Depressed, Confused and Contemplating Suicide

First of all, you need to promise me that if you feel that you can't control your self-destructive urges that you will call your psychologist or psychiatrist or go immediately to your local emergency room. I don't want you harming yourself in any way.

I am so sorry to hear about the life you have lived. You have been emotionally battered by your mother and father, as well as sexually assaulted. To top it all off, no one believed you when you said that you had been assaulted.

I know it feels like you have a thousand problems, but believe me, your problem actually boils down to one issue: buried anger, which has been poisoning you since childhood.

Let's take this step-by-step. It is normal for a child to feel angry at his/her parents. Even under the best of circumstances, children feel anger toward their parents; at the same time children find it hard to own their angry feelings. This is because they live in a magical world in which they believe that thoughts and feelings are the same as actions. When a child is angry, he/ she believes that if he wishes his parent dead (a normal wish when someone is angry) that the wish will come true and the parent will die. So, in order to insure his/her own survival, the child must keep the parent alive, which means that the child swallows his/her anger, which leads to many emotional and physical problems.

Your case is complicated by the fact that you were so abused, which means that you have a larger well of anger inside you; plus, your mother increased your natural urge to swallow your anger by telling you that she would not love you if you were a bad girl. This kind of message forces a child to completely gag her anger.

In this climate of suppression, you suffered one assault after another; more and more anger got added to your already overwhelming pile of fury. The buried anger is literally poisoning you by this point. This is because angry feelings can only stay buried for so long before the mind begins to come apart at the seams. The buried anger is like a loaded gun that gets directed away from the real objects of the anger and aimed at the self; this literally short-circuits the mind, causing all the symptoms you are experiening: suicidal thoughts and urges, depression, anxiety, self-loathing, hate for the baby you produced, which the mind sees as an extension of your own self, and much more.

As for dreaming about your husband's best friend. Just as you aren't comfortable with your aggressive urges, you also aren't comfortable with your sexual ones. Your unconscious mind may have chosen a man who, himself, doesn't place a high priority on sex. Perhaps your unconscious mind thought that being with him would keep your urges in check. Meanwhile, you have become frustrated and have begun dreaming about his best friend. The dreams are simple wishes, and these wishes and urges are fine. The problem is that you are hating yourself for them and feeling like you deserve to be punished for these urges.

You need to have your therapist help you accept all your urges, sexual and aggressive. You need to learn that feelings are nothing more than that, feelings (emotional farts, air bubbles that pass as quickly as they came). When you really absorb the fact that feelings don't lead to outcomes (not unless you act them out), then you will feel free to feel all your feelings. When you do, all these horrible emotional symtoms-- depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts should fade.

You also asked why you are dreaming about your father believing you and taking your uncle to court. The wound you suffered--to have been abused and then not be believed--still lives on in your unconscious mind. It is said that the unconscious doesn't have a sense of time, so old wounds feel as fresh as though they were inflicted yesterday. The wounds are fresh because they were buried alive; they continue to get churned up in your dreams because your mind is trying to work the trauma through. The dream is telling you what you dearly wish: that your father would believe you and come to your aid. You have needed this your entire life. I believe you and I want you to know that you don't need to wait for your father to rescue you. To wait for him is to remain a helpless, angry victim your entire life. Here's a concept. How about rescuing yourself by taking your uncle to court. That is a proactive step in which you direct your anger off of your psyche and onto someone who wronged you; fight back and you are healing the anger; waiting for daddy to rescue you keeps you stuck in that enraged victim place, which not only doesn't help you purge the anger from the past, it also helps you to keep manufacturing anger in the present.

I also encourage you to join a therapy group. There you will see that everyone else shares your thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and wishes. You are not alone or abnormal. Trying to deny these parts of yourself is making you ill and this is what you need help to resolve. You are absolutely fine the way you are.