I'm right in the middle of this now, but I've learned a couple of things. My dad had extremely high expectations of me, which I could never meet, so that's one of the reasons I feel I have to earn love. No matter how much I knocked myself out to be perfect, it was never enough. He withheld love and acceptance, kind of sadistically, actually, and enjoyed his power over me. He could make me dance like a puppet on a string, trying to please him. Ugh.

Then we started focusing on my mother in T. She's been dead for 25 years and I can remember things about her, but no emotions at all. Suspicious, eh? I brought in pictures of her and my family, and we would spend entire sessions with me trying to remember what it was like growing up, how I felt. So far we've discovered that she tromped all over my boundaries and tried to live through me. Meanwhile, my parents had an unhappy marriage and both of them talked to me about each other and their problems, and it fell to me to try to fix the marriage. Of course I couldn't so I felt like a failure. And where were my needs in all this? Nobody met my needs!! I couldn't be happy if my mother wasn't happy, because it was my job to make her happy and I couldn't, so therefore I didn't deserve to be happy.

It's just a huge depressing mess. But as we work on this T is showing me how this informs the way I've lived my life as an adult. It's all making sense, but it's just really slow going at 50 mins/week.

If I think of more I'll post, hope this makes sense. I'm struggling with it all. Wish I could be more coherent.