Dear Reina,

Your father’s overprotective actions come from his own general anxiety. Now, what most parents don’t seem to realize is that the anxiety that they feel when interacting with their children does get transmitted to their children since children tend to tune in to the unvoiced, underlying emotions in their parents. Even if your father doesn’t express his anxiety, it doesn’t mean you can’t feel it. And a child tend to adopt their parent’s anxiety as their own when they see/feel it’s something that is a common part of their parent. After all, you are learning about one part of the world through your parent’s perspective. So couple that anxiety with restricting your movements to which you didn’t care to obey, you get a dynamic that is you wanting to do what any kids would want to do at your age, but doing it behind your father’s back because he didn’t trust you to be responsible for yourself. The thing is, your situation before was ripe with anxiety from your father’s actions to your actions.

Now that the situation has changed and you don’t have to do things behind your father’s back anymore; your anxiety (half generated by your father’s anxiety and half not wanting to get into trouble before) that had colored your situation before your father allowed some freedom of movement, has nowhere to go now. Before, you might have been anxious but you were in a situation that, if your father knew you went behind his back, could get you into trouble. So that anxiety seemed normal, it was normal to be somewhat anxious most of the time. But now you don’t have an outlet for the anxiety anymore. Before, you could be anxious about your father finding out what you did. Now, there’s not much to be anxious about, but you are anxious because you were conditioned to be anxious. Even if your father is lax now, you were conditioned to his overprotective before so you were used to be limited in your actions and the perception that he (might) know things.

In conclusion, you’ve developed anxiety and that anxiety is taking the form of your father watching your movement.