Hello Anita,

I have been thinking about your comment a lot and that is why its taken so long to respond.

No I don’t think it is helping me to keep all those feelings bottled up under the surface. I think it generates a lot of self-loathing because I kind of beat myself up and ask myself ‘why haven’t I ever just said what I really think?’ It makes me feel weak because I never found a way to express those feelings. But the problem is that this pattern of swallowing down negative emotions is such a big part of my personality and my way of being that it is hard to isolate it to just one relationship. I think it kind of permeates my whole life. Until very recently I wasn’t even able to identify those feelings as ultimately stemming from feelings of anger. It’s like anger was so impossible for me to feel that I couldn’t even identify that feeling, let alone the way it became subjugated into resentment when it went underground and unexpressed.

Somehow I learnt some extremely unhealthy coping patterns in my family home and I have never really been able to identify them until now. I think that underlying all of this subjugation of feelings is fear. I felt that expressing real feelings would lead to anger from my father and so I learnt to hide them and in fact I prided myself on my ability to maintain a calm exterior and not be ruffled by his emotional outbursts. But now I realise that I have paid an extremely high price for that coping strategy – I don’t know how to express myself fully and honestly and for sure that was a major part of my long-term relationship breaking down. I became a people pleaser through fear of expressing myself fully in my own family. It gets to the point where I don’t know what I feel or what I want.

So, I am in this position where I have identified the problem and I know where it comes from and how if affects my life, but I really don’t know how to move forward from this point. Do I deal with these issues in my own life first and gain confidence in expressing myself in different ways, or do I directly express myself to my family of origin and hope that that will somehow be a catalyst for change in my own life? I really need a clear roadmap and direction to deal with this that I can follow step by step.

Thanks for the replies.

To RebirthandRestart2018 I think you made some really useful insights. No I didn’t really challenge either of them at the time. I have this tendency to always pause before I respond or react to things. I think this is something I learnt growing up in a home with a parent who had a very volatile temper. I think this is a defensive strategy that I have learnt and it worked in my family home because I found the ways to sort of go ‘neutral’ or blank to avoid giving rise to further confrontation and emotional outbursts. Obviously, this strategy is probably not serving me well now as an adult because I know I tend to go into emotionally blank states and also don’t speak up when I don’t like things because I fear expressing strong emotions. So, I think this may be another side effect of this defensive strategy is that I allow things to ‘slide’. People can say fairly confrontational or even hurtful things to me and I will never react to them with my true feelings at the time. I always want to give myself a bit of ‘time’ to process their words and see how I feel about it. But I think that it also leads me to de facto accepting things that people say or at least not challenging them and I guess this is really just acquiescing to whatever their interpretation. I think later I realise I didn’t like something or I should have challenged it but it is kind of too late and instead of those being expressed at the time, the feelings I had transform into a quiet resentment. I guess I am the classic passive aggressive people pleaser.

So I am starting to see how not being able to express my real emotions in an appropriate way at the appropriate time allows other people to sort of project their own interpretations of my situations onto me. Even though I may not accept them, if they were not challenged at the time they can become the de facto interpretation and it leaves me feeling quite disempowered and uncomfortable because all the emotions are sort of boiling under the surface. I have also mentioned these things on other threads in relation to expressing anger.

I have never really thought about boundaries being a reflection of your values. I have thought about my own values in terms of politics and society, but I don’t think I have ever thought about my own values in interpersonal relationships. I think I have always felt so grateful to have a friend or a partner that I kind of didn’t worry too much about whether the relationships were always matching my values or serving me. I remember a few months ago I did a yoga retreat and there was a truth telling session and we were asked to say what are the things that we will not accept in a relationship and I was the only one that couldn’t answer. I had just never thought about it. So I guess I still have a ways to go in considering what I want and need from my relationships.

To Anita, I also found your comments useful. I like the concept of how people have their own narratives about you and that maybe your own narrative actually disturbs their narrative of you. But actually your life should be your own narrative and the other person should be able to listen wholeheartedly. I think that this was definitely a problem in my previous relationship. Somehow I never really felt heard or understood. I often felt that when I was trying to share how I felt about something, especially if they were negative feelings, then I would get stonewalled. It’s like he just couldn’t relate or somehow those negative feelings were a reflection of my own failures as a person rather than maybe a basic human response to a stressful situation. So, this caused a lot of problems in our relationship. As I am a person who tends to swallow my emotions rather than express them, I often had things bottled up for possibly months at a time before I would try to express them to him and then when I did I tended to get a fairly non-responsive reaction. I felt that he had his own understanding of what was happening but wouldn’t let me know about them and instead would just go silent. So we really had incompatible communication styles, especially in relation to emotions.

Thanks for the comments and the article.

Through this thread I have been able to gain a big insight into one of my major stumbling blocks in life. I have realised that this fear of ‘dissolving’ into other people because I didn’t learn healthy boundaries growing up has actually hindered me from really opening up to other people. I often have a great deal of anxiety related to how I should interact with other people and the extent to which I allow others into my life. This anxiety can also cross the line into obsessive thinking. I have now realised that the major trigger for this kind of anxiety and obsessive thinking is when I need to negotiate the boundaries of a relationship, whether that be a friendship, work relationship or intimate relationship. And at the bottom of it is my fear that I will not be able to assert my own boundaries with people. So the easiest thing is to just avoid opening up to others. But constantly pushing people away only leads to unhappiness.

Anita, you said that you hoped that I could exit the triangle that I was in. What I am starting to realise is that exiting the unhealthy patterns does not need to be through solving those problems for my parents and ‘fixing’ them but through understanding how those patterns re-emerge in my own life and finding ways of creating new patterns in my own relationships. That is probably easier said than done, but at least I have some major insights to help me on my way.

Thanks for all the posts on this thread, I really value these contributions.

Thanks for the very interesting responses again.

To VJ – that is some very good advice. I have looked at your link and I will definitely try to consider those before I speak. I have noticed that I definitely tend to want to find a way to connect with anyone that I am speaking to and I suppose sometimes I lose my sense of purpose for what I am saying and just say something (anything?) to connect with the person I am speaking to at that time. Also, I think I will look more deeper at Rumi’s writing, I have heard the name many times but haven’t read much yet.

To Anita –  I think you have revealed something to me which has probably been hidden from view. I think it is very difficult to acknowledge that you have anger or resentment towards someone that you love, especially when you have sort of given that person a privileged position vis a vis my father. I think I have to finally admit to myself that both my parents were involved in unhealthy relationship dynamics and that neither of them had the strength to call quits on the relationship completely or on the other hand to speak openly and honestly to me and my siblings about what was really going on with them. We witnessed the breakdown of their marriage and then were expected to watch them ‘get back together’ in a kind of ‘backdoor’ way (that is after several years of not living full time in the family home, my dad just kind of started living there again) but without actually being given any explanation about why they were getting back together and whether we as the kids had any opinion or say over how the new relationships were supposed to be negotiated. My dad came back and sort of wanted to ‘assert’ his right to being an authority figure in the home after having abdicated that for several years and we were supposed to just accept all of these things without question. But you can’t erase your own memories and you can’t stop your own questioning of what is happening. But all of those things get pushed inwards and I guess that means there is anger or resentment there. But because I still needed the love and support of my mother (rejecting that also would have been too painful) I deflected my anger away from her and focused it all on my dad. In my mind my dad was the ‘perpetrator’ and my mum was the ‘victim’. But at the end of the day she should have taken responsibility for her own part in the mess.

Hi Anita,

Thanks for your reply and your detective work!

Yes I guess that sounds quite inconsistent. I think what happened in my family is that I kind of decided at some point that there was a ‘good’ parent (my mum) and a ‘bad’ parent (my dad). This is because my dad was very critical and quick to anger and also tended to try to ‘defeat’ others in intellectual debates rather than listening and responding calmly to others opinions. I can’t really say that she stuck up for me that effectively, at least not in the past. I think she always felt quite intimidated by my dad too so wasn’t really able to defend us against his anger and criticism. I suppose I feel that I developed an extremely defensive relationship with my dad while I had almost no ‘defences’ with my mum possibly to the point of not having any healthy boundaries either.

I guess another element which may help to make sense of this, is that I would often engage in long discussions about other people in my family with my mum (about my dad, my sister or brother). So as well as kind of compulsively sharing every aspect of my life with my mum, without thinking whether it was really an appropriate thing to share, I would also discuss other family members problems with her. I stopped that pattern last year but I guess I hadn’t realised there might be anything fundamentally ‘wrong’ with my relationship with my mother. And that has meant that I haven’t been able to identify the cause of some of my own behaviours that have turned out not to be particularly constructive. While my relationship with both parents has definitely changed and matured over the years, I think on some level I still held onto this idea of a good and bad parent. That is why when I have a crisis I immediately turn to my mum and don’t really talk to my dad much.

I guess what I am now wondering is whether that experience of sort of having no boundaries is actually the experience of unconditional love that I may have thought it was. I think it has kind of laid a foundation of being a bit dependent on others for that level of emotional support and sometimes others just can’t give it to you or you actually need to find some emotional resilience within yourself.

Does that make sense?