Dear Miyoid:

You are welcome.

“I can have anger towards my parents.. but I won’t be understanding of their conditions.. they have much more traumatizing lives and traumas.. They have tried so much to do the right thing.. Therefore, I cannot rationalize having anger towards them and I don’t feel any. Actually I feel sorry for them, I feel compassion and mercy. I wish I could’ve make their lives better”-

– it is very, very common for a child who was neglected (“I was just neglected a lot”) to focus on the parent or parents, to feel great empathy for them. It is a shift of roles: the parents are supposed to feel empathy for the child and to focus on the well being of the child, but when that doesn’t happen, the child makes up for the lack of empathy and attention by feeling a whole lot of empathy for the parents and focusing on the well-being of the parents.( This is what I experienced in my own life).

You wrote: “I cannot rationalize having anger towards them”- anger happens by itself, it is instinctive. We don’t rationalize having anger. What we rationalize is hiding the anger, pushing it outside of our awareness, so that we “don’t feel any”.

“I won’t be understanding their conditions. They have much more traumatizing lives..”- healing is about you understanding your conditions, and your traumatized life. Healing is when your life becomes about you, and no longer about them.

“the fact that you don’t think opening up to my parents is a good idea kind of relieved me”- I thought it would. I don’t think it would be a good idea because as a child, you were very open to them, as all children are. And what happened as a result is that they hurt you badly. So, of course, it doesn’t make sense to be open to them again.. and get hurt even more.

You wrote about your mother: “she looks down on and doesn’t respect others’ misery”- so you wear the healthy-strong-person mask, not wanting to be looked down at and disrespected by her?

“So I guess I have to accept her for who she really is”- I wonder what you mean by this sentence.

anita