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Dear humour,

You’re welcome. I am glad that you don’t mind my prodding 🙂

You’ve said that your go-to emotion is usually anxiety:

Since I have a slightly turmoiled background, I don’t understand the so called “normal” stuff. My go to quality is usually anxiety.

I am anxious in situations that does not require me to be.

So, in situations that would require a different reaction, you still react with anxiety, right?

It occurs to me that among those might be situations that would require assertiveness… I am saying this because of what you wrote in 2016 and 2017, which anita kindly put together in a previous post:

I’ve had a challenge with being assertive because I feel that I might ‘hurt’ people. I take the hurt upon myself without speaking out. Once I am assertive, I get all sensitive thinking I hurt the other person (Oct 2016)

I want to be able to take care of myself and be less of a martyr. I am getting frustrated with regrets, things not turning out the way I wanted it to, my efforts not being recognised, me not able to meet my own expectations, people pleasing. I’ve had enough! (January 2017)

You wrote back then that you’ve got a problem with assertiveness, because you believe that if you’re assertive, you will hurt the other person. So you rather don’t speak out…

This might be still happening at the place your work, when your colleagues put you down, and you don’t say anything. Instead of reacting in some way, defending yourself, you rather contract and the only emotion you feel is anxiety?

If so, this anxiety – which is your go-to emotion – became a guardian to your anger. It keeps the anger (which would be a natural reaction) in check.

This anger would tell you what is acceptable and what is not. It would signal that your boundaries have been crossed. But because you don’t want to feel it, you also don’t know what is acceptable and what is not. And as we’ve discussed earlier, this means you also don’t know what is “normal”, what is a normal reaction in a given situation.

Does this seem plausible? That anxiety may be blocking your anger, which would otherwise signal you that your boundaries are somehow being violated or that your desires aren’t respected?

Dear Julia,

I hear you, and I think I understand what happened. Your parents were the type who did the bare minimum in their life. They complained about everything rather than try to change something. They had jobs they didn’t like, did sports they didn’t like (if I understood that part well?). Everything extra, including taking you to extracurricular activities, was too hard for them.

It seems they almost sabotaged both your soccer training and your dance training, because they only took you once, and since it “didn’t work”, they stopped trying. Your mom didn’t inquire where the proper gym is, so you could go next time. She just gave up immediately. She was probably relieved that she doesn’t need to take you there.

It seems that neither of your parents understood how much such activities mean for the child – they just did what was easiest for them, which was to sit at home and not be bothered. It seems they suppressed their own inner child too, because they never discovered their own creativity and joy of life.

Not surprisingly, you adopted some of their behaviors, such as “doing the bare minimum” with your master’s degree:

I am just putting enough effort into it to pass. I don’t work my butt of. I choose easier courses, I just do what is needed. I don’t even try to understand some things. I just gave up.

You are judging yourself for being like that, and I believe you’re also judging your parents for “making you” like that:

I was a clever and creative child and I guess I needed extra input. … It just stings when I think of this missed opportunities and when I think of other children or friends who were encouraged by their parents to follow their passion and were actually helped. I couldn’t even try to find my passion.

Maybe your reasoning goes something like this: “I am irreversibly damaged by the lack of opportunities to develop my talents and follow my passion, therefore I am destined to be a slacker like you [your parents] and live a dull, boring, mediocre life. Because of you, I am destined to be less than I could have become.”

Would you say that this is close to how you think and feel?

If so, the solution would be to stop blaming them, to know that you’re not irreversibly damaged, and that you can still start exploring your talents and your passion. Even if you’re now a mother and have less free time, you can still play with your own creativity.

You can take a dance class, or whatever seems exciting. You can find time for yourself, even if it’s just once a week, to PLAY and have fun exploring your creativity. Your creativity is not lost, it’s just buried a little and needs dusting off. So nothing is irreversibly lost, it’s still in you.

But you’d need to stop blaming your parents and forgive them for being “slackers”. And not expect them to change. Instead, give yourself permission to play and have fun and do the things that they haven’t encouraged you to do. Take yourself to a dance class, and have fun! 🙂

What do you say?

Dear humour,

motivated by anita’s latest reply to you, I would like to ask if you’re okay with me “prodding” and trying to look a bit deeper into what’s bothering you. If you don’t feel comfortable, please say so. If you would like to explore it a bit more, let me know. I will respect whatever you prefer at the moment.

Dear humour,

I am definitely after more happiness, fulfillment, career success and so on but I either don’t know what to do to attain it or I don’t know how much is enough.

OK, let me ask you this: you know when you’re hungry, right? And you know when you’re full, when you don’t need more food in your system? If so, it means that you’re in touch with your physiological needs, such as eating, sleeping, etc.

However, it seems that you’re not in touch with your emotional needs. You are in touch with the needs of others – and you like to help them (I am grateful for my ability to be of help to others). However, you don’t know what YOU yourself need.

For example, do you need a hug, do you need to be talked to nicely, do you need to be seen and heard, do you need to be respected, do you need to be acknowledged…. all those are our core emotional needs. And it seems you have suppressed them in the course of your growing up, because you felt you needed to meet the needs of your family first.

Because the child – a capable, intelligent and strong child – believes that he can help their parents feel better, make them happy, make them less sad, or make them less angry… The child believes he has that kind of power, and so tries to meet his parents’ emotional needs, instead of his own.

In fact, he suppresses his own needs. He says to himself : “I’ll be fine”, “I don’t need much”, “I shouldn’t disturb my mother with my problems, she is so burdened”, “I shouldn’t make my mother any more sad, she is so weak and fragile”. Etc etc.

You see? You focus all your attention on your loved ones, and almost completely disregard your own needs. And it has been going like that for years and years…. The result is that you don’t even know what you need, or what you want.

I am definitely after more happiness, fulfillment, career success and so on but I either don’t know what to do to attain it or I don’t know how much is enough

Before you can actually set some goals for success and fulfillment in either professional or personal arena, you would need to get in touch with your core emotional needs. You would need to turn your attention inwards, rather than outwards.

We can talk about it more, if this resonates…

Dear farnaz,

you’re welcome!

i am stronger now and i prefer to be alone than in bad company

You’re right! Better be alone than get involved with bad people out of desperation.

i have a question for you , how many of people who you needed to forgive for any reason are still in your life ?for me most of them gone for good .

Well, my mother is one such person. She is very critical of me and likes to blame me while refusing any responsibility of her own. As I have been working on myself, I’ve put up some defenses and boundaries, to protect myself from her. About a year ago I complained about a physical pain I had, and she accused me of being a hypochondriac and used the opportunity to send some more criticism my way. So she used my vulnerability and my honest sharing to hurt me. That’s when I decided I’ll never again be vulnerable around her, and I’ll never again expect any empathy from her.

But we do stay in a superficial contact. In fact we rarely speak nowadays because I live in another country, and I mostly speak with my father on the phone. So our contact is minimal but it still exists.

I’ve also forgiven my father, who was her enabler and failed to protect me from my mother’s toxicity. But he hurt me much less than she did…

And I’ve also forgiven a relative of mine, who is a fun person to be around, but sometimes doesn’t care about other people and only cares about her own needs. But I don’t want to lose a friendship with her, so I decided not to expect much from her, but to enjoy her company when we meet once or twice per year.

I actually don’t believe people who were deceitful would stay once you saw through them.

Yes, deceitful people don’t like to be “seen through”. Fortunately I’ve never had experience with deceitful people, only with very critical people (my mother). But in both cases, we need to set boundaries to protect ourselves…

Dear humour,

But I am also proud of the individual I have turned out to be, considering the circumstances that we went through. Basically I did not end up a complete failure or a messed up person.

That’s good – you have a healthy dose of self-love and self-acceptance. You’re not hating yourself, which is great! You have an optimistic outlook too, which is also an asset. So yes, you should be proud of yourself!

But I also feel I have the ego body of a child and not that of an adult.

That’s because there is a child part in you (the so-called inner child), who got emotionally wounded due to his experiences growing up in an unhappy home. This child needs to have his core emotional needs met… before you can have healthy adult relationships.

I am definitely after more happiness, fulfillment, career success and so on but I either don’t know what to do to attain it or I don’t know how much is enough.

Well, what you have now is not enough…. Let me give you an example. You mentioned this situation at work:

I am also trying to get comfortable in uncomfortable situations, especially at work where I am put down subtly.

Should you get comfortable that people put you down (perhaps grow a thicker skin, ignore, numb your anger…), or you should develop assertiveness and boundaries and not allow those put-downs?

If you say you should get more comfortable accepting what you shouldn’t accept – it means one part of you wins (the submissive, enduring part, who believes he doesn’t deserve more).

If you say you should show up differently and respect yourself more and set boundaries so people wouldn’t mistreat you –  that’s when another part of your wins.

That’s the conflict I was talking about….

Dear humour,

I am sorry you feel bad about yourself and that your self-confidence is quite low. I’ve taken a look at some of your earlier threads, and what you wrote about your family and growing up (in the thread “Require advice on how to gracefully accept changes without getting overwhelmed”) could actually explain why you feel so low now.

Anita already noticed back then one important thing that you’ve said:

I have been extremely attached to my family always trying to make ours ‘a happy family. It never happened though. No matter how much I tried, nothing got better.

Also, you haven’t really spent fun time together as a family, making nice memories, or simply bonding with each other:

We have not spent time together, not had a meal together, never went on a vacation together. Basically we never made any memories

You also said that both you, your sister and your mother felt depressed on and off.

It seems to me that your depression could be the result of you trying so hard to make your parents happy, but never succeeding. This causes the child (and later adult) to have low self-esteem, because if nothing they’ve tried made their parents happy, the child concludes that it must be their fault. So you end up believing you’re not good enough, that you are somehow defective.

And you carry this false belief into your adulthood…. As an adult, you have been putting yourself down a lot, right? For example now, you’ve been telling yourself that you are mediocre, that you are falling behind in life, that you should have done a lot better.

It seems you have a strong inner critic, who is telling you that you’re not good enough, maybe even that you’re a failure.

Do you resonate with any of this?

(If you do, the antidote is self-love and self-compassion. It’s possible to feel better!)