Dear Caroline,

you are welcome. Sure, take as much time as you need. Be easy on yourself – you don’t have to figure it all out immediately. Maybe some things I’ve said resonate, and others don’t. Take only that what resonates with you. And as anita said, take good care of yourself, practice self-care, lots of compassion and empathy for yourself. Talk to you later!

Dear Caroline,

you are very welcome.

It’s happiness and relief mixed with no hope for the future. I see people who had happy, respectful families and you can see it in their eyes, in their behavior.  I will never have that.

I am sorry that seeing things as they are caused you so much grief. Please do not fall into despair, because there is so much hope for the future, now that you know what the main problem is. You can still build happy, mutually respectful relationships, even if this wasn’t possible in your family of origin. Things can change, you are only 32 years old and an entire life is ahead of you!

I think at some point my mom started being ashamed of me. Not sure why, I think I was a normal child, she had some issues of her own, was not feeling confident, pretty or loved so she naturally thought her child was inferior too. I often felt that, she was afraid I was going to look not pretty, someone would comment on my appearance (I had acne) and she immediately was downcast.

My mom’s family never liked me, my dad or my mom. We use to go there for holidays etc but grandparents or uncles never talked to us, was never interested in asking me anything. They did not like my dad because they thought he was drunk. They just rejected him and us, that’s all what they did.

So this is what I think has happened: your mother never felt loved by her own mother (My mom’s family never liked me, my dad or my mom.) Because of that, she felt ashamed of herself. She transferred that shame onto you, when she became ashamed of you as well. You were a normal, healthy child, but for her, you were a potential source of shame. That’s why she saw your acne as a potential source of shame for her, in front of her family. It’s not just that she felt defective, but she also felt that you – her offspring – was defective and not good enough for her family.

So she exposed you to huge amounts of toxic shame, which you absorbed of course, because that’s what children do. But please note that there was NO REASON for her to be ashamed of you. She was ashamed of you only because she was ashamed of HERSELF. No other reason, there was nothing wrong about you!

Luckily, your father didn’t shame you and even stood up for you a few times, so that helped a little. But not in a major way, since the overwhelming message you received in your childhood is: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

You got this message not only from your mother, both also from your mother’s family, and from your father’s family. And each time you visited, this message was reinforced.

Unfortunately, your mother is still visiting her mother and still taking the shaming and the lesser treatment without saying a word: I see how my mom visits her mother and still plays this game and I don’t like that.

I even told her recently that what happened to me is the result of the family dynamic. But she has her reasons, does not want to argue etc. But I think it still affects me, the fact that she is still doing this.

You see that well – it does affect you, but most importantly, it affected you immensely while you were growing up.

Luckily, there is a way out. In order to counter the toxic message you received in your childhood (that “You should be ashamed of yourself”), you need to start telling yourself: “There is nothing wrong with me. I deserve to be treated with respect!”

Of course, you won’t be able to do it overnight, but start befriending yourself with this new message. You should have heard it in your childhood, but it’s never too late – you can “deprogram” your old programming and start anew!

And thank you for the song by Beth Orton! These verses seem quite pertinent:

Once that I saw how to see
All of your love was looking back at me
It was hard not to full fill the prophecy we’d always been

Once that you see what happened in your childhood, you can start feeling love for yourself, and fulfill the prophecy that you have always been: a beautiful, worthy and deserving human being!

Dear Caroline,

it’s great that you understood, with anita’s help, that he indeed was abusing you, and that you took steps to protect yourself from him in the future. What you wrote about in your last post – all the measures you took not to upset him (feeding your cat before he visited, not greeting a neighbor while he was talking to you, etc) – was basically appeasing a bully.

It’s also called the fawn response (the term was coined by a psychotherapist Pete Walker). It’s the fourth response to trauma, the first three being fight, flight or freeze. You can read about it in the article “The Beginner’s Guide to Trauma Responses” on healthline dot com.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

This response, which he [Pete Walker] termed “fawning”, offers an alternate path to safety. You escape harm, in short, by learning to please the person threatening you and keep them happy.

You might learn to fawn, for example, to please a narcissistically defended parent, or one whose behavior you couldn’t predict.

Giving up your personal boundaries and limits in childhood may have helped minimize abuse, but this response tends to linger into adulthood, where it often drives codependency or people-pleasing tendencies.

It seems to me that you were trying to appease your “friend”, so he wouldn’t criticize you, attack you or bully you. You did it by staying quiet and listening to his hour-long monologues, and doing all the other things you mentioned above.

You say:

Today, after a week since my message to him, and two weeks after his “escalation” I feel weird. Free and happy but also sad that I was abused and did not realize that, I was just trying to survive, walking on eggshells, avoiding asking stupid questions, or doing anything that would piss him off, but it was still not possible entirely to avoid it. … I feel really sad and cheerless.

It’s understandable that realizing how he treated you, and that you endured it for so long, causes sadness and grief. Pete Walker says this about recovery from the fawn response:

“this work involves a considerable amount of grieving. Typically this entails many tears about the loss and pain of being so long without healthy self-interest and self-protective skills. Grieving also tends to unlock healthy anger about a life lived with such a diminished sense of self. This anger can then be worked into recovering a healthy fight-response that is the basis of the instinct of self-protection, of balanced assertiveness, and of the courage that will be needed in the journey of creating relationships based on equality and fairness.”

You say:

Thinking about how to set boundaries in relationships with people so that it won’t happen again. I think it is easier when people are not evil. I will definitely be careful although I know a few nice people and I don’t think they would act this way, I think there is mutual respect there (except for my family but as I mentioned some of them I do not talk to anymore and some of them I meet for the minimum time during the year).

Yes, in your recovery from the fawn response you will need to set up boundaries so that other people cannot abuse you and disrespect you. The best would be not to keep in touch with people who you know will disrespect you and treat you poorly. Best is not to expose yourself to unnecessary humiliation, unless you can stand firm and call out those people on their rude behavior.

Dear Nala,

You are so very welcome. Reading your story, it seems to me there are multiple reasons for your anxiety and self-sabotage.

First, I see a parallel between your blissful, happy, ideal childhood in the first 10 years of your life, and your blissful, perfect relationship with your boyfriend now. Your perfect childhood was suddenly discontinued when your mother got sick with depression, which turned your life upside down. You might subconsciously believe that the blissful relationship with your boyfriend likewise won’t last, and so you start sabotaging it beforehand, expecting its inevitable demise. That’s one possible reason for your anxiety, i.e. self-sabotage.

The reason for your low self-esteem could very well be that you tried to help your mother get better, perhaps ever since you were 10 years old, but nothing really helped – because she “never did anything about it.” When the child tries so hard to make their parent happy, but the parent is still depressed, the child starts blaming themselves and believing that something is wrong with them. That can be at the root of your low self-esteem.

Your mother had a lot of unresolved trauma, but she didn’t do anything to help herself. I assume she didn’t go to therapy and didn’t talk to anyone about it, since it was a taboo in her eyes. Moreover, she told you and your brother not to talk to anyone about it.  You were very affected by your mother’s condition, but you weren’t supposed to show it to anyone that something was bothering you. You were to hide it and pretend that everything is fine (“If there was a problem, I was taught to fix it with my head held high. I was never taught that it was okay to share my life with anyone and it taught me to always have my guard up. It has always made me think I can’t let anyone ever see me weak”).

So you were taught to hide your emotions, hide your weaknesses and insecurities, and pretend that all is fine. But all those negative emotions, fears and insecurities have been stored in your system, and now they are coming out all at once, causing those intrusive thoughts and panic attacks.

It seems to me that years and years of suppressed emotions are now coming to the surface, making you anxious and scared, even wanting to escape back home… But what you would need to do instead is process those emotions, process the fears and the trauma that your mother’s untreated depression has caused you. You won’t be an “anxious mess” if you process those emotions, in the safe environment of therapy. In fact, once you process it, you will be stronger and more balanced, which will greatly reduce the chance of panic attacks.

So this seems to me as the second reason for your anxiety: suppressed negative emotions, which have been a taboo in your mother’s eyes and which you were not allowed to express for many years.

And the third reason for your anxiety, as I see it, is you feeling guilty for not helping your family enough, and feeling responsible for their happiness. Your family has been guilt tripping you – perhaps they are even complaining that you live too far away, so you cannot help them the way they would want you to? And so you sometimes have the urge to get on the plane and leave your whole life with your boyfriend and go back to your parents (“even as I recognize all of the problems I have with my family, I still get homesick and want to be around them. I still feel like they are a safe place for me, especially when I am feeling so anxious”).

You think that by being closer to them you will feel better – because they would love you more (“it makes me feel like if I cannot help them then they will grow to not like me”), and it will ease your anxiety. But their love is conditional: they are guilt-tripping you for not helping them enough, and maybe even for living your life away from them.

Every child wants to be loved by their parents, and so you too, in order to feel loved, you want to please them and help them and make them happy…  but as I said before, you cannot make happy someone who doesn’t want to be happy. You said your mother never did anything to deal with her depression. It seems to me she wants you to help with the consequences of her untreated depression (perhaps finances, help in the household and suchlike?), but she doesn’t want to really help herself – to take responsibility for her depression.

If that’s the case, your help will never be enough. Even if you moved back to your parents and dedicated your life to helping them, I believe it wouldn’t be enough. Your mother would still not be happy, since she chooses to blame others rather than help herself.

So as the third reason for your self-sabotage I see your feeling of guilt and wanting to be loved by your parents, believing that if only you could be a perfect daughter, they would finally love you. So a part of you (the inner child who craves to be loved) would even sacrifice your relationship with your boyfriend in order to please your parents.

OK, I’ll stop here for now… please let me know how you see this and if you feel there is truth in what I said above.

Dear Nala,

I am sorry about the sudden increase in your anxiety and having intrusive thoughts about ending your relationship – which has been a great, supportive and loving relationship – something you don’t want to lose in a million years! It seems to me that these intrusive thoughts are a form of self-sabotage.

You said you’ve always suffered from a mild anxiety and self-esteem issues, and now you are telling yourself: “I will just be an anxious mess, I won’t enjoy anything so might as well just leave now“. There might be a part of you that believes that you aren’t capable of a loving and supportive long-term relationship, because there is something wrong with you. This part may be now sabotaging you.

Or, as anita said, you might believe that all relationships end up badly, based on what you have experienced and/or have been taught in your childhood, and so there is no point in trying.

Or, perhaps your parents had a bad relationship and you feel you would “betray” them by having a good one, and so you self-sabotage out of solidarity for them.

There could be a number of reasons, but I think it would be important to get to the bottom of why you self-sabotage. Is it your own inadequacy and self-esteem issues, or the fear of being different and sort of “betraying” your family?

But most importantly, please calm down, know that it is just one part of you that is sabotaging you, and that you can get to the bottom of the problem and solve it. Trust that you are able to solve the problem and get to the other side successfully!

Dear Dan,

In my last post I said: I can imagine that you felt very alone and frightened during your childhood, having to endure the pain and the trauma on your own, not sharing any of that with your parents.

It occurred to me – and anita already mentioned it – that the pain was probably too much for you to handle (and it would have been for anyone in your situation), and that’s why you disassociated and were not in touch with your feelings. It is very common for victims of abuse to disassociate because it enables them to survive the trauma.

I am not a professional and don’t want to explain things that I know only superficially about, but I think that disassociation is the reason why you don’t really know why you didn’t tell your parents about the abuse. You said you vividly remember the time when the abuse happened when you were 8 or 9 years old. But you still don’t know why you didn’t tell you parents… Which would be a sign that you switched off your feelings and disassociated.

Disassociation is common for victims of abuse, because it helps the person survive the trauma. It’s a self-protection mechanism. You did what you had to do under the circumstances. I guess the circumstances weren’t too good in your family: you said other things happened to you as well, and you are welcome to share about it when you feel ready. There is a reason why the first time you felt validated and appreciated was with your wife. It’s probably because it never happened in your family, with your parents. We can talk about this if you’d like…

I think it would make sense to see a therapist specialized in trauma work, perhaps even someone specialized in childhood sexual abuse, to process the sexual abuse trauma. I unfortunately cannot give you competent advice on that matter. But we can talk about the attachment trauma, i.e. the relationship between you and your parents (which was perhaps different than the relationship between your parents and your brother?)

All that – both the sexual abuse and the poor/inadequate relationship with your parents – could have led to you feeling lack of self-worth (which you mentioned in one of your earlier posts).

I also think that it would be good to practice some self-care – to prepare yourself a healthy meal, or go for a walk, or go to a concert… You said earlier: “I would try to please her while neglecting my own needs“. Is there a need that you have (or a hobby), that you have been neglecting, and that you could return to now?

Dear Dan,

My parents didn’t know about it and I didn’t tell my family until I was 23 years old.

What do you think was the reason for not telling them? There could be plenty of reasons, e.g. your parents were really busy and you didn’t want to burden them with your problems, or they might have been criticizing/strict and you didn’t feel safe to confide in them, or your brother was telling you not to tell anyone…

The fact that you didn’t tell your parents till you were an adult tells me that you either didn’t feel completely safe and secure to share something like that with them, or that you were afraid of your brother (or alternatively, you wanted to protect him), and that’s why you didn’t say anything.

I can imagine that you felt very alone and frightened during your childhood, having to endure the pain and the trauma on your own, not sharing any of that with your parents. There might be even some similarity with your situation with your wife, where you felt very alone and miserable when she couldn’t spend time with you, and yet you didn’t complain, you kept it for yourself and tried to endure. Would you say that some parts of how you felt with your wife (when you felt neglected and rejected) remind you of how you felt during your childhood?

I am sorry you are feeling down these days…and I know how it is to be abandoned and feel inconsolable… But I still think that a lot of that pain is the pain of your inner child. In fact, my guess is that your wife – when she was available and could spend quality time with you – was meeting some of your unmet childhood needs. And I think that’s why you saw her as your source of happiness…  What do you think? Do you think there might be some truth in it?