Dear Ashmitha,

you’re welcome, and thank you for sharing some more. You did well to become strong and resilient while growing up, to fight rather than flee, to work hard and excel in your studies, rather than become disillusioned and self-destructive. Your self-preservation instincts were excellent and you got out of your precarious childhood as a strong, independent woman. Congratulations for that! The only thing that suffered as a collateral damage is your emotional side – your ability to be emotionally open and vulnerable with another person.

Perhaps what could help a little bit is to tell yourself that you don’t have to be in the survival mode any more, that you’re safe and there’s no one pointing a knife at you or your mother (have your parents divorced in the meanwhile? has your father stopped threatening your mother?).

If you know you’re physically and existentially safe, you could relax a little, which could be as simple as laying down on a carpet, or lean against the wall, and allow the ground, or the wall, to take your weight. You don’t need to hold so much any more – you can allow yourself to be held (put a cushion if you lean against the wall to make it more comfy 🙂 ). And just breathe and relax.

You can also make a habit of getting on the call each evening with your boyfriend and asking him how was his day, and also share about your day. That’s the chance to talk about any dilemmas, or worries you might have, or simply “to talk about feelings and experiences and just understanding people” – which you said you’d love to do.

So I believe if you make the space for mutual sharing, every day at a convenient time, you’ll start building that intimacy, that emotional bond between you. Do you think it’s something you could try?

Dear Ashmitha,

you’re welcome. In your family home there was a lot of distress because of your father’s alcoholism, and I believe what happened is that you felt it’s better not to upset your mother with your problems – your emotional needs – because she was going through a lot anyway, and your father was unavailable or at least unreliable. So you decided not to share your problems with your parents, and tried to manage without their emotional support (I do not like asking for help from others. I find it hard to ask for my needs to be met, like maybe I am asking for too much or I am being difficult.).

You focused on school and academics, in which I guess you were talented and successful, and you found certain fulfillment and satisfaction there. This also helped build your confidence, so you do seem confident, and also pretty “low-maintenance” and relaxed. But that’s just a defense mechanism, because you do need emotional closeness and intimacy. You’d like to be vulnerable and share your inner-most feelings with your significant other, but you’re afraid to do so, because you’re afraid you’d be seen as too demanding and possibly even abandoned (I think I also have a fear of partners leaving me, which is why I hold my feelings back.).

You’re in a relationship with someone who’s got a lot of “needy” relatives to take care of, and since he’s a people-pleaser, and probably also has a sense of responsibility towards his family, he spends most of his free time taking care of them, not you. If you meet once per week and the rest of the time you just chat, not even daily, it seems to me there isn’t too much chance for emotional intimacy and sharing. It’s good that you started demanding a certain level of attention from him, such as daily check-ins.

You’d also need to work on your willingness to share emotionally and express your needs, and on the fear of being rejected, of being “too much”. And you need to see – when you do share and open up – whether he’s capable and willing to acknowledge you and support you, or he isn’t willing to have that level of emotional intimacy with you.

Dear Sofioula,

happy belated birthday! I am glad you’re feeling good, although very busy – but with the things you love and enjoy!

It may not make sense to you but this is how my brain works, 2 sided. It is completely split. I often have agruements with my own mind. OCD again, plays a huge role in this I think. The only senario that plays in my head, is that I am a loser and he was right.

It’s the inner critic telling you you’re wrong and blaming you. It’s the internalized parental voice. You’d need to develop the voice of the good parent, which is a loving, compassionate voice. It would counter the inner critic and enable you to forgive yourself for making mistakes or for changing your mind.

I saw that when I met my then bf, I didn’t want to marry or have kids until a certain age, I knew I always wanted to do those things, but it wasn’t something I stressed or even thought about. My obsession and fear with having a family ASAP, started with my first visit to the OB/GYN.

Alright, so your need to get married and have children young didn’t just stem from your parents “brainwashing” you and expecting it from you, but because you genuinely got afraid that your health would deteriorate and you wouldn’t be able to have children later, because you were wrongly diagnosed with a health condition you never had. In addition to that, you lost your beloved cousin a few years earlier, who was born with brain damage and severe health problems – also due to an ob/gyn mistake.

So your desire to get married ASAP (which you wanted from your previous boyfriend) stemmed both from your parents’ expectation, but also from your own fear that they may be right that you’ll really stay alone and die alone, due to a medical condition which doesn’t allow you to bear children. The diagnosis was like an alarm firing up in your head, because there was now a real danger that your parents’ “prophecies” would turn out true, so you better hurry up because what if they’re right.

Though I do not cry anymore and have been back to normal – somewhat – I still carry a picture of me as a baby in my wallet and fear that I will never be able to have my kids photos in there. 

After the diagnosis, you feared that you won’t be able to have children ever. It was an unbearable thought for you, not only because you wanted to be a mother and experience the joy of motherhood, but also because it carried a horrible sentence for you: of staying alone forever and dying alone. The two great fears got activated in you. That’s the alarm – the double alarm – that turned on in your head.

And it appears it’s still hard for you to switch it off completely. There’s still a fear that your “grim destiny” might be possible, although not probable. The fear is present, but it has lessened.

Well, now you’d need to silence that ominous voice in your head by telling yourself that you’re healthy, you have no medical condition, and you have enough time to meet the right guy. Not just the first willing guy, but someone with whom you’re really compatible. For silencing the ominous voice, what you need again is the voice of the loving, compassionate parent – to assure you that you’ll be fine and there’s no need to worry about it.

Now it occurs to me that your father was actually not just the critical voice, but also the ominous voice, always worrying for the slightest thing, always having plan B if things go wrong, and believing that things might go wrong easily. You internalized both of those voices, and your misdiagnosis only strengthened them… so truly, you need a counter-voice, which is the voice of faith and trust that things will be fine, that you’re safe, that universe has your back.

Both my father – and I suspect your mother too – were too young to be able to check and control their emotions, or even find ways to let them out in a non catastrophic way

My mother wasn’t too young when she had me, she was 33, but she was the worrying, catastrophizing kind of person, like your father. So the ominous voice is very familiar to me, and I too internalized it…

But the question is how do we approach the inner child as adults and how do we start fixing our compass? In my experience, being myself is the same as being silly, that no one will take my seriously and that being spontaneous is not adult-like.

It’s the inner critic telling you that you’re silly. It’s what you’ve been hearing from your parents since you were a child: that you don’t know what’s good for you, that you make stupid decisions. If you’d only do what they tell you, you’d be much better off. And you believe it. Now it’s the time to stop believing it. To do that, bring in the inner compassionate parent, who’ll tell you you’re smart and capable of knowing what’s good for you.

As for being spontaneous, that’s one of the healthy qualities of the inner child that many adults sadly lose, specially if they’re fear-based, like your father and my mother is. If you fear life, you need to have everything pre-planned and under control (and you need to even have a plan B!), because you never know what might happen. And what can happen is only bad, in their mind. So they need to ensure that the least possible damage happens… but that also means the least possible joy can happen too, because they can’t enjoy life while waiting for a catastrophe to happen…

Let me know if you have found ways to address this in your own experience, if you would like to share how (if) you fixed your relationship with your mother, or rather how you respond to your mother behaviors as an adult . Without losing your soul.

Well, I stopped trying to please her, fulfill her expectations and live my life the way she’d want me to. Because of that, she’s very sad and offended at me. We barely speak. And we live in two different countries, so we rarely meet as well. In her eyes, I am a great disappointment and a failure. But I’m not upset about what she thinks of me, I can live with it. She cannot really make me feel bad about myself, like she used to before.

Thank you so much for all the kind and supportive words. I work better in life with words of affirmation and support.

You’re very welcome. And as I said, try to develop that positive inner parental voice, which will give your inner child words of affirmation and support, to counter your judgmental and catastrophizing inner critic!

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear Ryan,

I’ve taken a look at your earlier threads. You had a great discussion with Anita there, who very astutely pointed at the dynamics you had with women and its possible causes. I now realize that you did say No to a woman before (to your ex with a small son), however it wasn’t a strong, resolute no, but rather an ambivalent no.

You didn’t really want a relationship with her, you didn’t want to live with her and share life with her – so that was your No. But you did want her in your life from time to time, going to trips and spending time with her and her son. That was your Yes. You wanted her to be emotionally close to you, to confide in you, to talk about her problems. You were receptive to that and seeking it even after you broke up, which she told you she isn’t willing to do.

What you weren’t receptive to was her anger towards her father. Her anger repelled you and you said it was one of the reasons you broke up with her. Anita noticed that you might be suppressing your own anger (towards your mother) and that’s why you cannot deal with hers. Your mother scolded you when during arguments you would use the word “freaking”. It seems to me that this is how she silenced you and deterred the attention from the actual problem to something inconsequential like proper speaking. You weren’t allowed to get angry with her, or to express that anger. Would you say that’s true?

When we suppress our anger, we cannot set proper boundaries either, and we cannot say a definite and resolute No. We also don’t know what we want, or we don’t dare to go after what we want. So we cannot say a definite and resolute Yes either. This may even cause depression because we can’t selectively suppress just anger, but we need to suppress ALL emotions, including joy and happiness.

Do you recognize yourself in any of this?

Dear Ryan,

I am sorry you haven’t been feeling great lately and have felt empty and as you say, self-destructive.

You said you agreed to have sex with a woman you didn’t really like: when you met in person, you felt “even less of a connection” than online. You felt you didn’t have much in common with her, and you were not physically attracted to her either. There was just “nothing there for you”. And yet, she was persistent, so you just went along, went to her house, and did what she expected you to do – have sex with her. You met once again a few days later, after her insisting, and you tried to “rise to the occasion” again, but it didn’t work. You left home without meeting her expectations.

It appears to me you can’t say no to a woman, and feel obliged to meet her expectations/needs, even if they go against what you really want and desire. Is this dynamic familiar to you, perhaps from your childhood, in the relationship with your mother?

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear Ishita,

we can start a new topic if you’d like, but I’d like to address the situation with X:

yes , i kind of dont want to admit that, also , its just gonna end up being a gossip , if we go around talking to common friends about it, I wouldnt want that,I dont want them to resolve it for us or even attempt to it as well.

I totally understand that you don’t want to admit this to your pals and become a subject of gossip. What I believe would help you is to admit it to yourself, and to stop blaming yourself for falling in love with someone who behaved lovingly towards you (at least in the beginning). It’s not your fault. It’s completely normal. You have the right to fall in love with anyone you want, and specially with someone you thought so highly of and who treated you well at first. So try to have compassion for yourself.

You said you want him to “understand you and let you go and allow you to heal”. But actually, his understanding is not what you need right now. What you really need is to understand yourself – have compassion for yourself – and let yourself off the hook. Forgive yourself for whatever you feel you did wrong in this relationship. Forgive yourself for falling in love, for hoping, for having expectations from him, for allowing sexting, for accusing him for not calling you, for being vulnerable with him.

Your blaming yourself now is almost certainly related to that experience before entering college, when you were under stress, you were blamed by your batch mates, and even by your teachers. Instead of trying to understand why you have problems and helping you, your teachers blamed you. Since we tend to trust authorities (teachers, trainers and coaches) almost as much as our parents – you started believing them and accepted that something’s wrong with you, that you’re not good enough. And the pressure of entering amongst fierce competition just added to your insecurity and anxiety.

I wish I could go back and tell the 17 year old self ,how it was ok to let go, because there are bigger things waiting, and I will get it anyways( because now, when I am in college , I see an entirely different picture , to what I used to imagine then, and its so much better)

Actually, you can  go back, in a meditation, and tell exactly that to your 17-yr old self. This is what she needs to hear – and it is you who can release her.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear tranquility_17,

We have discussed this and he is not interested in being the sole provider.

How about maternity leave? Do you think he’d be willing to provide for you and the children while you’re on maternity leave and beyond, if you decide to take a few years off of work because you feel like dedicating your time completely to children while they’re little? Do you feel he’d support you in that, or he’d expect you to return to work ASAP?