solitary

Sharing what it feels like to be an only

I suppose I was compelled to write to you simply because I have never encountered anyone who wanted to know, in some depth, what it felt like to be an only child. Although I have had some experience of personal therapy,  my experience of being an only child has come up in the context of other matters, not as a matter for examination itself. I suppose this is the nature of therapy, one deals with what arises in the time and space, and the fact of my ‘onliness’ has never been, of itself, a topic in the therapeutic space. I have no doubt, however, that having brought it to the fore, I will take it to my personal therapy. My impulse to write to you signifies to me that this is something that needs to be used in my therapy, which begins next week.

Some of what I remember is my [...]

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I feel so solitary with aged parents

At this moment in time I have just scanned the web as I am just overwhelmed 
with the shear scale of emotional and physical support required of me to
 support my parents aged 81 and 80 years old, I have just put the telephone 
down at 10.00pm after my father has rung me saying he does not know what to do with my mother who is crying and in pain. I am at 56 year of age, just being able to enjoy life after working hard but being pulled back again and again, more and more to help my parents. Its has been so hard to show love for the both of them now, when they both
so desperately need it and I have to forgive and forget all the years that
went before when all I needed was a cuddle from them.

I know I sound selfish and just at the moment [...]

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I would never have an only child!

Being an only child, taught me, that one day when I got married I never wanted just one child, because I did not want them to go through what I went through, even though it sounds lovely, it was a very lonely and solitary existence at times. I was lucky in many ways, but feel that in other ways you miss out so much. I never learnt from brothers or sisters who had children, the experiences of looking after babies, I never changed a nappy until I had my own children, I had never looked after a baby and did not have a clue, until I had my own. I never had cousins to play with or aunties or uncles popping in or baby sitting. In a way it was harder being an only child who wanted for nothing, than being in a larger family, learning about life, and how [...]

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I’d like to make contact wiht a surrogate sibling…

An Australian living in France I would very much like to make contact with a surrogate brother and/or sister. I desperately feel the need to communicate with someone who has traversed the same road. I am a 61 year old only “child”. I have hated it all my life, always being the odd one out with no brother or sister. My father was an only child too, and I have never been able to find out why I was also doomed to this solitary life. I find that I STILL have to explain to people that I don’t have any siblings and I STILL get the same looks of incomprehension and distrust that I first noticed at primary school. I get the feeling that they think it is my fault that I have to live like this. At primary school I used to hear other kids say that ” my [...]

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