I'm a little late to this conversation but I've been looking all over the web to find other people talking about this.
My dad died when I was four and my mom has severe emotional/mental health problems. As a result she was verbally and psychologically abusive towards me my whole life, and can't maintain stable relationships with other adults. So growing up, I had nobody. That insidious "good enough" equation that
@Dana1010 talks about ended up underlying everything I did in life, but of course, I didn't realize it. I'm in my late 30s now and I'm only just starting to realize it.
I never had "imaginary" parent figures growing up and I didn't create any intentionally, but about six months ago, out of the blue, I had a dream in which a famous person who's in his 70s now, someone who I really admire, met me at an event and immediately sort of "adopted" me, so to speak, in a fatherly, supportive way. He had a wife in the dream (no resemblance to a real person that I know of; nothing like his real-life partner), and she was also very kind and interested in me as a person. At one point, something I said made him laugh and he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it just a little bit. Platonically affectionate, supportive, almost proud.
I'm *still* crying about this dream, at least once a week if not more often. I had a few difficult life events occur unexpectedly in the months after I had the dream and when things were tough I'd imagine his hand on my shoulder squeezing it supportively, like he did in the dream. Sometimes I'd imagine phone conversations with him where he helped me figure out what to do or just listened and made me feel good about myself, and sometimes I even imagined that he came to visit the way a real father would, to help me around the house while things got back to normal, etc.
I think I'd buried the hurt and the longing for some kind of supportive parental relationship really deep so that I could finally move on from the devastating effects it's had on my life -- and for a while, it worked. I'm doing really well in life, finally -- marriage, good career, etc. But this dream has made it all fresh again and these daydreams -- sometimes they feel really nice, and sometimes they just sort of re-open the wounds. I wish it made me feel better about my upbringing, like you describe,
@Dana1010, showing me my mom was just like any other crappy person with no real power over me. Instead I think it just digs up more and more and more grief for the love I never had and the difficulty I've always had and will probably continue to have feeling safe and truly connecting with other people. I've been able to channel a lot of these feelings into the creative work I do, so at least there's somewhere to put it, but I haven't even been able to bring myself to tell my therapist about it yet. I think I really cherish this vivid shoulder-squeezing moment from my dream so much that I'm afraid if I tell anyone about it it'll somehow slip away from me. It sounds silly, I know ....
