Hey Anita,
Wow, 6 years, absolutely it sounds like that would take a while to sort through!

You asked about when I attended therapy, and I’ll say that it was really useful for digging things up and making me realize that there was a connection between my past and my current distress. This was the whole “blame mommy and daddy” phase that everyone goes through and yes, I did have quite a bit of anger there for a while.

Truthfully, it was here that I learned the techniques of mindfulness. When I first attended I didn’t know what it meant to “be in the moment” and it actually took weeks, if not months, of practicing this before I could grab a hold of the concept, if even for just a moment. My therapist taught me breathing exercises and really pushed the concept of yoga on me…one that I was strangely resistant to at first. Of course, yoga helped me connect to myself, my breath, my inner self more than I could have ever expected and through a several week series of heart-opener sequences I quite literally got so much off of my chest. I confronted past transgressions with my parents and afterward we had a strained relationship for months. During my childhood my grandparents and my father had the opportunity to confront my mother about her alcoholism and how it affected everyone. I was too young at the time and as I grew older I learned that her condition could have been so much worse and that I should be grateful that I didn’t grow up with a raging alcoholic. This enlightenment led to avoidance of ever confronting her on how it affected me. After the first few therapy sessions I realized that the childhood I had damaged me (but really, whose didn’t?) and I began dealing with it. I wrote a very long and probably hurtful letter to my mother about how selfish alcoholism is and for a very long time I truly in my heart believed that I must not be loved by my mother because she would continuously “choose” to drink when she knew how much it hurt me. Since then, I’ve learned a great deal about alcoholism, I’ve come to understand it has nothing to do with me and that she was doing the best she knew had with the tools that she had. In response, my mother has made a pact to no longer drink when I’m visiting. Remarkably, this promise has been 100% upheld. As I’ve been learning more about myself, diving deeper into anxiety and what it looks like I’m shocked to see just how terribly, terribly anxious my mom and her mom both are. For years we had a running family joke that my grandmother “was so silly” because “she always worries about worrying too much!” It was a slap in the face when I realized that that’s pretty much the textbook definition of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. By my mother not drinking to cover up her anxiety I realize that she’s an anxious wreck, that she always has been, and she drinks to avoid the pain. (Yes, trust me I know this makes it much worse in the long run. Treat anxiety with alcohol, feel better temporarily, wake up, feel even more anxious, drink earlier, rinse, repeat). My father tries his best and just loves us all so damn much, but he doesn’t have anxiety and doesn’t understand how to cope with it. He coddles her through it and I’m convinced that this “trying to help” has made it all much worse throughout the years. Again, he is just doing the best they know how, but the kicker is that they are resistant to change. My father may not have generalized anxiety, but I definitely recognize a fear of failure that he has and yes, you betcha, I picked up this habit like it was going out of style. My parents are both terrified that they’ll mess something up if they think for themselves, and therefore always await the “instruction manual” before doing anything. Even when they receive detailed instructions for some menial task, they blow it out of proportion until it’s a big, huge deal that they’re super anxious about “ruining.” I think if I pointed this out to my dad, he’d be in disbelief. This is also where I was taught “it’s better to be safe than sorry.” The whole situation is almost comical because my dad has said for years how hard he tried to not be overprotective of his only child, a daughter (and in a lot of ways he succeeded) but I definitely learned the notion that doom and gloom was around every corner. You must have constant vigilance or else die in a horrific car accident with a boy or you better take all the necessities at all times when you leave the house in case you’re stranded. …I’m from a large metropolitan city in the SE USA… This behavior all seems very strange coming from someone that has such a tremendously optimistic outlook on life. It’s hard to wrap my head around sometimes. Again, I think he was just trying his best to show me the dangers of the world without being overbearing? I’m not sure, but I do know it’s taking a long time to prove to myself that the world doesn’t have to be so dangerous. Death is not around every corner and that I can relax and breath without a strict itemized itinerary about, I don’t know, what’s going to happen from the time he walks downstairs to pass my mother the phone during a conversation.

At the end of the day it’s a nice notion to say, “ok I get it. This is where my anxiety came from,” but I think it’s so important that we move past blaming the parents and take responsibility for our mental habits ourselves. This took me a long time to be able to accept.