Dear humour,

you’re very welcome.

the other things you mentioned are there I think. I don’t understand if the way I perceive myself is the way people perceive me or how I should behave at my age and so on.

If you grew up separately from your mother and had no interaction with her as a child, then one thing that was missing was the s0-called mirroring. The baby reaches out, and the parent responds to the baby’s gestures. Or the baby cries, and the parent soothes her. The baby smiles, and the parent smiles back. That’s called mirroring.

If there is no one there to mirror us (to respond to our signals, our communication), I think one of the consequences is that we don’t know ourselves. We don’t know how others perceive us because we weren’t “perceived” (seen and mirrored) properly by our parents or care-takers.

So if that’s what happened to you, you’d need mirroring. You would need someone to see you and respond to you. I think the best way to do it is within a therapeutic relationship because a good therapist is (among many other things) a safe mirror. So that you slowly get that feedback, i.e. response to the signals you give out…