Sometimes talking doesn’t help. Cause the other person is walled off from their own emotions. Talking to them feels like a cheerleader đź“Ł shouting at a crowd. I grew up with someone close to me who was like that. Only it was worse… Because she always seemed angry at and frustrated with me. She wasn’t, necessarily. But she turned the energy my situation made her feel totally toward me. And because she never explained that to me (maybe never understood for herself, even today, possibly) I spent most of my life being afraid.
I learned I couldn’t talk to her. Because I was afraid…and because I always sensed she was jealous of me, which makes no sense – that is, until you understand (decades later) that she looked at me as just another woman. Even when I was really a girl, she compared herself and my relationship with my boyfriend (now husband) to her and to her self-centered, alcoholic other half.
A jealousy this close – let me tell you, if you aren’t acquainted with your own – is a secret you hide even from yourself for as long as humanly possible. Because it’s ugly. Like being abused, you don’t want to be the subject. You don’t want it to be true. So, you do MORE than pretend; you forget.