"HOW DO I BECOME EMOTIONALLY INDEPENDENT FROM MY BOYFRIEND?"
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I
think your last sentence is a hopeful one. You want to
tackle your problems and you realise that this won’t be
an easy process. You understand that your anxieties and
depression have their roots in the unconscious and that
you will need to relive some very painful feelings from
your life in the past.
You lost both parents at a very young age but not
through illness or accident. For whatever reasons, they
chose to end their lives and this may have left you with
very complicated feelings, possibly anger and guilt as
well as a huge sadness. I wonder about your life as you
grew up. It is not surprising that you yourself were
depressed, anxious and, for a time anorexic. Did you
have any other family that you could talk to?
It seems that your partner has some understanding of
your difficulties and, as you say, it is good that he is
tackling his drinking problems through AA and excellent
that you have been attending Al-anon. Perhaps it is this
connection that has helped you to feel a bit more
hopeful that things could change. Maybe you have come to
see that facing up to terrible experiences through
talking about them can lessen their power over you. At
the moment I think you are probably defending your
sanity by trying to keep things away from your conscious
mind. Terrible dreams and physical symptoms are the
result.
You had six counselling sessions, which could have
helped more than you realise. I wonder what made you
feel that it was going nowhere. It could be that the
therapist was not right for you or maybe it was going
somewhere but was too fast and too painful for you and
you backed away. I cannot say because I don’t know what
theoretical background and qualifications your therapist
had. I also don’t know where you live or whether you
would want to work with your therapist in French or
English. What I would say is that you need to find
someone who has a psychodynamic or psychoanalytic
approach and be prepared to work with them on a regular
basis for as long as it takes, maybe two or three years.
Perhaps easier said than done as good therapists on the
whole don’t come cheap and you may not live where you
could find someone close by. Some therapists have a
‘sliding scale’ of fees and you might have to find
someone to speak to on Skype or the telephone.
So where can you look? This site of course, The British
Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy website,
The British Association for Psychotherapists website,
The UK Council for Psychotherapy website, or The
Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy
website would all be good places to start. |
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THERAPIST B
IS UNAVAILABLE AT PRESENT SO THIS ANSWER IS FROM A
PERSON-CENTRED COUNSELLOR
You must be very angry with your parents for
choosing to take their own lives and leaving you alone
and without support from home when you were just
starting your independent life. You don't say whether
you have siblings but I would guess that you do not.
Could I recommend that you read a couple of relevant
books, the first being John Bowlby's "Loss - Sadness And
Depression" and also "Silent Grief - Living in the Wake
of Suicide" by Christopher Lukas. They will most likely
help you to understand what is going on for you.
Anorexia, without being too simplistic, is very often a
way that people use the only thing they are in control
of - food. It may be worth you looking at where you feel
out of control in your life? Is it just in keeping your
boyfriend with you or is it leaking into other areas?
Both parents killing themselves is not something you
could have done anything about, but it seems to have
left you with a very understandable feeling of terror of
losing a loved one, currently your boyfriend. I would
suggest that you will never actually lose the fear of
loss after what has happened to you but it would help
you to get control by understanding what is happening
for yourself. Reading about it may help, as will
explaining to your boyfriend that you need extra
reassurance and that he will need to be very honest
about his feelings. This is because you will have picked
up a lot of hidden messages from your parents which
didn't make sense and probably made you feel powerless
and insecure. Hidden messages from your boyfriend (he
will most likely hide any disquiet he has about your
insecurity) will reawaken all those same feelings again
and those sort of feelings can be overwhelming, for you
and also for your boyfriend. You say that you are less
worried about the future now but it could be that you
have buried these feelings again so do keep an eye on
that as hidden feelings have a nasty habit of leaping
out of nowhere when you least expect them.
This is something you will need to learn to handle,
rather than get over, so that although you may find
handling the feelings uncomfortable, it will gradually
become second nature. You will know that you can expect
terror and fear of loss but at least you will be
prepared for it which will help you feel in control of
it. I applaud you for having done so well so far. Good
luck and enjoy your relationship. |
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It sounds like you went
through a very difficult period in your teens but I
would imagine that your childhood was not easy with a
depressed mother and, possibly, a depressed father.
Having a depressed mother can have many repercussions on
a child and may manifest in some of the difficulties
that you are experiencing. From what you write it does
sound as though you did not have the opportunity to
address and deal with all that was evoked for you in
your childhood, your adolescence and due to your
parents' suicide. I wonder what was happening around the
time of the onset of your anorexia. Also you mention
that your couple went through one of its biggest crisis
year ago but you do not say what was the cause of the
crisis. It may be
that your way of surviving all the difficulties with
which you had to cope was by keeping your feelings at
bay. However, feelings that we try and suppress can end
up by making us feel tired because it takes and effort
to keep them away and this effort can use up a lot of
energy and can feel oppressive. From what you write, it
sounds as though you would like to get to the root of
your difficulties so that you can address them and move
beyond them. I would suggest that you consider seeing a
psychoanalytic psychotherapist or counsellor as they do
work with the unconscious, which is something that you
say you would like to do. |
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