{"id":28121,"date":"2015-06-02T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2015-06-02T15:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/?p=28121"},"modified":"2015-05-29T12:20:35","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T19:20:35","slug":"why-do-i-feel-like-something-is-missing-in-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/why-do-i-feel-like-something-is-missing-in-me-0602155","title":{"rendered":"Why Do I Feel Like Something Is Missing in Me?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sad\u201cIt\u2019s taken me a long time to get here,\u201d Jessica lamented in her first session. \u201cI don\u2019t know what my problem is. I just feel unhappy. Something is missing in my life, but I don\u2019t know what I want or what it could be. I\u2019m a 46-year-old married woman. My marriage to Peter is fine and I like my job as a speech therapist well enough. I feel boring and bored and maybe have more anxiety<\/a> than I should. What do you think is wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessica\u2019s statement at the start of therapy<\/a> began our quest to understand Jessica\u2019s sense of emptiness<\/a>. In our sessions, her talk was tinged with melancholy. Jessica said that when she looked in the mirror she saw \u201ca not very attractive, aging, unsatisfied woman who feels empty.\u201d Apart from Jessica\u2019s sad demeanor, she brought urgency to the sessions with her intense desire to find out \u201cwhat is wrong with me?\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessica grew up in a suburb of a large city as the younger of two daughters. Her parents divorced when she was 9 years old. Her father quickly remarried and had a child with his new wife. Jessica had vivid memories: \u201cI was crying and my father was hugging me. He said he was moving out because he and my mother had too many problems to stay together.\u201d A tearful Jessica continued: \u201cI remember thinking, \u2018How can he leave me?\u2019 I couldn\u2019t stop crying and ran to my room.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t

Find a Therapist<\/a><\/h2>\n\t
\n\n\t\t\t\n\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\tAdvanced Search<\/a>\n\t<\/form>\n<\/div>\n

Jessica and her sister saw her father weekly for a little more than a year, but when he became involved with his wife to be, their visits became less frequent. She recalled, \u201cIt was never the same after he left. I never saw him alone and I couldn\u2019t hold onto the feeling that I was special to him. I lost that when I lost him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessica tried in our sessions to recapture what growing up was like. She wondered if she had been sad even before her father left: \u201cI think I\u2019ve always been sad. Maybe our whole household was sad. My mother was not an energetic or happy person. She often seemed far away. I think she was depressed after my father left and she definitely became more anxious. I was always anxious, too. My sister, who is five years older than me, always did her own thing. But I was very attached to my mother. I felt a strong need for her, and it must have gotten more intense after my father left. She wasn\u2019t very affectionate, and I was very clingy. I remember we used to play cards a lot and we\u2019d go shopping together. I wanted to be around her. I didn\u2019t have a lot of friends. When I went to high school, I started to make friends, but I was always nervous around them. I felt different and not part of the group, so I didn\u2019t do as much at school or with them as I now wish I had.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Jessica left home for college, she became somewhat more engaged with the world. She had her first date at the end of her freshman year and dated occasionally throughout college. For the most part, she focused on her education. The college and graduate school Jessica chose was two hours away from home. She spent most weekends and school vacations home alone with her mother (her sister had married and moved to California).<\/p>\n

Jessica recalled her conflicted feelings about going home: \u201cI missed my mother when I was away at school, but I don\u2019t know what I missed, exactly. Going home was pretty boring. My mother wasn\u2019t very interested in what I was doing. Whenever I was excited to tell her about my classes or my patients when I was in grad school, she seemed to change the subject. I don\u2019t know what it was, but being around her made me anxious about school and dating and I guess about most everything. Still, after grad school I moved back near my mother and got a job as a speech therapist. When I think about it now, I don\u2019t get why I went home. I think I felt my mother wanted something from me, but I don\u2019t know what.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Jessica to talk more about her experience with her mother.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to describe,\u201d she said. \u201cI felt so ambivalent about her. I loved her desperately but always felt something was missing in our connection. I wanted her to tell me I was terrific, to give me the feeling she was interested in me and my life. I wanted to feel like she took pleasure in what I did and who I was, but she never did. If anything, I made her feel good. I felt she needed me, but I didn\u2019t know what she needed me for. She was very sensitive, and I was very anxious around her. It didn\u2019t take much for me to feel I had hurt her. She seemed like a pretty lonely person. I think I felt I was supposed to do something to make her life better. She seemed to like it when I was around, but she never seemed to want me very close to her. It was confusing because I also needed to be with her, but it never made sense to me that I felt that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessica was beginning to recognize that her mother was limited and couldn\u2019t provide her with feelings of being special that she desperately needed and longed for. Jessica also began to appreciate the consequences of her strong feelings that she would hurt her mother by being special or fulfilled. <\/span><\/p>\n

Tears started to flow: \u201cYou know, she died too young. She developed heart problems and became very sick when I was 32. After that, I spoke to her every day and visited as much as I could, even if I didn\u2019t want to. All my energy was focused on her. She was very depressed, and I was very careful not to make her feel worse by telling her anything that was good in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessica\u2019s mother was ill for four years and died when Jessica was 36, 10 years before she came to see me. During her illness, Jessica\u2019s mother was a constant companion in Jessica\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got more anxious and very depressed<\/a>,\u201d Jessica recalled. \u201cMy mother was dying, and I felt totally helpless. I was so worried that I would say or do something that would upset her. I was preoccupied with thoughts about what I should be doing for her and what she would think about my life. Sometimes I still catch myself wondering what she would think about me. I\u2019m very sad that she never got to meet Peter or know that I married. But sometimes I think marrying Peter was a betrayal of my mother. She never felt very good about herself. How would she feel if my life went well? I think it would hurt her. She might think I was arrogant if I said I had a good life or expressed excitement about my accomplishments. I\u2019d feel like I was being mean to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even now, after the death of her mother, Jessica still expresses a strong need for her mother: \u201cSince my mother died, she is in my head more than ever. I find myself wondering what she would think about everything: would she like something I bought or would she be OK with my coming here?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat kind of response would you want from your mother now?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

Jessica began to sob: \u201cI wish she would give me a big smile and look really delighted with me. I don\u2019t think I ever got that from her.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we continued to explore Jessica\u2019s relationship with her mother, it became clearer that her mother had been unable to provide Jessica with the basics for developing positive self-feelings and a sense of being valued, admired, and recognized. Jessica\u2019s mother couldn\u2019t mirror Jessica\u2019s excitement, enthusiasm, and good self-feelings back to her. Consequently, Jessica infrequently experienced these feelings as part of herself. This left a space inside Jessica, which I believed was what Jessica described as \u201csomething missing.\u201d Growing up, Jessica did not know that her need and longing for her mother was her effort to find her missing good and valuable self in her mother\u2019s experience of her.<\/p>\n

Jessica was beginning to recognize that her mother was limited and couldn\u2019t provide her with feelings of being special that she desperately needed and longed for. Jessica also began to appreciate the consequences of her strong feelings that she would hurt her mother by being special or fulfilled. We spent many sessions talking about all the ways Jessica had held herself back in her life. She became aware of how her relationship to her mother governed her choices and kept her trapped in patterns of behavior, thought, and feeling that interfered with her ability to enjoy life, engage with people, and ultimately feel self-confident and pleased with herself and her life. She began to understand how, unconsciously, she had lived her life to assure that if her mother contrasted her life to Jessica\u2019s, she wouldn\u2019t feel threatened by finding too much \u201cgood stuff\u201d in Jessica\u2019s life. Jessica wondered if she was only able to find a partner and marry after her mother\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Jessica and I worked hard exploring her attachment<\/a> to her mother. Now she has emotional knowledge (knowledge with feelings attached, not just thoughts) about that connection. She knows she connected to her mother by becoming like her: she internalized her mother\u2019s sadness<\/a> and duplicated the absence of her mother\u2019s good internalized self-feelings. She knows that her sadness about her missing good self-parts was a kind of mourning for the absence of a nurturing mother and the good feelings she was never able to obtain from her.<\/p>\n

Now Jessica is freeing herself from protecting her mother. Now she can be there for herself. She can nurture her missing parts and change her internal world. She will be able to own a new sense of self-confidence and self-esteem<\/a> and follow her own wishes, get her needs met, and feel special.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong>\u00a0To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Complicated relationships with parents, even in adulthood, can bring on feelings of emptiness. Therapy can help a person find what’s seemingly missing within.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[542],"tags":[31,406,382,450,25,235],"class_list":["post-28121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-articles","tag-psychotherapy-practice","tag-emptiness","tag-family-of-origin-issues","tag-individuation","tag-psychotherapy-issues","tag-self-esteem-psychotherapy-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}