I'm reading a book entited "Breaking Free of the co-dependency Trap" Its not one of those "pretty" co-dependency books where its suggested you repeat "I am a pretty girl" 25times daily LOL but it really gives a meaty honest look at it and recovery.

Reading one chapter it suggests writing 2 columns of what we resent our mothers not giving or doing for us and another column for our father.

I didnt get as far as pen to paper the sentence "I resent she didn't love me enought" came straight to the forefront then like the book suggests I take that with me into all relationships. I sit looking at T with this old tape playing and playing and missing the fact that T is sitting and waiting for me to "come to" and see what she is offering me.

Instead my head is going round and round in time waiting for mum to love me enought and IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN because its gone, that moment in time is no more!

Geez how delussional am I? LOL

I will enter T tomorrow and speak about this immediately.

[Perna]

what do you mean by "love" Mouse and "enough"? I'd get really specific because the ideas can be so vague sometimes that no one can love us like that and, for me, what the T was offering I could never see because what I "wanted" was never concrete enough.

My T helped me see that my stepmother didn't offer "connection" and we kept "missing" each other's efforts to communicate. My stepmother, right after she and my father married and we moved into her house (I had just turned 5) immediately showed me how to make my bed and set the table and that was it! I was to do those chores the rest of my life :-) But my T and I discovered it would have been nice to have activities we did "together" with talking, laughing, instruction, etc. My life was divided up into "spheres" and I was supposed to be self-sustaining. We had dinner all together at the table (it was mid-1950s) but that consisted of "questions" which my father would more or less teach about. My brothers to this day (and they're almost all in their 60s :-) still tease that I figured out what question to ask to keep my father talking the rest of dinner and we all just ate.

I don't think we were co-dependent; we didn't have anyone to be dependent on and we were children! I was emotionally intermeshed with my stepmother because we would hurt one another and not know how to talk/behave effectively together to help one another get what we needed. We both loved one another and were constantly crying because we'd hurt the other and then the other retaliated, and we'd promise to "do better" but we didn't know how; neither of us had the tools to either help the other or ourselves communicate our needs effectively and get them met. My nickname my father gave me when I was 2 or 3 was "mouse" :-) and I was quiet and polite and "good" and it took a long time for my Ts to convince me I probably was not an angel to raise :-) I don't think there's as much "fault" in child raising as there is ignorance and lack of knowing how or where to get help. Some parents truly don't care but children have neither instructions nor are they angels/blank slates and "average" people can have a hard time of it.

Emotionally emashed is co-dependency.