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anitaParticipantHow are you, John?
anitaParticipantHow are you, Debbie?
January 24, 2026 at 12:16 pm in reply to: Gf’s Dad passing was the final straw into ending our long distance relationship #454493anitaParticipantHow are you. Alecsee?
anitaParticipantHow are you, Lindsey???
anitaParticipant* I want to develop this inquiry further at a later time (I am using my phone đą and don’t have access to a computer or AI).
For now, what’s clearer to me is that the ways we felt a bit safer as children (self erasure, focusing on the parent, etc.) was the only available strategy (automatic, instinctual) at the time, but in adulthood it’s totally dysfunctional.
So, it’s about shifting strategy (through active awareness) so to become functional in a world đ where in parts, is way better than the world we grew up in (childhood home).
A world where I can be me, a world where I am not punished for being me: for saying NO, for CHOOSING, for stating, for being authentically, truly me.
đ¤ đ AnitaÂł
anitaParticipantDear Milda:
This is what Copilot had to say about what you shared above (I did not feed Copilot with my quoted input above, only with your quotes, and without the dates- so for Copilot all that you shared, you shared at one time):
What youâve described, Milda, is not a âsmall issue,â and itâs not a matter of simply âbeing too nice.â Itâs the story of someone who grew up in an environment where emotional neglect, unpredictability, and parentification shaped your entire nervous system.
The reactions you are havingâpanic, guilt, the sense of being âa bad daughter,â the feeling that youâve committed some kind of moral crime by setting boundariesâare not signs that youâre doing something wrong. Theyâre signs that youâre finally doing something different.
Let me walk through the core pieces of what you shared and reflect them back to you in a way that might help you see the architecture of whatâs happening inside you.
đż 1. Your childhood trained your nervous system to equate safety with self-erasure- You werenât just âhelpful.â You were required to monitor the emotional weather of the adults around you in order to survive. Thatâs not a personality traitâitâs a survival adaptation.
A parent with a drinking problem; a mother who was overwhelmed, unavailable, and emotionally inconsistent; a home where your needs were not met, and where expressing them led to guilt, dismissal, or punishment. In this environment, a child learns: âMy feelings are dangerous.â, âMy needs cause conflict.â, âIf I take up space, someone gets upset.â, âIf I fix their problems, maybe things will finally be calm.â
Your body learned to scan, soothe, anticipate, and fix because that was the only way to feel even a little bit safe. This is why your reaction to your motherâs text was physical. Your body remembers the old rules even when your mind is trying to rewrite them.
đż 2. The guilt you feel is not moral guiltâitâs conditioned guilt- Youâre not feeling guilt because you did something wrong. Youâre feeling guilt because you broke a lifelong pattern. Your parents trained youâintentionally or notâto believe: Your worth = your usefulness, Your role = emotional caretaker, Your needs = selfish, Their emotions = your responsibility, Their unhappiness = your failure.
So, when you donât jump into the caretaker role, your nervous system interprets it as danger.
That âI murdered someone and hid the bodyâ feeling?- Thatâs what happens when a person breaks a trauma-bonded role. Itâs the body screaming, âThis is unfamiliar. This is unsafe. Go back to the old pattern.â
But unfamiliar is not the same as wrong.
đż 3. You were parentified, not supported- You werenât just âa good daughter.â You were placed in the role of emotional regulator, mediator, therapist, peacekeeper, buffer, fixer
And in return, you received: emotional neglect, dismissal, guilt-tripping, conditional affection, criticism, invalidation
This is why you feel âunseenâ and ânot human.â You were treated as a function, not a child.
đż 4. Your motherâs sadness and fatherâs coldness still activate the old survival script- When your mother says, âYour father isnât talking to me,â she is not just sharing information. She is pulling the same lever she has always pulled: âI am unhappy. Fix it.â
Your body reacts as if youâre still a child trapped in that environment.
But youâre not. Youâre an adult now, and youâre allowed to step out of the role they assigned you.
đż 5. The pause you took was healthyâand terrifying: You did something incredibly brave: You paused. You didnât jump into the rescuer role. You didnât absorb her emotional burden. You didnât abandon yourself.
And your body panicked because it has never experienced that before.
This is what healing looks like in the beginning: Calm on the outside, chaos on the inside.
đż 6. The loneliness you feel is realâand it makes sense: When someone has spent their entire life being useful instead of being known, stepping back feels like stepping into a void. Youâre not just losing a role. Youâre losing the only identity you were ever allowed to have. Of course, it feels empty. Of course you donât know what hobbies you like. Of course, friendships feel foreign. Of course, self-worth feels theoretical.
Youâre not failing. Youâre starting from scratch.
đż 7. âHow do I build self-esteem in healthy ways?â- Self-esteem doesnât come from affirmations or forcing yourself to âfeel worthy.â It comes from lived experience. Here are the building blocks:
a) Doing things because you want to, not because theyâre useful- Even tiny things count: choosing what you want to eat, choosing how you spend 10 minutes, choosing a show you like, Choosing rest without justification
These are acts of reclaiming your humanity.
b) Practicing boundaries in small, low-stakes ways-
Not with your parents at first. With yourself. With daily life. With small decisions.
c) Letting your nervous system learn that nothing catastrophic happens when you donât fix others- This is slow work. But every time you donât jump in, your body learns a new rule.
d) Being around people who donât need you to perform- This might take time. But even one neutral, non-demanding interaction can start rewiring things.
e) Allowing yourself to exist without being productive- This is the hardest part for someone who grew up like you.
đż 8. The âworst daughterâ feeling is a trauma echo, not a truth-
* Youâre not a bad daughter. Youâre a daughter who was never allowed to be a child.
* Youâre not abandoning your parents. Youâre stepping out of a role that harmed you.
* Youâre not doing something cruel. Youâre doing something necessary.
And the fact that it feels wrong is evidence of how deeply the old pattern was carvedânot evidence that the new pattern is wrong.
đż 9. What youâre experiencing is the beginning of individuation- This is the stage where a person: recognizes the dysfunction, steps back, feels guilt, fear, and confusion, questions everything, feels alone, feels like theyâre doing something terrible, keeps going anyway.
This is the part where your old self is dissolving and your new self hasnât formed yet. Itâs disorienting.
Itâs painful. Itâs necessary.đż 10. A gentle thought to hold onto- You didnât choose this role. It was assigned to you. And now youâre choosing something else. Thatâs not betrayal. Thatâs healing.
Copilot
anitaParticipantDear Milda:
Rereading your thread this morning is fascinating. Your clarity of thought, your insight are amazing!
Here are quotes from what you wrote in your original post on Oct 24, 2023: “Iâm always there for people, listening to their problems, giving advice, questioning everything, focused much more on the outside world than on my own life. I feel that this absorption in… other peoplesâ lives just really is draining”
On my first reply to you on the same day, I wrote: “Is it that growing up, you had to always be there for your mother (or father) because she was very unhappy and so, you tried to solve her problems/ make her happy?”.
You answered on the same day: “â exactly, I had a very chaotic childhood, my father had serious drinking problem, so mother was always thinking about the next step, most of the time tired, scared or just with thoughts floating somewhere else… so the coping mechanism formed that I always have to scan othersâ emotions to know (if) I can ask for help/ talk about my problems/ what scares me etc. or if I shouldnât because my mother/father is at the moment busy with their problems. I had a need inside to always solve their problems, so that maybe then I can live in a happy, stable and calm family with happy parents.”
Three days later, on Oct 27, 2023, you wrote: “I was text messaging with my mother… when I asked mother what her plans for weekend are, she replied: well, father is again not talking to me… After reading this message, I physically felt a stress reaction: my heart was racing, head spinning, felt nervous, scared and had an immediate thoughts of âI HAVE TO DO SOMETHING, I HAVE TO SOLVE IT, HOW CAN I COMFORT MY MOTHER, HOW TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM FOR HER, WHY IS FATHER NOT TALKING, I HAVE TO MAKE THEIR RELATIONSHIP RIGHT, I HAVE TO KNOW THE DETAILS, MAYBE KNOWING THE DETAILS WILL HELP ME SOLVE ITâ. It was a true reaction of stress, tension, fear. But I paused… I just put my phone away. Tried to challenge those thoughts… But then I started facing new thoughts, which were: ‘How dare you not helping her, comforting her, she is lonely… you are not taking care of your mother, which is your duty… DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO HELP HER AND MAKE HER HAPPY!!’…A huge guilt inside of me”
On that day, I wrote to you: “Evident here is Role Reversal which started in your childhood: the child-daughter feeling that it is her duty to take care (to parent) her adult mother… Of course, it is mission impossible for a child to be an adult… she doesnât have the emotional (or other) resources to parent her parents, but she is driven to do it anyway…
“If your mother really was a child and you really were her mother, you would have had the opportunity to make her a happy child because she would be in her Formative Years when under your care, her brain developing-… with your input, your care in it. As a child, you unknowingly took on an impossible task: to change a sad brain that is already formed into a happy brain. Mission impossible.
After almost 2 years break, you returned to your thread on Sept 24, 2025. You shared on Sept 24-25 the following: “I read books ‘Codependent no more’, ‘Unhealthy helping’, ‘Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Co-dependency’ and something clicked…
“I have paused communication with parents for a while… Itâs a relief that patterns and reality are now fully understood, but I do not feel brave enough to start making changes… I feel so stressful, scared and alone in this journey of change… I am lost in all of the insights, and I truly have no idea what the next step should be…
“I read a very good quote that ‘When you do not feel lovable, you settle with being useful’. I do not think that I can be loved just because I am, without giving, doing, over functioning for others. There is no self-worth… When it comes to thinking about what to do in the free time, what could be my hobby, I have no idea. I also have no friends, because all of my friendships were ingenuine, I was performing and people wanted to be with me only because of that.”
On Sept 28-29, you shared: “During my whole life, when I had situations where I said ‘no’, and my parents guilt tripped me for that, said something shameful, insulting, I always felt (and still feel) this high rush in my body, indicating stress, scariness, unsafety, a mix of enormously unpleasant feelings, as if I am doing something majorly wrong.
“I always received such feelings as a signal: do something so they are not angry with you. I believe this is the biggest issue- that I feel scared, I feel a bad daughter (by my parents’ terms) and I immediately stop what I wanted to do- I stop setting boundaries, I stop saying what I believe, what are my needs…
“To hear my parentsâ insulting, hurtful words, to hear mother’s ‘How dare you think about yourself when there are other people, you are not the centre of the word’… Their words hit me like a bullet. Momâs sadness hits me like the hardest weight. Fatherâs skepticism and narcissism is like a punch in the face.
“No matter how many books I read, their one sentence gets me into guilt and old behavior⌠Itâs like I was born with a tag ‘Born for everyone, use (her) for your needs, parents do not protect this child from usage’â.
On Oct 1-2, you shared: “My emotional needs were never met. I was emotionally neglected, dealt with my problems alone, couldnât share them, because I knew that reactions would be either no interest or blaming that Iâm too sensitive/should not be scared etc. But when it came to parents- I always searched for ways to meet their emotional needs UNCONDITIONALLY. But meeting my needs by them was always conditional. Always. And conditions were not on my side, so I was left alone with my problems and my need for safety, acceptance and love…
“Just feeling unseen. Feeling as being born for service, for making others happy, fulfilled and comforted. Absorbing everyone’s bad mood, problems and converting them into soothing…
“Itâs even not that my feelings are not important. Itâs as if they do not exist at all. Everyone is human except for me, thatâs the feeling…
“Regarding parentsâ reactions to my problems (as much as I can remember), my mother would be preoccupied with her problems and did not show interest in trying to soothe me or make me feel better, and my father is the ‘stone’ one, he used to say be strong, do not be sensitive, there are bigger problems in world etc…
“I have to start gaining self-esteem from other sources instead of caring, comforting, enabling and fixing. How does a person gain that through healthy behaviors?”
On Oct 3, I wrote to you: “Self-erasure is a high price to pay for being a ‘good daughter’, isnât it? And isnât it a bad mother who demands such a price?… I think redefining things is a good start, to throw away the old dictionary and start a new one.
“I mean there are plenty of advice out there in regard to how to gain self-esteem, books are written on it, I am sure, as well as online videos that you can access. Thing is, for as long as the core belief within me was ‘I am a bad daughter’, I couldnât or wouldnât love myself because, it doesnât feel right to love a bad person, does it, Milda?”
You replied on Oct 5: “Deep down I feel the worst daughter, because I decided to step away from parents and do not communicate with them/ visit them for a while. I feel the worst that I do not listen to their problems, issues and do not soothe them.
“I feel the worst, because I stopped keeping them the centre of MY life and started TO BE the center of MY life. Even though such decision is helping me to stay more at peace and calm, at the same time it is burning at low heat anxiety inside of me and I do not feel at peace at all. I feel as if I murdered somebody but took very good care of hiding the body and evidence… I would really appreciate your thoughts on that feeling. How can I navigate through it in a healthy way. This is a very complicated state of mind, state of being actually…
“I did not have even one person to support me and say that Milda, such parent behavior is not ok, and they are actually manipulating you… I think the biggest change internally started to happen, because by reading book ‘Codependent no more’ interpretations… My (personal) interpretations and gut feeling was silenced by me, silenced by scared, small me, because I had to survive, and listening to those interpretations would not help me survive, so I silenced them. The bloody work now is to give a voice for those interpretations, they still scare me a lot, I still do not know what to do with themâŚ
I replied on Oct 6, 2025: “A child needs the parentâs approval, and when the parent is repeatedly rejecting, shaming and/ or guilt-tripping the child, that natural need for approval becomes a desperate need. It takes center stage, and everything else is put off for another time in the future when approval is finally given. This has been my experience. I put my life on hold for decades, waiting for my motherâs approval, not even knowing that I was still waiting and waiting…
“To reclaim center stage in your life, go back and take the hand of Milda-the-child who is still stuck waiting for that approval and bring her home. Give her a safe place in your heart, to be and to become more and more of who she already is…
“I think that itâs the childâs desperate need for the parentâs approval that puts off everything for a later time, including one own thinking, interpreting and feeling. You know that as an adult, if you are practically able to survive without your parents, their approval is not necessary. Itâs just that the child within you doesnât know it yet..?”
You didn’t answer that questioned and didn’t post again since Oct 5, 2025.
I will continue in the next post.
đ¤ Anita
anitaParticipantI’ll let my thoughts develop, Confused, not in the thought that it may help you, but in the way it has been for me, let the words appear as they will:
I LOVED my mother more than anything, more than anyone. True Love. H.U.G.E.
I saw her as a little girl who needed a mother she never had (hers died young), and crazily, I tried to be her mother, crazy- it never worked. And in that futile futility, I never grew up and she was never re-mothered. She and I were two unanswered children.
Strange how much you can LOVE a person (like I loved her), and none of it reached her, none of it made a difference.
Tears in my eyes right now, that’s emotion, not numbness. And it feels okay, yes. Feels okay to just feel. To feel.
đ¤ Anita
anitaParticipantHey Confused:
As I read your recent post of only 20 minutes ago, this stood out the most: “because at some point in my life someone needed me too much and I resented that.”-
Someone who was supposed to be what you needed- needed you instead.
Makes me think of course, of my mother: how much, how desperately I needed her to be that person of calm, a person- a world I could rest in. But no rest for me.
“I perceive it as pressure and responsibility”- what was supposed to be love and calm was- not at all calm.
“Now I am mostly numb towards everything, even sadness is gone, fear too.”- that’s okay. Be numb as long as you need to be numb. You are a good person, I know it! You are allowed to take a break.
đđ´â¨Anita
anitaParticipantAnd again, just in case you are reading- How are you, Milda?
anitaParticipantHow are you, M?
January 23, 2026 at 7:32 pm in reply to: Understanding someone who's recently divorced and not ready #454479anitaParticipantAlmost 4 months since you posted last, Dafne. I hope đ that you’re okay đ.. and even better than okay.
đ¤ Anita
January 23, 2026 at 7:29 pm in reply to: Should I Forget about him, or was he the one that got away? #454478anitaParticipantHow are you, Emma???
January 23, 2026 at 7:27 pm in reply to: “Giants Of The Nile” Bright Star – South Sudan Basketball Team. #454477anitaParticipantGregory, if you are reading this, how are you?
anitaParticipantHow are you, NYC Artist?
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