Dear LeenBee

You are welcome 🙏

“Most of the time, he’s a decent person.”- but sometimes he’s not decent, not when he gets aggressive and scares people. I suppose every aggressive- abusive person is sometimes decent.

“I no longer wish to be his caretaker and listen to his complaints.”- I imagine that it could work for 2 people, in general, to give each other 5 (or so) minutes a day to complain, timing it (making it equal time) 🙂

🤍Anita

How are you/ what’s new, Laura?

Dear Ivy:

I understand and relate to not wanting to be judged for your likes (or dislikes).

I admire you for communicating how you feel- honestly, directly, and respectfully- just as you did a bit more than an hour ago.

How are you these days, Ivy?

🤍👍🤍 Anita

Well, I explained it best I could in this thread starting on page 1, and repeatedly on pages 13-44 in this thread. I can’t explain it any better or any more than I already did.

I will not be surprised though 🙂 if you find a better explanation elsewhere, one that will resonate with you. I’m sure there are plenty of YouTubes on attachment styles, explained by psychotherapist.

🤍 Anita

Continued, Dear Charlotte:   

Reading what you shared in your first, Nov 29, 2013, more than 4.5 years before your last thread (July 2018), it’s striking how consistently your early experiences match the patterns you’ve been struggling with in relationships.

Even at 21, you described feeling emotionally numb, disconnected from yourself, unsure of who you were, and easily shaped by the people around you. You wrote about feeling “false and unreal,” adapting to whoever you were with, and not knowing your own values — all signs of a self that was not supported or mirrored in childhood.

You also spoke about filling inner emptiness through relationships or eating disorders, repressing anger and feeling responsible for your parents’ emotions (“I feel bad about staying so sad because my parents have been suffering because of this.”).

These are the same themes that later showed up in your romantic life: losing your sense of self, not knowing your needs, merging with partners, feeling guilty for having boundaries, and swinging between closeness and distance.

Your posts across the years tell one coherent story: you’ve been trying to navigate life without ever having been taught how to stay connected to yourself, and you’ve been doing the best you can with the tools you were given.

Growing up, it’s clear to me that you suffered Emotional Neglect (the lack of mirroring, etc.)
In regard to emotional over-involvement by a parent: it’s when the parent uses the child for emotional support (role reversal). Examples: (1) A mother cries to her 10‑year‑old about her marriage problems, (2) A parent says, “You’re the only one I can talk to.”, (3) A parent vents about work stress to the child instead of another adult, (4) “I don’t know what I’d do without you — you’re my rock.”

And as a result, the child becomes the parent’s emotional caretaker and learns to suppress their own needs.
Emotional overinvolvement can also happen when the parent takes the child’s emotions personally. For example, saying something like “It hurts me when you’re upset.”, “When you’re sad, it ruins my whole day.”, or “Why are you angry at me? I’m doing everything for you.”, and the child learns that expressing emotions harms others, so they shut down or numb out.

Emotional overinvolvement also happens when the parent expects emotional closeness the child can’t give.
Example, saying, “Why don’t you want to spend time with me anymore?”, as well as the parent treating the child’s independence as rejection. Example, “Why do you want to go out with friends instead of staying with me?”. The child learns that autonomy causes conflict, so they avoid boundaries in adulthood.

It happens when the parent is emotionally fused with the child. Examples- The parent needs the child to agree with their opinions or the parent becomes upset if the child has different feelings, expecting the child to mirror their moods. As a result, the child never develops a separate identity and later “merges” with partners.

Emotional overinvolvement doesn’t look like “abuse” in the traditional sense — it often looks like closeness, concern, or even love. But it quietly erodes a child’s ability to develop a stable inner world.

You didn’t describe specific behaviors from your parents, but based on what you did share, it’s clear that you grew up in an environment where your emotions were not mirrored, your boundaries were not respected, you had to abandon yourself so to adapt to your parent or parents, you felt responsible for their feelings, you weren’t supported in developing a sense of self and you learned to suppress anger and needs. You became emotionally disconnected from yourself

I started a new thread yesterday, partly as a result of your threads, Charlotte. Like I said, it’d be a miracle of you respond after all these years 🌿 ✨ 🌼 🌟

🤍 Anita

Good morning, Confused:

You wrote yesterday: “I realized we’ve posted in 20+ pages, wow”- actually, we posted in 32 pages (#13-45), WOW.

About Harry, he first posted on June 27, 2024 (page 9). Re-reading his posts this morning, he sounds eerily similar to you, Confused. At times I thought I was reading your words.

There were many similarities, but I’ll mention just one in this post:

Harry: “I’ve never really looked into my past as a child as a reason for how I feel. To be honest with you I can’t name specific times I’ve felt that way. I was kicked out of my house a lot by my mum, I suppose my dad had left the house abruptly a couple times and stayed away. I was bullied pretty badly in school and tried to just brush it off, which worked at the time.”

Confused: “The relationship with my mother was very chaotic, violence and arguing constantly, throwing some awkward affection here and there, then rinse and repeat. I can’t remember if I was dissociating when I was a kid, definitely trying to escape in imaginary worlds and games though… How does my body relate this relationship to the one with my mother? I can’t comprehend that; I saw no similarities there.”

Neither Harry nor you, Confused, connected your respective childhoods to your emotional patterns in adulthood. Both of you minimized and dismissed the impact of your childhoods; neither of you saw it as relevant.

Neither one of you has processed his childhood wounds, including the chaotic history with your respective mothers.

I addressed this point to Harry back in the summer of 2024, and to you, in this thread (eerily, in the summer of 2025).

Anita to Confused: “Your childhood experience is not only relevant but extremely relevant to what you described. You mentioned a childhood of violence, chaos, unpredictable affection and emotional instability- This is the exact environment that creates disorganized attachment, hypervigilance, fear of abandonment and dissociation (emotional shutdown under stress) as a coping mechanism.”

🤍 Anita