Dear Ilyana,

regarding your son, you say that you’re still trying to deal with the trauma around his birth, which actually deepened your depression. Did I understand well that before your son was born, you sometimes had manic episodes too (you were diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 26), but, since you gave birth to your son, at 35, you’ve mostly experienced depression and the manic episodes are gone?

If you haven’t managed to heal the trauma surrounding your son’s birth, does it mean you’re blaming him, at least in part, for almost causing you to die? Is there some resentment in you towards your son?

Dear llyana:

Welcome back. I hope that your various therapists regularly communicate with each other so to coordinate their efforts, and work as a team to  provide you with the best professional help possible. I know that one of your therapists recommended that you visit tiny buddha a few months ago, but I don’t know if your therapists know of your past or current communication in this forum. I believe that they need to know about it and approve of it, if you are to continue here.

I re-read your posts since April 3 to see if I can see something new, or if I can see more of something I saw before, and I did: I saw your anger more clearly. I think that anger is the biggest obstacle to your continuous healing. If healing is a moving vehicle, your anger is The Stop Sign that stops your healing again and again.

If you are feeling distressed now, or at any time as you read, please stop reading. If you think that there is some value in my post, you can bring it to one of your therapists.

You clearly expressed your anger at yourself, using the words: hate, judgment, beating, etc., but you didn’t express your anger at others clearly. Yet, it is still evident:

(1) Anger at yourself: “My whole life I have hated myself… I don’t remember a time when I didn’t hate myself…I hated the way I looked.. I make changes from a place of.. self-judgment, and eventually I get sick of it and give up. ..I have a very critical inner voice, have had for as long as I can remember. I beat myself up for beating myself up. My inner voice is always harsh, always judgmental, never compassionate. ..always finding fault with myself…I feel like a terrible person, a terrible mother, a terrible wife, a terrible sister”.

2) Anger at your father: “My father walked out when I was three, and I didn’t have any contact with him again until I was 10 or 11…He has definitely done a lot to hurt me in the past. He was in and out of my life, and there was child support battle with my mother in which he refused to pay”.

3) Anger at your mother: “She also intercepted letters and gifts that he sent over the years, because she said she thought it would confuse me and that I was better off without him…she all but stopped parenting me, except to discipline me when I did something wrong.. I did not have a loving, attentive mother”.

4) Anger at your husband: “We have very little in common, and I don’t feel like he gets me at all… I don’t know how I can get better without getting emotional support from my partner.. My husband..  is so bad with emotions. But I am a very emotional person, and I cannot be with someone who can’t handle that”.

5) Possibly (I am not sure), anger at your son: “I had a very traumatic birth during which I almost died, and it profoundly affected by ability to bond with my son”- angry at him for almost killing you, I am guessing. Mothers feeling anger is one of the symptoms of postpartum depression which affects roughly 15% of women after childbirth (Wikipedia), and some of the anger felt is at the baby.

6) Anger at Everyone, perhaps: ” Everyone laughed off my fears, and no one talked about my father… I don’t remember ever being reassured that I was good enough, that I was worthy of love”.

If you are still reading, llyana- I wish you well!!!

anita

Dear llyana:

“When asked what his low point of the last two weeks was, a two weeks in which we have almost not talked at all, he said it was getting stuck in traffic on the way to the appointment… for the worst thing about his last two weeks to be traffic when our relationship is in crisis and I am falling apart – it just astonished me”-

– your relationship has been in crisis for about ten years, hasn’t it? –  his answer may have been regarding the worst thing that happened in the last two weeks, as opposed to the worst thing that happened in the last 15 years, let’s say.

“I think we’re too incompatible – I’m way too emotional for him”-

– one emotion you have too much of is anger (“I agree that I have a lot of anger, and I don’t seem to be able to let go of it”). A lot of anger makes close, healthy relationships impossible, be it with a friend, a husband or a child.

wiley. com on destructive anger: “Destructive anger can take many forms. Anger can be expressed in rage that is out of control, either verbally or physically. We also can express anger by snapping at
someone or being unkindly critical. A third form that anger may take is that of cold, icy withdrawal that punishes others by shutting them out, shunning them, or refusing to acknowledge their attempts to relate to us. All of these reactions and many more can be destructive to the relationship and to our own feelings of self-esteem. Destructive expressions of anger often generate later feelings of guilt and shame”-

– I wonder how your anger is being expressed.. (?)

anita

Dear llyana:

I don’t know if it is a good idea for me to post to you today, exactly a week after your last post and my last reply to you. But I figure that you can choose to read this or not, and that if you are reading and you feel distressed, you can choose to stop reading at any time. My purpose: maybe… just maybe, a little bit of a maybe- something I write may help just a bit. And I am fine with not receiving a reply, of course.

About your son and your relationship with him, you wrote April-June 2020: “I’m 44 and married with one child (9 years old)… I have been depressed since my son was born.. and my relationships with him (is) strained.  I had a very traumatic birth during which I almost died, and it profoundly affected by ability to bond with my son…..My son seems depressed to me. He keeps saying that life sucks and that more bad things happen than good things. I am worried about him. But he is talking to me about it, and last night he said I helped him, which made us both feel good. We are in family therapy to help heal the fractured connection we formed after my traumatic birth, and I am hopeful that if I get better… My son had a hard day yesterday. He kept saying that life sucks and that he wishes he’d never been born……my son.. is really struggling right now. He hates his life and wishes he were never born. He sometimes asks me to kill him. We have him in therapy… I have a lot of anger, and I don’t seem to be able to let go of it. I want to forgive.. but I am stuck. As you know, anger that gets held onto runs in my family. I am sure some of that anger is directed towards my son. I don’t want it to be there, I totally see that it is not his fault. I hate that I resent him, but I know that I do. I have done some good work around this in therapy. I badly want to repair the relationship with my son”-

– Anger doesn’t want to repair relationships, it wants to destroy relationships: it is in the nature of anger to destroy, not to build or mend or fix. Part of you badly wants to repair the relationship with your son, but the angry part of you does not want to do that.

“Often times I feel like I want to die, like no one loves me”- the little girl that you were.. she was very angry that no one loved her and she still is angry at others and at herself: “My whole life I have hated myself”.

“I am on a number of psychiatric medications, have been for many years now…But the medication is clearly not enough to make me feel less depressed. I am lucky to have excellent psychiatric care though.. I am working with 5 different therapists lately. I have a trauma therapist, an art therapist, and a psychologist. I also am still working with our family therapist and the couple’s therapist”- none of the medications and therapies resolved your anger, true to a week ago.

As I see it, there has to be a significant resolution of your anger, not of all of it, but of a significant amount before you can be truly motivated to make a significant improvement in your mental health and in your relationship with your son.

When your mother was dying, angrily vomiting into a bucket with a photo of your father attached to the bottom.. when you watched that.. I can  only imagine the horror. It makes me think of a time when I was a child, seeing the photos in the album with the head of my mother torn off from almost of the photos. None of the heads of the other people were torn off, only hers. I think that I asked her why. She said that she is ugly, that’s whys. You just don’t forget things like that. I don’t remember how I felt but it was one of those many times that made me sick.

Back to  you- maybe ever since you watched your now dead mother angrily vomiting into that bucket, you’ve been stuck yourself in that Bucket of Anger. And if so, to live life outside that bucket, you have to climb out of it and see what’s out there, outside that bucket.

anita

Dear llyana:

What a delightful update.. what a pleasure reading from you 4 months and 12 days since you posted last, and such good news. Congratulations for doing what is right for you and for your son.. for everyone involved, I am thrilled! I want to write you a bit more when I am more focused, Sat morning my time (in about 15 hours from now). Again, a delight to read from you!

anita

Dear Llyana:

Again, good to read back from you. I looked at some of our communication April-June this year, and I realized that I missed something important about your story: that your soon to be ex-husband is probably on the autism spectrum, just like you suggested  in June 10: “He genuinely doesn’t get that people talking to one another has a purpose besides transmission of information. It has occurred to me (and him) that he might be on the autism spectrum“.

I read this sentence back in June but didn’t pay attention to it because I was focused on something else. But now, integrating this sentence into my overall understanding, I can see further why getting divorced is the right decision for you (“the best decision I have ever made“).

I then asked myself, out of curiosity.. how is it that you married a man so unsupportive Emotionally, and figured that maybe it has to do with what you wrote in April about yourself: “The only thing I ever appreciated about myself was my intellect“- maybe you and him had a meeting of the minds in regard to Intellect.. and that’s what you focused on at the time.

I am glad that you decided finally to get a divorce and I hope that you are continuing therapy throughout the process of the divorce and the establishing of a workable co-parenting routine. I wish you continued healing and hope to read from you again. Thank you for the positive update, it is kind of you to want to share it with us here, on tiny buddha.

anita