Dear Vegas101:

When your father pushed you to be the perfect student, is the message: be a perfect student and you will get my approval. Not a perfect student= no approval by me?

With this message every move you make in school, every effort, every grade, every thought maybe, every such thing carries a heavy extra weight. There is the weight of school work and grades, success and failure, and then there is the EXTRA weight of approval- or disapproval by father.

When you carry such extra, unnecessary, defeating weight day in and day out and your father and your mother do not SEE you suffer under the weight and they keep the extra weight on you, then you feel all alone, totally alone. You feel not understood and not trusted (You are not trusted until you get a perfect grade and only until the next test with a grade yet to come).

If you have hopes for your relationships with your parents, talk to them, tell them how you feel (you might have already?)- tell them calmly, for the purpose of healing the relationship with them, to turn it into a Win-Win relationship, for your won good as well as their own good. If they understand and change their behavior, if an honest communication begins, then there is hope and you keep at it.

If not, if they reject (again) your feelings and beliefs as you express them honestly and with best intentions, then you are, again, alone, with little hope, really, for future closeness. In that case, you separate from the people who harm you. Separate enough so they no longer harm you.

You have a wound, you mentioned it “wound”- it needs to be attended to. Attend to it, continue to attend to it. And keep away the people who re-open it and make it bleed again.

anita