How to Stop These Feelings of Abandonment and Shame

by Denis O'Connor
(Limerick Ireland)

I write this today as I have had enough of these feelings. I am 30 years old and have been dealing with these feelings all of my life. I am looking for a rational solution and I am struggling at this.

When I was three my mother spiraled into a world of depression (bi-polar) after loosing her mother (cancer) and father (traffic accident) over two years. She spent the next 10 years in and out of mental institutes and was also addicted to the prescribed drug ativan. My father was and is still a closed book and I'm guessing he had issue about another male in the house. He also had this thing that if I didn't show interest in what he liked I disliked him (I avoid the relationship now).

My home life consisted of constant arguing and emotional abuse - if you did something good, you where like you mothers people and if you did something right you were like your father people. We were used as pawns in their internal war.

I hated being at home and went anywhere but home. I never received any discipline as my dad was working and my mother was in bed depressed. Our uncle was always at our house and is an alcoholic, which my mother didn't care about how this affected us; still a consistent issue between us.

I was always crap at school as I never had to do school work. I have had to learn of the basic thing myself and also found out that I'm dyslexic at 28 as I'm now in college. I am hugely effected by external events and have no confidence, always questioning my decisions.

Even though my home life was and is still crap, I would get over it if I could just stop feeling like this. I'm currently in a relationship that I need to get out of but I'm so scared of the feelings that I will have to face that I am staying in it. I feel like a coward. I feel I'm at a bridge that is broken and I want to get to the other side but I don't know how.

Also I have been diagnosed with Adult ADHD in the last year.