Letters to different parts of myself are a way for me to practice having compassion for myself and to talk back to the “I am bad” voices in my head. Today’s letter is to the self that was moving toward a departure from a terrible first marriage. Why write to her now, when that happened a long time ago? Well, lately I’m thinking a lot about that time of my life. I am moving into a period of significant change in my life, and I think some of the anxiety and uncertainty reminds me of that time. I still carry a lot of hurt from that period of my life and feel the need to acknowledge it and to reject the negative messages from that time.
My dear friend,
I went back to your journal and read your words from the summer and fall before you left Miguel. I read and feel so sad for you. You were trying so hard to hold it all together: to be a good mom to little boys, to keep the household running, to manage on a low income, and in the midst of it all, to finish a dissertation. As if that weren’t challenging enough, you were experiencing a crushing depression. Not to mention that you had a husband who couldn’t stop criticizing you. Though you’d been depressed for a long time (maybe years), you’d been in therapy for just six months. In those six months, your marriage had deteriorated further, your depression had deepened and you’d experienced the full range of side effects from a variety of psychiatric meds. No wonder you felt things were hopeless. You couldn’t see any way out of the situation.
Feeling so hopeless, you had no resistance to the messages that Miguel kept delivering to you: You were a bad mother. You had no professional future. You’d never finish your dissertation–look how long it was taking! You were a mess, no use to anyone.
As your calm, mature, experienced self, I wish I’d been there to challenge those messages. You needed someone at your side, someone who would counter everything he said with evidence to the contrary. Because what he said just wasn’t true. You were a patient mother who did not take her unhappiness out on her little boys. I know you still berate yourself for not having enough energy, for not being happier with them. You wonder if you have damaged them in any way—you’ve heard a lot about the negative impact of a depressed mother. But don’t forget, you sang songs to them. That summer you read them James and the Giant Peach out loud, and even though they were just three and five years old, they were mesmerized. It was their first chapter book and set the stage for the many, many books you read out loud to them over the next ten years. You took them to the library and the park and to museums. You built houses and castles out of blocks. You dug in the sand with them. You comforted them when they needed it. You celebrated their little successes. You made them feel loved and valuable. If a stranger were to ask them confidentially if they had a good, loving mother, you know they would say yes.
You had no professional future, Miguel told you, and you believed it. You were certainly disadvantaged by how often he wanted to move, by the absence of other family support, by having children in graduate school, by the weak job market at the time. Miguel blamed you for not finishing your dissertation sooner, but it makes sense that it took a long time under the circumstances. He told you that you were a financial drain on him, but let’s be honest: you often supported him and usually worked at least half time. He was the one who gambled money away while you looked for the sales at the grocery store.
The worst part was that you took the combination of the circumstances and Miguel’s unflattering interpretation of them, and you adopted them as truth. If I’d been there, I would have pointed out how inaccurate, unkind and unhelpful his words were. I would have reminded you that you were smart, and there were many future employment options, even if you didn’t know what they were. I would have taught you about informational interviews and taken you to the career center. At night, when you tossed and turned, wondering how you would survive, I would have whispered to you, “You can do this. You will figure it out, just as you have figured out many things before this. You will figure out the dissertation and figure out a job. You have made your way through a lot of things without a lot of guidance and support. I’ll help you out. I’ll encourage you.”
You felt so stuck. You were desperately unhappy but still couldn’t imagine yourself leaving this relationship. Don’t the boys need their dad? How would you support them? Wouldn’t they be devastated by divorce? Would I even get custody? Miguel said he would tell the court that I was crazy and it wasn’t safe for the boys to be with me.
I would have told you that Miguel was not a healthy person to be around, not for you, and not for the boys either. I would have said, yes, divorce is painful, and the boys will cry, and Miguel will blame you. “It’s all your fault,” he said. I would have challenged that and reminded you that you tried hard, for years, to make the relationship work. You acquiesced, you forgave, you gave him another chance. In contrast, his approach to making the marriage work was by increasing the pressure on you to go along with him. He didn’t just want you to do what he demanded–he wanted you to believe that he was right.
You felt stuck because you were faced with difficult choices and had no financial resources and little emotional support. You harmed yourself as a way to deal with the intense, conflicted feelings. But despite everything, you were strong enough to leave. You left Miguel in December, still seriously depressed, and by May you had defended your dissertation and got a job. That’s a lot of strength. That strength is still there in you, and it will get you through your current healing process. It will get you through whatever changes lie ahead with your current job. You could do it on the basis of that strength alone, but think of all the support you have now that you didn’t have then: a loving husband, plenty of job experience and a strong resume, professional connections, friends, and some savings.
I know you still feel the urge to harm yourself to cope with stress or chase away intense, negative feelings. I’ll stay with you while you learn to let yourself feel those feelings, all of them. I’ll help you pace yourself. I won’t tell you that you can’t burn yourself, because I know you still see it as an effective coping mechanism. Together we’ll create alternative coping mechanisms. I look forward to the day when you won’t want to burn yourself anymore, because you simply won’t need it.
One day you’ll look back on this time and think: oh look, I got through this too.
With love,
Your older and wiser self, Q.
Sage Burning 
Never give up on your true self. When the going gets rough remind yourself that you are a survivor. Keep centered on all that is good.
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I know this is the right advice–this is what I want to be, my true self. But I find it distressingly easy to lose track of who that self is. Lately I feel like I slide back and forth between my confident self and my confused, lost self–the one who reminds me of the young woman who was trying to leave a controlling husband. I think that’s why I keep thinking about that time in my life. Maybe it would be more helpful to spend time thinking about when I have been centered, resilient and happy.
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Even to this day I will find myself doubting who the ‘real’ Margie is. But, I will literally make myself do something positive just for me.
My husband is a controlling individual and is the hurtful piece to my life, at 63 I am ready to leave.but my father-in-law is dying of lung cancer. It would devastate that man if he knew how domineering his son is. My son is a replica of his mother. I also have my 25 year old daughter still living at home. She almost suffered a mental breakdown in 2005 when my husband was very emotionally attached to his associate at work.
I guess what I want you to know is that I truly understand where you sit, how vulnerable and threatening life can feel when we are overwhelmed with negative thoughts. Take a deep breath and push yourself forward. I want the remaining years of my life to be fulfilling and rewarding. The only path to that is by accepting I cannot change my past, but I can, slowly, but surely, build a future.☕️❤️
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I think you have so much to be proud of. Amazing inner strength to have gotten through all those challenges. Well done.
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Isn’t it funny, how you go through terrible times feeling you are nothing but weak. And then when you make a change, people say you have such inner strength. But I never felt I did. Maye I should think about the kind comments like yours and tell myself, look, I have had strength even when I didn’t feel it. So if I don’t feel it now, it is probably still there, and I can count on it to carry me through.
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Oh, the chance to send my own words back to my younger self! To imbue that younger version with my current strength. Would I then have MORE strength to face today’s challenges? More wisdom in the face of my tormenting self image?
I always want to think that if I could go back and communicate with myself I’d be a stronger, better, and wiser person for it today. But I only learned how strong I am by facing those original challenges. If I took that away, I may not turn out as well as I think I would.
Sounds to me like you’ve risen over and over again to the challenge life has to offer. You can get through whatever you’re stressing about right now.
And this is a lovely, healing letter to yourself, btw. *hugs*
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For years my therapist has been telling me to write letters to my former self or to different parts of myself. It felt foolish, and I resisted for a long time. But I have started getting more serious about it this year and have found it very helpful. It’s a shame that I can’t really go back in time and comfort my former self. But the letters do make me more gentle in my judgment of the past and even of myself in the present.
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Glad to know it’s helping you. I’ve been working along similar lines with the goal of forgiving myself. It’s a process; a little bit more with each step I take.
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Beautiful letter that you were so able to pull out the positive things you did in spite of the abuse. We really do have the option now to believe the lies and that we were only our the negative depressive mess the abuse turned us into or to believe that we are wonderful moms and women who somehow managed to shine throughout it all.
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Today I am doing a lot of thinking. I wonder if I have been focusing too much on the ways I have been wounded and what it’s done to me. I could choose instead to list out all the ways I have been strong or all the times I have accomplished something important in spite of great difficulties.
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It is not only too easy, but embedded into my being, that when something goes wrong, didn’t work as planned, a mistake made, or even just a life event of any kind that is unpleasant…It is my fault, my doing, all me. I was a sweet little girl, playing with dolls, loving my brothers and mother, trusting them, looking up to them, and feeling safe in the family of them.
Then touched by evil as a mere innocent, like any child, I took it all in as if I were ‘bad.’ That’s what children do. I could ask why? Why should it take work to love myself, let myself off the hook if I make a mistake, or do something I wish I hadn’t, or in your case loved someone who didn’t or couldn’t love you back as you fully deserved.
It has taken years to separate myself from ‘them.’ Yet the go to person to blame, flog, reproach, beat up, beat up, beat up… is me. It should not be work to love oneself. Yet it is my work. And though I could ask ‘why’, I know why.
Good work!
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Your words “…the go to person to blame, flog, reproach, bet up, beat up, beat up… is me” really resonate. I remember first therapist telling me that we create ruts in our brain by driving over them again and again (I always imagine it as a rut in a dirt path made by a bicycle.). We have gone over that way of thinking so many times, that even in new situations where it is not appropriate, we still go there. It’s familiar, even automatic. It’s a lot of work for us to create new pathways. Some days I feel like I’m starting to do that, but under stress, it’s straight back to the rut.
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Yup, right back in it. Exactly. Like grooves in record but you’re too young to have owned records!
But progress is made, it’s just sometimes hard to see.
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[…] very unsatisfied with yesterday’s post, which turned into a bit of a rant about my first husband and some statements about how I […]
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I really related to your situation as a young mother, because mine was similar in some ways, and I too worried that my son would be worse off living with me alone. I also didn’t have work and had little confidence of any kind. Those are such tough circumstances. It’s easy to forget how tough that situation was. You certainly did great coping and then getting out.
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It’s making me remember how hard it is to be a young mother with small children, especially if you don’t have family around to help, even more so if your marriage is a source of unhappiness rather than support. I feel like I want to tell other women in such circumstances that it is possible to make a change and survive the difficulties of it.
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Wow this is amazing. YOU are amazing! So glad you’re writing these letters. Very inspiring.
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Each one teaches me something new, first when I write it, and then again when I respond to comments, and later when I read it back a couple months later.
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