is not a bad part of you, but a natural, understandable part of every human/ social animal: to need so much social connection in the context of a social vacuum. The less we are given of what we need- the more we want it. It is the wrong kind of life (“living the wrong life”) for any social animal to live in a vacuum. And it is “very unsettling and restless, a lack of inner peace feeling” for every social animal trapped by a social vacuum.

“I can be very stubborn and immature and naïve in life”- the child in you stubbornly wants to get what she didn’t get then, and enough to make up for the severe lack. The child within you is immature- a child, a child who doesn’t know yet that we can’t get a redo of our childhood.

I hope to read from you again.

anita

I feel like you guys went into my head and put my thoughts to paper for me. I have turned to God and put all my trust, faith and burdens to Him. This has helped but there are still times that it affects me.

Dear Alice:

I wasn’t aware until a short time ago that you posted yesterday, otherwise I would have responded to you yesterday.

Because you were compared unfavorably to other children, you understandably formed this core belief: “I (am not) the child my parents wanted to have”.

Core beliefs like this, based on the real-life experience of childhood, do not change because we grow older and become adults. Core belief are made of thoughts and emotions that were recorded in our brain as children, in the physical form of chemical processes. As an adult, a variety of daily experiences activate these processes, so we keep experiencing the same kinds of thoughts and emotions that we experienced as children. These core beliefs expand from the context of child-parents, to the context of child/adult- anyone.

“In terms of not reliving that childhood experiences and not doing childhood again, what have you found to be the path forward in your own life?”-

The path forward for me has been this (and I am explaining it with the advantage of being able to look backward from where I am now): it is a long, long path. It requires endless patience. It cannot be instantaneous. Clear rational understanding of my development as a child is not and cannot be enough to make a difference in those chemical processes I mentioned, because what was recorded in childhood is not only thoughts but strong emotions. Rational thinking and understanding cannot undo these powerful emotions. This is why it takes so much time and so much patience. Every time I had an aha moment, an excitement about understanding something I didn’t understand before, I thought that I got it, that now I am over this or that. But not so.

The path is long, with twists and turns, ups and downs, and derailments. You come across a section that is flooded, figuratively, and you cross that part slowly and successfully, and you think that you are done with floods, but not so. You have to take breaks, no rushing the process. The more you rush the process, the more stuck you get, and the more time it takes.

Let me know if this makes sense to you, and we can continue to communicate here for as long as you want to.

anita

Dear Alice:

You are welcome. “I feel and often am so lazy… left to my own devices, I would struggle to get things done. I seem to go through peaks of great activity and then troughs when everything seems pointless… I am easily discouraged and often tired. The kind of tired where sleep and food does not help… my parents.. either directly compared me to others and said how I was lacking or kind of implied it so I KNOW that is true”-

– The facts are that your parents thought that you were not lacking when you were not at all lacking. They were wrong. You know now that not everything that people think is true to reality. Imagine your parents thinking on the matter was wrong.

“How can I argue with the facts?”- you did argue with what your parents presented to you as the facts: you tried to show them that you are not lacking. You tried hard, in so many ways, for so long, and you failed to change their minds and hearts about you. No wonder you got so very tired.

You are still trying to show that you are not lacking when you are in those “peaks of great activity”, tidying your house, for example. Thing is, you are in the habit of trying and failing, so you get discouraged and exhausted, and you figure that trying is pointless.

You may wonder how do I know that you are not lacking, and that your parents’ “facts” were wrong? My answer: if you were truly lacking, you wouldn’t have felt hurt  that your parents know what is true. You felt hurt because what they implied was not true.

“In addition I.. have been rejected over and over in my life by romantic partners, best friends, etc. so there is something in me or a behaviour or series of behaviours i do that I cannot yet see objectively or identify that pushes people away so they leave”-

I am sure this is true, just as there were series of behaviors on my part that pushed people away. But here is my point: those behaviors that push people away, are not the behaviors that pushed your parents away. They rejected you before those behaviors developed.

“the belief of ‘people always leave’ is also true as it has happened in my life over and over. I don’t know how to deal or move past beliefs which are true”-

Imagine the following (it is a crude imagery, but fitting): a flower, beautiful, wonderful fragrance in the garden; a sick animal approaches and vomits on the flower. The vomit dries out but the stink remains. Flowers nearby bend away from the smelly flower. Animals that walk by, move away from the stinky flower.

Back to you: remove the stink of your parents untruths, and you will see that you were beautiful all along.

“I still feel the same inside. Where do you suggest I go now to start?”-

– go to a mirror in your house, look into the eyes of the woman in the mirror and ask yourself out loud: is it possible that I am not lacking, is it possible? But don’t try to answer this question, just hold the question in your awareness.

Post again anytime.

anita

* Dear Amirta: I suggest that you start your own thread: click FORUMS above, choose a CATEGORY, click it, scroll down the page to the empty boxes and type there. I will be glad to read and reply to you in your thread.

anita