Help without Anti Depressants

[SugarHut]

I'd really like some (kind,helpful) advice please, as I've seen some very harsh and condescending things written where people seem to genuinely be seeking help.

I have a 5yr old boy, and being very honest, I've never really even liked him...I feel like if I could press a button and it would take me back to never have fallen pregnant then I would press it like a shot. I make myself be as good a mother as I can, I hug him and tell him I love him, but I feel nothing. I don't feel repulsion, or hatred, but I feel nothing towards him. It makes me so sad...mainly for him, although I feel I hide it well and he's none the wiser. I long for the 2 days a week my mother has him when I can be me. I'm not a drippy "woe is me" failure, I'm a very strong woman, he's in private school, I have a very good job, which is not even very demanding...on the outside, I look like I have it made....but I wanted a girl so very badly, and every day I feel disappointed.

He's very smart, he gets outstanding reports, his behaviour is excellent, they are talking about putting him up a year in school...all things other parents tell me are amazing. On the outside I smile and gush and agree...on the inside I couldn't care less. I hate it.

Does this sound like depression? I can't bring myself to take any medication, so please don't advise me too. And please don't lecture me for "you shouldn't have had a child if you only wanted a girl" yes I did...but trust me if I knew I'd be this permanently disengaged and hate it to the extremes I do, then I would not have had him and saved us both. No pointless battering me for a decision I can not reverse, I feel bad enough as it is.

I look at other children at the school, and if I look at one of his little girl friends, I imagine it was my child and I get overwhelmed with these warm loving feelings, I want to pick her up and cuddle her, take her shopping, brush her hair, make cakes with her, read stories with her, I feel overwhelming pride and love even though it's a random child, then I look at him and want to cry. I am looking at him right now, and I picture him being a girl and I feel like there is so much love in me for a girl and he's just this child in my house that I don't even feel related to that's ruined my life.

What do I do??? Are there any non medication routes that actually work if I am depressed? Does it even sound like depression? I know these feelings aren't normal, and I know it shouldn't have taken me 5 years to say something about it. But anyone who has had a remotely similar experience please help me. x x x

Sugar- several of your posts have also been deleted. As have a couple of mine (a first for me!) This has got unbelievably heated at times so hardly surprising...

Mine have been deleted purely as they have been responses to other people's initial comments that have been deleted. I queried it. There was nothing wrong with what I wrote, it was removed as it was in direct response to a prior post that had been wiped for being inappropriate. If you look at the little bit of text that appears when a post gets wiped, you will see what I mean...

x x x

They were deleted due to complaints that your personal attacks breached guidelines.

Did you not read the bit saying I queried.

x x x

Yet again this is more pointless side tracking. Stop wasting my thread please. If you want to talk about NPD, start your own topic. This is not what this thread concerns, and the majority of us are trying to discuss the important issued here.....

x x x

Op, the majority of us see NPD as relevant here. Again, you cannot dictate what others say. They will say what they will. This is not a 1:1 therapy service but an open and public forum.

Nope, many of my posts still stand. I too, in 6 years of mumsnet have never, ever been deleted before

We should start a club

I think your spot on with NPD.

Sugar, even down to your posts being deleted you can't see they were deleted due to your breech of MN guidelines.

Please seek real life help, this is not the place for you.

It does look like a possible diagnosis.

Please seek help!

"Your 4th paragraph re the materialisation, spot on. I know exactly what to do in terms of being a good mother, and how to act the part. I just have no feelings of wanting to be a mother to this child/a boy. It's like I can't be the mother I know I so desperately want to be."

I hear this in so many of your posts and I really feel for the deep sense of loss you have that this is happening in your life. Remember again that the NPD "box" is just a box... as I said previously, we use the word bouquet to describe any random collection of flowers be they dandelions or orchids and no diagnostic list ever does or ever could describe any human being given our glorious and inconsistent complexities whether deemed "normal" or "abnormal". I would tend to reject the use of the term "personality disorder" as I believe all the reasons we post here are afflictive mind states and each of us has experience of a wide range of positive and negative mental states - we all contain, as Walt Whitman would have it, multitudes.

I do think that if you externalise it and strip away all of those diagnostic behaviours and just think of it as being about a sense of a fragmented self because everything you ever dreamed of seems totally out of your grasp, there may be something in what people are seeing.

One thing that struck me is that there is growing recognition that the idea of a "self" is something that is,, in itself, a construct but our rigid adherence to our own self-concept is often the root cause of human suffering - ALL human suffering, not just that which passes the grade for some sort of psychological or psychiatric label.

I have heard this book is quite good at explaining this school of thought, though I will confess not to have read it personally.

Beyond and underneath all this pain that your mind is creating, there is a whole and complete you - that sovereign, unique person that I mentioned in my first post on this thread. There is a common Mindfulness meditation which is about focusing on a mountain and imagining the core stability of a mountain as the centre of your self, with your thoughts, emotions and experiences like weather patterns around the mountain. Sometimes it will be stormy, sometimes it will be clear, there will similar patterns of weather you encounter over and over again but there is a healthy and whole person capable of deep, limitless love and compassion in there - limitless meaning capable of loving a boy child with time and the right support and understanding for your unique situation.

I don't know how helpful this thread is now (to anyone)?

Sugar It will not work telling people not to post/start another thread/not comment/refrain from deviating etc as you have chosen to post on a public forum.

As a "layman" I think the NPD is worth investigating. I appreciate that you vehemently deny it to be any where near the case, but consider that that is exactly what someone suffering with NPD would do.

I won't post again as I am uncomfortable with the turn it has taken.

But what I will say is that, like your son, my Mum didn't show me love. I also played on my own 99% of the time. It affected my whole life. I was desperately sad twinned with desperate to please. I became extremely good at pretending. So much so I became an actor. How much all of that had on my own parenting issues (see previous) I have no idea. My relationship with my mother is NOT a "mother/daughter" relationship. She happens to be the woman who gave birth to me.

Sugar You speak of your own mother with love and affection. I have no idea what that would be like. Please don't risk your son feeling the same any more than he does already. My Dad died when I was four so I also didn't/don't know what it was like to have a father either.

I really wish you and your son the best of luck.

My god! Why are people still trying to support this selfish, stuck up cow?! I have similar issues regarding bonding (I always wanted a daughter, but motherhood is not how I imagined and I hate the detachment I feel towards my dd), but still utterly shocked by op's attitude. I don't see her changing, so just let her get on with it. I just hope for her son's sake, someone ie: his grandma or father, notices something is amiss, and will give him the love and attention he deserves.

Hi op.
I have read the majority of the thread, but not all of it.

Can I ask two, off the wall questions?

1.When you were a child, and you were given a toy that you did not like much, what did you do with it?
and
2.Following on from Gracie's post actually, how is your mother towards your son?

ok, read it now

You love your child. It is on a deep level, but it is there.

sugar Interestng that you say you 'queried' the deletion of your posts and imply that they were only deleted because they were responses to what others had written. I'm afraid that's not the case, is it?

I deleted one of your posts because it contained a personal attack. MNHQ told me they were looking into it. About two minutes later, the post
I had complained about was deleted, and was subsequently joined by other posts you'd written. They were deleted because they contained personal attacks which are against the talk guidelines. Perhaps it makes you feel better to pretend that's not what happened but it absolutely is.

Meant to say I complained about your post, not deleted.

I think so miemohrs.

The op has scripts in her head.
The boy did not fit the script.
She doesnt know what to do.

Have you ever cried about it SugarHut?

Well, ignoring the ignorami, and actually feeling a little pity for them with clearly nothing better to do, back to the issue in hand....thank you for keeping this on track guys, in the few days that I have now spoken to you about this, I'm feeling like this really could be the start of me working this out. And a little frustrated that now I see how helpful you guys have been, kicking myself that I have kept this all bottled up for 5 years. I'm actually looking forward to my first appointment, the fact that I feel like I WANT to change, as opposed to a few days ago, when I spoke out for the first time because I felt I should change even if I didn't care, I just knew I was broken, is down to you talking this through with me. It's phenomenal really.

Shakey, your situation does sound very unpleasant, and one I really hope I won't force upon my son. I'm sorry that you went through that, and I can't relate to what you felt so I won't patronise with "I understand" because I can't imagine what it was like. Is my son aware now? To what extent it may have happened already I don't know, but I truly believe he is unaffected so far due to his age. It's not a blind denial, if I thought he was being affected, I think you can tell from how I write that I don't mince my words and would say so. The slight difference is that he is shown love all the time, and told he is loved all the time, and I do not think he is yet of a mental age to detect anything particularly suspicious. I am not foolish enough to think he will not start picking things up in the next few years unless something changes.

Working9, the mountain analogy is nice, I can relate to that a lot. It's quite true that I feel I'm good at every other aspect of my life, so I know the strong, capable core is there, that has the ability to tackle pretty much anything. And there are these large thunderous grey clouds that just hover above the peak and I can't dissipate them. You've been outstanding in making me explore this in such thoughtful depth, and I've surprised myself with the resulting revelations, I will certainly print this out and take to my appointment.

Breeze, it's actually knocked the wind out of me a little to hear you say that. That you've read through everything, and you can detect than on a deep level I do love my son. It's a beautiful thing to say if you really mean that, and makes me feel a little emotional. That perhaps it's not all a lost cause. I can't see any love in me for him, so that you can even see a glimmer, despite my inability to see it, means a lot. Re the toy thing, as I child I was a bit odd with toys, I never ever asked for anything, much to my mother's despair, from the age of talking, every birthday/Christmas to the question "what would you like?" my response every time was "a box of chocolates and a bunch of flowers." Bizarre but true. So I had very few toys, but consequently the select few I did have were all adored. I do remember once an Aunt buying me a make your own weather vane kit, and having no interest in it, so it stayed in the box and I gave it to one of my friends about a year later. Have I ever cried about it? Many a time. I'm not sure what the tears are really from though, self pity at a situation I feel I am life long doomed too, sadness for a little boy that has no hope with his mother, the unfairness I feel....I just don't know. I never feel like I can't cope though. It's not a struggle to battle to the end of each day. It's not a helpless woe is me thing. I am very much of the stance that I was stupid enough to put us both in this situation, it can't be reversed, so get on with it as best you can. Which externally to view me as a mother is great, but internally when you see what my mind has become, is a joke.

x x x

x x x
Thank you very much for answering me. I appreciate it.
I am always of the opinion that there is hope btw, in any situation.

I also asked how you mother is towards your son. Apologies if you have already answered this somewhere in this thread and I missed it.

Reading through all of this, the thing that strikes me is the importance of the subconscious. Consciously, OP, you may genuinely have no sense that your relationships with your mother and father have affected the way you feel about your son.

But what any good therapist will help you to begin to understand, is that there is a lot going on under the surface which we are not consciously aware of. Similarly, I would guess that you are right that your son has little or no conscious knowledge of your feelings towards him. But he will subconsciously, through a whole range of the tiniest of signals, have picked up on your feelings towards him. It isn't a coincidence that his very 'good' behaviour matches your own as a child.

But there is some very good news- if you get the right help, and work really hard now, with a genuinely open minded attitude, you can repair the damage that has been done (look up Oliver James on this).

I don't know how you'll receive this post, but I write with the best of intentions and wish you all the best. Also I wanted to let you know that I also picked up on an underlying love for your son from your posts.

Oh, one more thing- I read that your biological father left your mother when you were a young baby? Can you say more about this/think about it on your own a bit? Could your Mum let you know how things were for you both in your early weeks/months?

Did you see the GP yesterday OP?