Dear Tee,

“Well, when you say that your parents did everything right (except some minor stuff), it tells me you don’t really understand how badly they’ve harmed you” The key phrase is “everything right, except”.

“But after all of that, you claim they did everything right?” THE KEY WORD IS “EXCEPT”. I was obviously speaking in general. I know that emotional and mental health is very large and important area of life, but I am saying that except that VERY LARGE AND IMPORTANT AREA, they did everything else right.

“What did they do right? If they harmed a budding human spirit to the point of you wanting to obliterate your existence? What is right in not harming your body if they crushed your soul?” You are basically agreeing with me. You are responding as if I did not admit that they failed in the emotional and mental health area. You are responding as if I am going back to them and loving them and allowing myself to be hurt by their abuse. I literally said I hate them and I am never going to forget what they did. So why are you responding as if you are not reading?

“It seems to me that their intention was to raise a slave, whom they will own and command what to do. Their intention was not to raise a free-thinking individual, who will be in charge of their own happiness.” To you, maybe. But this is how most of us grew up, and this is normal for us. No matter how cruel u think this may be, this is normal for us, as shown by the neurosurgeon I mentioned earlier, which is why I am able to understand that my parents had good intentions even though their actions are stupid and cruel. Because the lifestyle that you grew up with is different from ours, you will see it as their intention to raise a slave, even though their real intention/ultimate goal was good.

“If you forgive someone, you cannot hate them.” Let me rephrase it for you to understand better. By forgive, I meant that I understand their intentions, but I will forever hate them for what they have done. I will always remember the things they have done. I will have their cruel words etched into my heart. But I am aware of their ultimate goal and I understand that they meant only good for me. There are multiple paths to achieve the same good result. However, my parents chose the cruel and painful path to push me through. I hate them for driving me down this path, but I understand their ultimate goal. That is the difference you fail to recognize.

“It’s okay to forgive your parents, but before you do that, you would need to acknowledge how they have actually harmed you, and what emotional needs they’ve failed to meet.” Are you not reading? I literally just expressed that I acknowledge how they harmed me and the emotional needs that they have failed to meet. And for that, I will hate them for life. But I will still carry out my duties as their son. It is a DUTY, it is not based on whether they DESERVE it or not. I UNDERSTAND their motive, but I will hate them for what they have done.

“Telling you that you are a pig and will forever stay a pig is quite a horrible treatment.” Turns out he was right. I told my guy friend what my dad said and he pointed out that technically I am still a pig cause I am still talking to B despite everything she did, cause she is the mud that I should be staying away from.

“And another goal is to protect yourself from your parents’ abuse and toxicity (which they are still practicing today).” I already have myself protected. I laugh when they say the things they say, to the point they get pissed at how I am laughing every time they try to hurt me. They cannot hurt me anymore, so don’t misunderstand.

You are misreading/misunderstanding the things I am saying and latching on to the wrong points here, to the extent that you don’t even realize that you are essentially agreeing with me.

Paradoxy

Dear Tee,

“So let’s assume there is a tribe deep in the jungle who believes that cutting off their child’s ear will help them achieve great success in life. Would you say they are good parents, who care about their child’s happiness?” No, but you wouldn’t blame them for their lack of knowledge. And you would try to correct them too. Trying to correct my parents is a waste of my time. So I understand that they are doing what they think is right, but I will not tolerate the things they do.

“Yes exactly, that’s called fawning, as I’ve already explained.” I know it is fawning, but I am not affected by the things he say though. I am not LISTENING to his lies and insults, I am HEARING them. I let them enter one ear and leave the other ear. Besides it is not like I have a choice other than to avoid them, so I am protecting myself by not caring about the things they say and focusing on my priorities. They HAD me in the grasp of their abuse, but no more.

“I’ve explained in great detail how you transferred your longing to be seen and understood from your parents to B” And I am saying that I DIDN’T transfer my longing to be seen and understood from my parents to B. I expected basic friendship, loyalty and respect from her, and because I wanted her to be my future wife, I wasted my time hoping that I could get her to fix herself. It was my desire for her to be my one and only partner that made me keep trying to make her understand me. I may have had unmet emotional needs, but I did not force that on B. I just cannot simply leave someone over a mistake that could be corrected and fixed and I had hoped that I could help her be better. I do not want to be dating multiple girls before I find the right person. If I am going to date, I want to be absolutely certain that the girl is the right person for me. I want to make sure that whoever is destined to be my wife, should feel like the only special person for me. But because B is my first real relationship, despite what my aim was, I was too blind to see that B was not the right person for me, but my desire to love one person only caused me to try to help her become the right person for me, which was a mistake that I now regret and have learnt from. That desire did not stem from my unmet emotional needs. That desire came from my morals.

“Unfortunately it does seem you haven’t learned your lesson, because you are denying the main reason for your attachment to her.” And what are the odds that you are wrong about the main reason for my attachment? Your advice is based on a third person’s perspective, which means you won’t be able to understand certain things that are hard to describe through words. Some experiences and feelings that I had are too complex to simply give a verbal description detailed enough to make you understand. Sometimes you have to trust the speaker. Especially since it is my life that I am describing. That doesn’t mean that I am completely rejecting your advice.

I have agreed with you that my parents are cruel people that have emotionally abused me. So why are you arguing with my decision to forgive them for not realizing that what they are doing is wrong? God himself forgave us for our sins due to our lack of knowledge, so why is it wrong for me to forgive my parents for their lack of knowledge? Why is it that you cannot acknowledge that my parents’ ultimate aim was to ensure I have a successful career instead of being a slave? Why do you think that I am making excuses for those who have hurt me? I have every reason to hate them so why do you still think I am making excuses? Even before God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham asked him if he would spare the cities if there were at least 10 good people in those cities, to which God agreed. So why is it wrong for me to look for the good in people? What makes you think that I am eager to be making excuses to justify the cruelty that others have put me through? I lived under my parents’ roof for 17 years. I have experienced life with them for 17 years, long enough for me to decide whether they are actually the cruel people you describe them to be or actually people who mistakenly believe that they are doing the right thing. So what makes you think my understanding of their intentions are wrong? You can only understand the words that I am writing to you. You cannot understand the actual experiences that I have been through, experiences that led me to realize their real intentions.

“Well of course, having critical and abusive parents influences us in negative ways, e.g. it may influence the person to become an addict.” Did you not read the part where I said “observations and my application of psychology to various situations”? I am trying to say that I realized that I would still not be the ideal son-in-law because I know what other fathers want in their sons, because I OBSERVED and applied PSYCHOLOGY on OTHER fathers. This is because I REBELLED against my parents’ “harmful parenting style”. I am not mature enough to be proactive and take responsibility and be the man of the house, and I know this because I know what other fathers are expecting of their son-in-law. It has nothing to do with my parents’ parenting style being “harmful”. That is why I said even if I grew up with DIFFERENT parents, the outcome would STILL BE THE SAME.

“Even if you started dating a girl outside of your religious community, she still was/is a bully, similar to your parents.” I did not fall in love with B because she was similar to my parents. I fell in love with her because I saw her as DIFFERENT from my parents. Someone would had the capability to understand better than my parents. Someone who could empathize with me since B herself was abused by her own parents. I thought we could heal together. At the beginning of the relationship, I felt a form of emotional connection with her. That is why I fell in love with her. She just started to behave like my parents OVER TIME. And my dumbass self thought I could fix that because she normally does not behave like my parents.

“Does that mean you are considering quitting medicine?” Not sure yet, I am planning to continue for now until my music career buds.

“Well, you can do that without enduring their abuse and without even studying medicine.” Hell no, how is that even possible? They pay for everything that I have, and I am almost out of the money that I earned over the years. If I don’t accept their calls, they will just assume that I am in danger and call administrators to see if I am okay, and I can’t quit med cause then they would want me to come back home to them, so I need an excuse to stay here. And there is no decently paid jobs here as even B struggled to find one. So I am going to wait until my music gets better.

“Dear Paradoxy, your parents must have suspected that your mental health was deteriorating, if not earlier then when you attempted suicide. They knew you were suffering. But what did your father tell you? That you are stupid for being so weak and sensitive. That you should be tougher.” They don’t know that I am suffering, they just know that SOMETHING is up. That’s it. That is why they even had other parents try to lecture me. They all say the same thing because THEY ALL think that what they are suggesting is actually what is good for me. They don’t know that I am suffering. They never will cause they cannot understand the form of suffering that I am going through, because IT IS NORMAL to them.

“They purposely reject the whole area of mental health – not because they’ve never heard of it, but because they believe it’s bs.” Precisely, they consider emotional and mental health deterioration to be nothing important, which is why they are oblivious to my suffering because it is primarily emotional and mental suffering. They PURPOSEFULLY ignore my suffering because they are OBLIVIOUS to the fact that IT IS SUFFERING. They don’t even CATEGORIZE it as suffering at all. That is the issue.

“So that’s their main goal: getting their children into prestigious colleges, which will result in them getting high salary jobs. For them, that’s all that matters. Well, frankly, those are pretty materialistic goals.” YES because during the time they grew up, only these things were considered important because it ensures you live a peaceful life in the physical aspect of things. Nobody cared about their emotional and mental well-being. Achieving these materialistic goals are what was normalized and considered important because without money, there is no point in complaining about your mental and emotional health.

“They put those above love, care, compassion, mercy – the values that Jesus proclaimed.” They are aware of these values. But they express these values of love, care, compassion and mercy through strict discipline and materials. They will always be available to love, care and show compassion for you in most situations except the situations that require therapeutical caring. That is the difference.

“Where is your parents’ love and compassion for you, their own child?” What you don’t realize is that they do love and care for me, but they do not provide therapeutical love and caring. It is like loving someone because it is their DUTY to love instead of loving someone because they WANT to love.

“Psychological health is equivalent to soul health. But your parents completely disregard that part. And yet, they claim to be deeply religious. Where is the “logic” in that?” There may be no logic in it to you, but they can see the logic in it, especially since they are getting the results they wanted, and because other parents support their actions too. So in a situation where they are being encouraged to ignore emotional and mental health, they will obviously continue with their cruelty, because to them, it is not cruelty. I hope you understand.

Paradoxy

Dear Tee,

“They don’t love and care for your emotional well-being, for your desires, for your goals and dreams.” Yea they do love and care for my emotional well-being lol. But in their own twisted way. That is the part that you don’t get. Like how children go to a flower garden, and pick the most beautiful flower, not with the intention of destroying it, but with the intention of keeping it safe and close to them due to its beauty and the child’s desire to preserve and protect it, but the child doesn’t realize that picking the flower would be the cause of its destruction. Did the child not love the flower? Obviously the child did love the flower, it just didn’t know how to take care of it. I know my parents are grown adults, but they know nothing about how to be a parent, especially since I am literally the oldest child among all my cousins and siblings by several years.

“So an attempted suicide is a sign for them that you are having the time of your life? That everything is great in your life? That you are just bored and don’t have a better thing to do?” Precisely. My dad already has the predetermined ideology that suicidal people are idiots, so he believed that there was no way in hell that his own kid would be suicidal. Besides, it’s not like they can see me in pain. They have to see me suffer in order for them to feel like I need help. I have never shown them my suffering, I kept it bottled. So to them, it appears as if I am living my life fine. They think that everything is normal and I am happy, cause that is what I show them. So obviously they won’t think they are responsible for any sort of suffering.

“No, they expressed the opposite of values of love, care, compassion and mercy in your upbringing. You are convincing yourself that abuse is love. No, it is not.” If you ask them for help, they will obviously help. But as long as the suffering is not obvious enough for them to understand, they won’t offer those values of love and compassion etc.

“Sure, 100 years ago it was all about survival. Nobody cared about mental health. But it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true today either that one needs to be getting the highest paying jobs to be materially secured. That you need to study medicine to ensure a decent existence. So their forcing their will on you, pushing you to choose a career with highest salaries – is a bit more than a “survival response”. I am sorry, but to me it’s already greed. It is having their eyes only on the material, while disregarding anything else.” Let me make this more clear: My parents are ASIAN. It is commonly known how Asian parents are. Always comparing the kids to other kids. Always getting disappointed when their child doesn’t bring home an A+. Always planning to make their child become a doctor or a software engineer or a lawyer etc even before they are even born. Hammering in the foundations of mathematics into their head when they are a mere child to ensure that they do well in school. That is not greed. That is like a traditional thing and almost every Asian family does this same thing. That is why it is known as the Asian stereotype, which most people are aware of. This is NORMAL for us. So obviously they won’t prioritize mental health because they are oblivious to the impact of mental health.

“And how ironical that they should be worried about gold diggers and wicked women who want to take the man’s wealth. In fact, it’s not strange, because they are fixated on wealth (even if they want to accumulate it by honest means and hard work), and of course they are afraid of those who would want to take it away from them” That is a huge misunderstanding. My parents are not greedy. If they were greedy, I would have found a way to get out of this mess. It is cause they prioritize family and tradition and culture that I am stuck in this mess. Greed would have been so much easier for me to handle, cause there are so many ways I could have made enough money to satisfy their greed but unfortunately, their aim was not wealth. That is something you won’t understand until you experience this life. It is too complicated for me to simply express in words, especially since even I don’t understand why my parents are so stubborn no matter how many different examples with exceptions I suggested to them.

“You mean what other men in your religious community expect from their son-in-law?” No in general. B’s father was also the same and the fathers in the church community are also the same.

“Other men in your religious community are obviously very similar to your father, so I guess you would get the same or similar abuse that you got from your father.” But that is the thing, it is not other fathers in our religious community, it is outsiders too, even my own school teachers said the same thing when my mom enquired them about me on parent teacher conference days. EVEN THE CHURCH MEN SAID IT TOO, and we go to a Greek Church so you definitely know they are not anywhere near of our “religious” community.

“Yeah, she encouraged your music development, i.e. your hobbies, which your parents probably thought was bs. But that’s the trick: we often fall in love with someone who is different than our parents in one area, but very similar in another.” Can’t you ever consider the possibility that you could be wrong? B’s encouragement and etc were just a brief scratch on the surface examples of what made her different. She was there for me whenever I had to deal with my parents’ hour long calls that I had endure. She provided me with the emotional support I needed to endure my parents. She helped me plan for a future together, where she studies to become a nurse while I study med and etc. Idk if she was lying but she also agreed to help me quit med if necessary after she becomes a nurse and fund my education for music or computers once I am ready. She made me feel valued. She made me feel like I had a good friend. Someone that I could go on adventures with. Someone who was willing to risk their happiness and make sacrifices to help build me up from my lowest point. In the beginning of our relationship, she did provide these things, even with the issues that led to our multiple break ups. Even if all of this was fake, it doesn’t change the fact that my reasons for loving her were not cause she was similar to my parents. But the annoying thing is that you will use these same examples to say that I was using her to meet my unmet childhood needs that I expected from my parents, which is completely wrong.

“By your morals, do you mean that the first girl you date should be your future wife? Because that “rule” too is something you learned from your father. It’s an invented rule.” No, my moral is that only one girl deserves special treatment. Only one girl deserves to be treated like the queen in a boy’s life. I do not want to be in multiple relationships, and end up loving each girl and breaking up until I find the right girl. I want to be able to make the right girl feel special. To know that I patiently waited until I could find her. To make her feel like every other girl are just normal classmates or colleagues but this one girl means so much more to me. To make her feel like every other girl is worthless compared to her. To make her feel like I would never cheat on her or find interest in another girl, because she is the most amazing woman in my life. I want my gf/wife to feel as if no one else deserves the honor/privilege of being my partner, and I should feel the same way too towards my partner, therefore making each of us that special person in each other’s life .

It is like the issue with body count. A typical man do not like women with high body count, and that goes both ways, cause if your partner slept with 30 guys/girls before they met you, you are no longer that special to your partner, especially sex wise, because he/she got the same pleasure from other people and therefore you become just another guy/girl that can sexually satisfy them; you are not that special.

“But as I said, your attempts to make her understand you and your needs – even though she was totally unresponsive – prove that it was an unmet need. You couldn’t just let go.” Again I say to you, I didn’t let go of her cause of my moral, not cause of my unmet need. I wanted to turn her into that special person in my life. Someone I could pour out 120% of my love into and never regret it. I didn’t want to hesitate when it came to loving her. Obviously I was wasting my time, but I didn’t realize it when I was fighting for the relationship. I just thought that everyone had flaws, and so if I could help her fix her flaws, she would become the perfect woman for me.

“It is very clear from your words (and from your inability to let her go) that you were trying to meet an unmet childhood need through her.” This is becoming foolish now. I wasn’t expecting compassion or pity from her. I just wanted her to understand HER FLAWS. Not understand MY ISSUES. I wanted her to FIX HERSELF. I wanted HER to IMPROVE, so that she would become the PERFECT WOMAN for me. That is completely unrelated to my unmet need because if that was the case, I would be trying to make her understand MY ISSUES and sympathize with ME. Instead I tried to CORRECT HER. I wanted to FIX HER.  I wanted to sympathize with HER and keep correcting her when she misunderstands things about me like assuming that I was cheating and etc, cause these misunderstandings were the core reasoning behind her foolish decisions.

“Because what they did is not love and care. It was cruelty. Even if they didn’t understand it.” YESSSS what they did is CRUELTY. But it STILL DOESN”T CHANGE the fact that THEIR INTENTION was to show LOVE AND CARING. They didn’t hurt me with the INTENTION of hurting me. They hurt me with the INTENTION of helping me. It is similar to how a child gets a beating or another form of punishment from their parent when they do something wrong. Technically, the physical beating harms the child and causes the child pain, but the parents did it to teach the child a lesson, to teach them to not repeat the mistake.

“I am also stressing it because you seem to believe that their parenting style didn’t affect the way you are today.” You clearly misunderstood, cause I am saying that their parenting style DID affect the way I am today. But it doesn’t change the fact that growing up with different parents would STILL result in the SAME “deficient” personality because the parenting method might differ but their intentions, priorities, aims etc would still be the SAME so they will still be driving that same hammer into my head.

“This again is freeing them from all responsibility and blaming yourself for having certain deficiencies. As if their lack of love and empathy didn’t leave any trace on you – as if it’s all you and your “badness.” That is why I keep telling you that you are misunderstanding me. I am not freeing them from the responsibility of making me the way I am. I am not freeing them from the blame of making me this way. I am NOT saying that their lack of love and empathy didn’t leave any trace on me. It is THEIR CRUELTY that drove me to this point. BUT IT STILL DOESN’T CHANGE THE FACT THAT OTHER PARENTS SHARED THE SAME GOAL AS THEM. That is why EVEN IF I GREW UP IN A DIFFERENT HOUSE, I would STILL HAVE THE SAME HAMMER DRIVEN INTO MY HEAD. Cause their GOALS are the SAME. That is why most of us just want to get away from them. Obviously the amount of mental and emotional health deterioration would differ, but the outcome would still be the same.

“In your latest posts you seem to deny it, claiming that their parenting didn’t really affect you negatively.” No, their parenting style did harm me, but not because the parenting style was harmful, but because of the individuals using the parenting style. Another parent can use the same parenting style, even be cruel to a certain point, but if they had just realized the mental and emotional deterioration that was happening, they could have helped with the healing while maintaining the parenting style. They could still drive me into doing med and not pursuing music and etc, but if they had just given me the encouragement I needed, the understanding that I expected from them, helping me go through this process TOGETHER instead of all by myself, my mental and emotional health would have been so much better.

“You’ve shared a lot here, certainly enough that I could form a picture of what was going on.” Clearly not enough, because you still misunderstood.

“Even your own words – the way you phrased things – confirm my assumptions “ EXACTLY. Some experiences are TOO COMPLEX to be described through simple words, you have to actually experience them to understand. That is why you think I confirmed your assumptions based on “the way I phrased things”. I wanted B to understand HER MISTAKES and how to fix them, but for my parents, I wanted them to understand MY ISSUES and how to fix them. That is the part you still do not understand. I am not trying to preserve the goodness of my parents. I want you to feel what I felt but that is impossible.

I will restate a simplified version of everything so you understand better:

My parents are cruel, but their intentions were good. Due to their lack of understanding, I forgive them. But I will not waste my time trying to make them understand my issues.

I loved B because she was different from my parents. She understood me to a certain point, until she started the downward spiral after I told her about what my parents said about modern women. Because she had the misunderstanding as the core of her beliefs, every other argument we had all spiraled from that misunderstanding, for example the argument where she called my parents racists, and the argument over what my type was, and the argument regarding my conversation with my high school crush etc. I tried to make her understand so she could fix her misunderstanding and become a better woman, but that failed.

I am not fit to be a son-in-law because most fathers want a son that is mature and man enough to handle the responsibility of being the man of the house. And that is a huge responsibility, and requires leadership skills, which I definitely lack due to my lack of confidence due to my poor mental and emotional health. I need a certain level of wisdom to understand how to handle the responsibilities of being the man of the house. Being the man of the house also requires me to ignore my emotions when taking responsibilities. That is why even if I grew up under a different parent, when I am taught to take up these responsibilities, I would still be forced to bottle up my emotions. And if I am not able to carry out these basic responsibilities, there would be another emotionally deteriorating experience waiting for me when the parent becomes disappointed in me. I have been observing this in 39 families now, and it is the same thing in each of them, that is how I know that this thing is normal and the outcome will still be the same.

I am trying to make it as simple as I can so you can understand but I have a feeling that you would still not understand what I am trying to say. I wish I could explain this better.

Paradoxy