Dear GL,

Amazing advice. I think you identified the exact word of my struggles. I am very speechless in an amazing way! Thank you so much for your words and encouragement to start building my own boundaries. You have no idea how much your advice means to me. 🙂

Best Regards,

Dahn

Hello Anita,

Thank you for your reply. I read your previous message again and you are right. I struggle to be assertive with myself and to ask for help.

I watch my parents helping their friends and our cousins and families, even me and my sister feel its too much sometimes. I moved to another country (Europe) after 19 so often my sister felt the pressure to help our cousins because my parents asked her to.

I am a second child of the family and have an older sister. I am the active and outgoing one whereas my sister is calm and listens to my parents. We are an Asian family. While I was growing up, because of my rowdy personality for Asian culture, my mother often told me that my personality is too strong or aggressive, so I was always told to soften my personality. I got compared a lot with my sister too. (later I heard my mother did the same to my sister) So from my early 20’s to mid 20’s, I struggled to accept myself because of the external pressure from my mother’s pressure and the surrounding people I had back then. So self-reflection, self-blame and self-guilt became my habits.

Since I have different friends now who accept and support me and also being far from my family, I regained my confidence and improved my self-esteem. But it was definitely significant that my mother and my old surrounding friends pressuring me to change myself. (well, with friends, usually I used to get upset because of their racist and ignorant behaviour.)

Since I am happy who I am now, it would be even grateful to forgive my mother’s hurtful messages and independently improve my issues. I love my family and my mother is still a great life role model for me, I want to stop projecting negative on her. I really want to learn to believe in myself more and stand for my voice to everybody.

Hello Anita, thank you for your reply.

As I remember, my mother was a very selfless person. Perhaps it may be my family culture that we don’t remind each other what we have done for each other. However, I grew up noticing how giving and selfless my mother is, to many people including myself.

I am glad I learnt to offer help to people when they need, which is very easy for me to take care of others. However, when I am in need of giving confrontation (e.g. delivering my honest feedback to people, claiming some matters to correct, saying no or even asking for help from friends) I feel the anxiety of rejection first or guilty of bothering them. 🙁 Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, I don’t know why I get scared.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Dahn.