Dear canary,

I would just like to add something regarding emotional neglect: it was unintentional emotional neglect by your mother. There are many well-intentioned parents who still make mistakes and don’t respond properly to the child’s emotional needs. This is what the book “Running on Empty” is about, so you might want to check it out.

Dear canary,

glad you’ve watched Therapy in a Nutshell! There’s a free course on her website, titled “Grounding skills for anxiety, stress and PTSD”. I am just watching it now 🙂

As for books, I can recommend “Running on Empty: Overcome your childhood’s emotional neglect”, by Jonice Webb.

I understand you feeling alone and scared when dealing with anxiety, because it brings you back into childhood when you too felt alone and scared. Do you have anybody who feels like a safe, soothing, calming, wise presence, that you can envision in your mind when your anxiety starts getting stronger? If there is no one in real life, perhaps a spiritual figure (I’ve described the Buddha, I guess 🙂 )

A support group would be great too. Unfortunately I don’t know any support groups for anxiety, but maybe you can look it up.

And keep posting here, if it helps you at least a little bit…

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

Dear Candice88,

I am sorry about your childhood, you suffered a severe trauma. Does your mother suffer from mental illness? Because the things she did to you I believe belong to the category of child abuse.

It’s no wonder that S’ behavior caused such a severe reaction in you. I think it was actually a reaction to your mother’s abuse, only it came delayed. Are you working on your childhood trauma in therapy?

S wasn’t patient enough for that healing process when we were together.

Well, S’ behavior wasn’t fair and would have caused anxiety, or at least upset, in someone less traumatized too. So don’t blame yourself – he didn’t respect you or your plea to text you when he gets home – which wasn’t too much to ask.

Regarding what to do now: I got the feeling that one of your main concerns is that you’re forever ruined (by S) and that it’s not fair, because had S been “enlightened” as he is now, it wouldn’t have happened and you could have lived a more or less normal life, without your childhood trauma being reactivated. And now, you have to “stay ruined” because S isn’t available any more, and you’re stuck with your wound (“bullet”)  for the rest of your life. Is that your reasoning approximately?

What I would like to say is that 1) your childhood trauma was a ticking bomb – it was to get triggered sooner or later. Even if S were an angel, there would have been other life events that would have triggered it. You couldn’t have prevented it from happening. 2) you’re not ruined for life – there’s treatment for childhood trauma and PTSD, 3) you cannot be truly happy with S or M (or anybody else) until you heal your childhood trauma. If you were to get together with S, you’d still need to work on your trauma, before you can really be “whole and healed”. The bullet is still in you, and S cannot take it out. Only you can, with the help of a professional.

How does this sound to you?

Dear canary,

Yes. When I was having rough days with my depression and anxiety, I felt alone and helpless. Although I told my mother everything, she would support me and give me advice and understand my pain but it still felt lonely.

Right… she supported you in the sense that she didn’t condemn you for your anxiety, she didn’t blame you, yell at you, shame  you, etc – which is great. But she also didn’t really help you – she let you skip school instead of talking to the teacher for example. As a result of confiding in her, you didn’t feel much better, and you weren’t better equipped to deal with your anxiety next time it happened. That’s why you felt alone and helpless… you were alone against the enemy called anxiety and nobody could help you. That’s pretty traumatic for a child…

But there are ways to repair the damage, so to speak. You can now create that safe container for yourself, and learn how to calm yourself down. There are many free videos on youtube on reducing stress and anxiety. I specially like the “Therapy in a Nutshell” channel – you may check it out if you’d like.

These are my suggestions for now – let me know what you think and how you feel about the things we’ve spoken about (possible causes of your anxiety) and possible help too…

Dear Felix,

I think i’ll start with creating a positive image and trying physical exercise in my housing complex that i mentioned before.

Good, let me know how it is going!

And do u think i’ve had this hobby of laying lazy in my room due to my parents keep relieving me from duties?

Yes, I think it’s related because if your parents believe that you’re rather incapable and have low expectations of you, you will lack motivation to do anything. You’ll adopt that same negative image of yourself and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I also believed that my self confidence issue isnt only caused my parents, but also rather due to the opinion of most girls in my highschool days… like their “criteria” on boys (which is taller than them, etc)… i always keep their opinion in mind…

Yes, we as teens are very much affected by the opinion of our peers, and very much want to be liked by them. But someone who has a healthier base from childhood won’t be so strongly affected by their peers, and their self-confidence won’t be crushed if their peers don’t like them. But if our confidence is low to begin with, the rejection by peers will be a horrible blow to our self-esteem, and it might even push us into depression. So the base of self-confidence that we receive in childhood is super important…

As for those questions that I’ve asked you pretty early into our conversation, you’ve answered them already. Your family situation is clearer, and it’s more or less clear how the core wound was formed. It all boils down to developing more self-esteem, and you can do that by applying those 3 principles from my previous post.

Dear Felix,

I understand that you want to feel liked by others, and you believe that in order to be liked by others, you need to do what everybody else is doing. The truth is that you cannot feel liked by others unless you first like yourself. Because if there’s a hole within, it’s like a bottomless pit – no amount of attention and praise will be enough. And even if you get positive attention and praise, you’ll question whether it’s true, whether people are sincere or they are just faking that they like you.

You see what I mean? Without that internal security and self-confidence, there’s really no outer “proof” that can satisfy you. Without it, you will always question yourself and other people’s intentions – even if they are sincere… I believe you realize that, because you are quick to question everything and always find a potential problem, even in harmless situations.

So the solution to your problem is not to find external approval – because you won’t believe it anyway! The solution is to develop internal approval – which means to like yourself and love yourself.

The solution is not to become extrovert, if you’re an introvert. The solution is not to talk about superficial things, if you prefer deeper topics and talking about emotions. The solution is not to become someone else, but to be yourself, with confidence.

I know it’s hard for you to be yourself with confidence, because you haven’t received enough stimulus from your parents. Your father was emotionally closed off, never smiled, workaholic, focused only on his work and duties, didn’t know how to have fun. And your mother was constantly worrying about you and your growth and development. She treated you as if there was something wrong with you, she worried about you and doubted that you can be a successful and thriving adult.

You grew up in such an atmosphere. You didn’t receive positive attention, but negative attention from your mother. She might have been “supportive”, as in helping a disabled child and relieving you from all duties – but you were not disabled! She didn’t have faith in you, and you don’t have faith in yourself either.

And probably she’s still the same, she probably still sees you as weak, fragile and incapable of life. She still sees you as her “disabled” child.

You need to change that image about yourself. You’re not disabled, you’re not incapable, you’re not less than others. My advice is to 1) adopt a positive self-image (use mantras, affirmations, love your inner child, have faith in him, etc), 2) do things that will give you a sense of accomplishment (to counter the idea that you’re weak and incapable), 3) do physical exercise to reduce mental chatter and produce good chemicals in your brain, such as dopamine.

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

Dear canary,

I am the youngest and my parents decided that when I was born they would parent me better and I was the closest to my mother. My siblings grew up afraid because my father was strict and would yell a lot. My father didn’t yell at me as much but I learned to stand up for myself because of it.

I see. Well, it seems that their parenting better meant less emotional abuse (e.g. less yelling by your father), but not enough emotional support – resulting in emotional neglect. Emotional neglect is almost as equally damaging to the child. Of course, you weren’t completely neglected, you say you were close to your mom and were given the most attention out of your siblings. But your mother lacked certain key skills and wasn’t aware of the importance of child’s emotional health, and she didn’t react properly to your anxiety.

As far as your father, it’s good that he didn’t yell at you – probably that’s why you managed to stand up to that girl in the 6th grade, and tell her that she was rude (even though your mother advised you to ignore her, i.e. not to speak to her). But then, after expressing yourself, you ran away and cried – because it was a very stressful experience, you felt alone, and I guess there was nobody to soothe you afterwards.

You say you felt close to your mom. But I wonder if in situations like this, you still felt alone and helpless?