Dear Anita,

to explain it a bit further: My dad works all day from 5/6 am until around 10 pm. He always used to say that lazy people are awful (of course in a nicer way but that was the content behind it).

When we were on holidays he worked in a different way: Our holidays growing up consisted of rebuilding a house in another place of my country, he used to get up at 6 am and then start working around the house. He said things like “Of course you can sleep in, but your mom won´t help me so I´ll do have to do it all by myself then and that would be very hard”. My sister and I woke up because of the noise and just couldn´t go on sleeping knowing he would want us to help.

I didn´t feel like I had a choice. He always said “If you don´t want to help then I´ll do it alone” but then he´d get irritated and sad working alone. As if I had let him down.

So noone really said to me “You are guilty if..”, it just always felt that way. Like I let him down if I don´t do what he wants. I was so angry when I was still living with my parents, because I felt like my needs were not respected at all, my dad did as he wanted to and would then be sad if we didn´t want the same things.

About the opinion thing – my dad has strong opinions on many things and is in my eyes a very intelligent man. So I looked up to him as a child but later in my teenage years I started to question the things he sad. He´d then get very angry and look at me as if I had done something very wrong. I felt awful knowing he was mad at me so I pretended for a long time to always being of his opinion. Then I´d get to see his sparkling eyes and him happy.