Dear Candice88,

you’re very welcome, I am glad you find it helpful.

About M, you said:

I’m trying to do things for myself that are also preparing me for the mess with M that I am returning home to in a few days.

What is the mess with M you’re expecting when you return home? Is it related to you moving out? What reaction are you expecting from him?

Dear Annie,

your sister does seem very spoiled, and your parents enable it. They have zero expectations from her, they let her do whatever she wants and accommodate to her whims, whereas they have all those expectations from you. There are unfortunately parents who treat their children differently, and yours seem to be like that.

I don’t know what the reason is: it could be because your sister is much younger, or perhaps her health was fragile when she was a child and that’s why they were worried about her and spared her from duties (?), and/or because of her character where she’s rather selfish and self-centered, and doesn’t care if she causes trouble to her parents. Whatever the cause is, they do seem to treat the two of you differently.

I know I keep pushing back on resuming the course, but I just feel like I have no time or energy to do it lately. I feel so mentally tired a lot lately just from work that I literally just feel like doing nothing.

It tends to be a vicious circle because sometimes we can’t say No to other people’s requirements to even start caring about ourselves. And so our exhaustion and burnout deepens… How is it at your workplace? Do you feel overburdened there too?

I know I will move out eventually in the future.

Yes, that would be really important. Do you have a vision of when this might become possible and under what circumstances?

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Tee.

Dear Dave,

good to hear from you! I am glad things are moving along fine with your separation and moving into a place of your own.

I find myself a little anxious sometimes, but I am patient with myself, as I’m sure it’s normal with all these changes going on at the same time.

Yes, it’s normal to feel this way. This is a big change for you, and there’s a part of us that doesn’t like changes, even if remaining in the status quo is painful, like it was for you. Stepping into something new for many people brings anxiety (at least for me, big time 🙂 ), so this is just something to endure for a while, until the move actually happens.

It’s good you’re finding ways to soothe and calm yourself, despite the disquiet that you’re currently feeling. Keep it up for a few more days, and then see how things are once your ex actually moves out. Post here anytime you need…. I am rooting for you!

Dear Candice88,

thanks for sharing some more. It’s good you have a supportive and understanding father. Did he know about your mother’s abuse while he was deployed? You said you moved to your father’s place when you were 17 – I guess this means your parents divorced at some point?

I am sorry this all happened to you, Candice. How are you feeling now? When you first wrote you said you can’t stop crying about S…  how is it now?

Dear Felix,

Is this me overanalyzing?

Yes, it is. You’re much more active in your brain, your thinking, than your physical body. Your mind is racing 100 miles per hour, while you’re sitting still in your chair in your room. If you want progress with your self-esteem, you’ll need to force yourself to get up and do something…

I’m still on progress on creating a positive image for myself and also for the exercise.

Let me know how it is gong, once you start with your exercises…

Dear kim,

I am sorry you’re now realizing your sons might not respect you as much as you hoped they would. Perhaps you’re thinking something like: I sacrificed myself for them, stayed in an emotionally abusive marriage for years, and “kept peace”, and this is their thank you??

Unfortunately, when you tried to “keep peace”, you probably didn’t respect yourself enough, you allowed yourself to be put down, you endured emotional abuse rather than standing up for yourself – and your sons noticed it. Your sons saw their mother not respecting herself, and they started to treat her like that too. On top of that, their father spoke badly about you behind your back, and they absorbed that too.

You thought that by keeping your mouth shut and enduring, you’ll protect them. But in fact, you gave them a bad example of how to treat a woman, and they carried that forward into their relationships.

What you’d need to do is start respecting yourself. You need to heal those emotional wounds inflicted upon you (which maybe go back to your childhood, where you learned that a woman should sacrifice herself for the sake of the family?), learn to love and respect yourself and stand up for yourself. I believe that only then will you see their attitude change.

Dear Candice88,

you’re welcome.  It’s good you realize you need to protect yourself from your mother until she is refusing to take responsibility for her actions.

Regarding you taking on a mother role with M, perhaps it’s not really surprising, because you did say you need to parent your mother too:

We have a better relationship now, but I still feel like I have to parent her.

You also said you had an adult-adult relationship with S, before he cheated. In psychology, there is a term called character structures. Steven Kessler wrote a wonderful book about it, called “The Five Personality Patterns”. There is one personality pattern, called the “compensated merging pattern”, in which the child doesn’t receive the necessary love and nurturance (like it happened in your case), but then builds herself up and becomes a care-taker to their parent, so that she can still be in a relationship with the parent, and feel loved and needed. So the child doesn’t collapse but finds strength in this care-taker persona.

But it’s a persona, it covers up the original trauma. The person can live relatively normally with this persona far into their adulthood. But when something happens, some triggering event, this persona is shattered and the person reverts to their old traumatized child self.

I believe this is what might have happened to you. You might have been coping quite fine in your youth, you said you even had a job in a diner at 15, which means you were quite resourceful – despite your trauma. You might have functioned like an adult, perhaps even with a touch of this care-taker persona. This is how you entered the relationship with S. And then it all came crashing down when he cheated on you.

Do you feel this is what might have happened?

Dear Peace,

No.they wont be able to stop me financially as i work part time and manage my expenses myself . so i dont need to ask them

That’s great! You’re in a good position, you cannot be blackmailed. You can basically live and arrange your life as you wish, independent of their requirements.

the worst that can happen is that they can get angry ,upset and very disappointed ..As they would think i ruined the family name etc because they scared “what will people say”?

So you might be seen as a rebel, “ungrateful” daughter (at least in the beginning, till they get used to it)? How much does it disturb you? Perhaps it would help you to be aware that there is a part of you that wants to be a “good daughter”, who makes her family happy (a part that wants to be loved and accepted by your family). And there is another part, who wants to live her life freely and be happy with the person she loves.

If you want to please your family, you need to sacrifice yourself and choose an unhappy life. If you want to choose your own happiness, you need to accept that you will cause some (although lesser) unhappiness to your family. So basically it’s your own deep, personal, day-in day-out lived happiness (as anita said) vs your family’s superficial and fleeting feeling of satisfaction because you did what they deem right. If you choose what your family wants, your life will be drastically worse. If you choose what you want, the life of your family won’t be drastically worse, in fact it won’t be worse at all. They might complain, but in all honesty, their life will be the same.

Perhaps this helps you decide…