Too screwed up to be Loved?

[nycfem]

Originally Posted by *Anya*

....
I remember so well my first therapist (thank you Ginny wherever you are) really was awesome as I was trying to work through my parental issues. I was 21 and still asking why my parents didn't love me. She just very firmly, each time I asked this question, said: "Because they can't".

I must have asked 20 times until the lightbulb in my head went off, she broke through the last of my defenses and I understood that they just were not able to love me. They never got the tools from their own parents.

Anya, your experience hit home for me and made me look up a poem I wrote years ago about a dream I had about my parents:

"Flight of Anger

I dreamed that my anger
propelled me into flight.
I was inside a store,
and my parents were waiting
outside in a car for me.
I felt so angry at my parents
that I rose up to the ceiling.
I cannot recall
why I was angry
but it was such a powerful force
that I flew around the store.
Then I looked at myself from afar
as the girl, a a teenage me,
got into the car with her parents.
I thought about how the girl's parents
did not really love her,
but because they were her parents
they had to allow her
to get in the car with them.
I felt a sense of utter fright and sadness
that the unloved girl
could have just as easily disappeared
and the parents could have driven off
without any sense of loss.
The girl was too young to know
that she was unloved,
that her parents didn't know her,
and that her family was just
an empty social construction."