Hi HealMe
I’ve been reading your back posts and I can identify with quite a lot of what you’ve said about being parentified, about feeling numb, and about your mother, oh yep. Even getting what passes as therapy from mom (tell me your problems dear) and feeling like they’re interested and we feel just a tad wanted and needed and secretly we think that is their loving us… and it’s hollow, we feel used somehow, we know that they don’t understand and that they don’t want to understand. And why should they? We don’t understand ourselves for goodness sake.
I’m just beginning to get a grip on what real emotions feel like. Age 44.
It’s not easy. It’s okay to be frustrated. It’s okay to feel anything.
You can’t make yourself feel anything and I doubt you should even try (as in try real hard and then feel like shit because you haven’t ‘succeeded’). It’s not about reaching some goal, or doing some intellectual exercise. Everyone does it differently but what they do do is realise the big difference between a ‘normal’ loving family and one like ours.
When we realise just how badly we felt when we were kids, when we realise with enormous force what was denied us, then we can feel. Usually sick and angry and shocked.
How to do it. I read books. I read “Healing the child within” Charles L Whitfield. He does a nice list of what a child needs to grow up mentally healthy. Compare your life to his list and you might get angry (angry is what we're looking for by the way!). “Homecoming” by John Bradshaw is good. All of Dorothy Rowe’s books, but the most well-known ‘Depression the way out of your prison” is probably most appropriate.
I was probably depressed all my life, living a half-life. I think you sound depressed too. Depression is a way of not taking part in life, it’s a way of finding safety in retreating inside our own heads.
Question: what could I ask you to do – an action – that would scare you? Like ask someone for something, tell someone what you really think about something. Think of something that you might fear doing. Fear is a basic feeling to tap into. See if you can? (It's not about doing the action, it's about accessing any feelings....)