Stopdog-sure, people can make a choice to not google someone. But I think if this is a core issue for someone, it will regularly manifest and in different ways. If not googling, then when watching TV. A person can not watch TV. If not TV, then driving down the street and passing those flats. A person may be able to avoid driving down the street. In all, a person might have to disconnect from life altogether to avoid feeling like that, which ironically, is sort of what Sarah has been doing.


I can relate to this Sarah. I have some of these things-children, career, education, above average home...but have often felt that way too and have had many discussions with my therapist about these things. I have often felt like that around my peers despite having similar things, I haven't met anyone who has a similar background as mine. (Not that they don't exist, it's just I have not met any. Most of my peers come from privileged backgrounds). I later learned that my feelings were all from the past-mostly from feeling deprived for much of my childhood. Deprived of love and parenting. I didn't experience 'normal' things- like having food to eat. Later, growing up with almost no 'normal' and having to constantly be around people who had some 'normal' things in life. And there is definitely a normal for those who have had little of it, so I agree with the relative aspect to this. If I lived in a developing country, having food might not be the norm, but where I lived, everyone I knew had food and so having food to eat was the norm. And I now think success is not about having things/accomplishments, but feeling content and whole and doing what you want to do--self actualizing. Some of us never had a sense of safety at all growing up, and this can get ingrained with your personhood. On the outside, I may look like one of those people Sarah, but you see here that I experience similar feelings. I think the same can be for therapists, so a T who has had 'invisible' hardships or adversity to overcome may be able to relate to you.

Since I had different parts, the feelings of deprivation were dissociated and also, I lived in the future for most of my adulthood and was very goal oriented, which eventually broke down. Now, after years of therapy, I started living in the present. It is vastly different from how I lived before, and living in the present--which required a sort of disconnecting from the future--led to feeling a ton of regret at the way my life is now when it could have been so much better. It doesn't help to dwell over things you can't change, but grieving these things with my T has been part of a process. Lately, T and I talk about moving forward, and during my last session, T noted I am looking at the future in a positive light. This wasn't exactly a serial process because there were spurts of throwing away old things, cleaning out closets, etc., that would dissipate and re-emerge. These behaviors paralleled my feelings of having to deal with my past but also make sense of it all. Not quite there, I'm almost at the place I want to be.

I have to be realistic and say that this process has been extremely painful, though I'm not talking about the one concept here as there was a lot of reconnecting with my feelings going on and I had a high degree of trauma. I think I have let go of the grieving surrounding these years , but I don't think a person necessarily needs therapy to move forward. I often remind myself of the economic principle of sunk costs, where you would still be at the same place regardless of what you did in the past. It's obviously a good idea to direct your energies to what you can do now rather than what you could have done, if possible. For some of us, that is a process that coincides with many different tangents and connection points, so easier said than done.