Dear Girija:

I think I understand your questions. I re-read (again) all your posts in your other threads and in the first 4 pages of this thread. A couple of comments about me: what I learn about life is not from reading books and through formal education, an academic kind of learning. What I learn is an inside-out kind of learning, intentional, persistent, emotional. When I read posts here , I ask myself: how are these things happening in my brain, in my life, and I move my attention from me to others and back.

My childhood was no better than yours and perhaps worse, Girija, and my distress and suffering for decades have been no less and perhaps greater than yours. Regarding functioning, your functioning in life so far has been way more functional than mine has been.

And now, the answer to your questions is in your own words: “it is a pattern. They are all rearing children, not raising them. No one cares about emotional needs. They are all doing what society expects them to do”. This means that many of the people you come across everywhere experienced something similar, having been raised not as emotional beings but as … live-biological tissues that need to be fed, bathed, clothed, woken up in the morning and told to go to work, and so forth.

When you, Girija, look at  others, you see mostly people who function. You feel your own distress, you usually don’t see others’ distress, so you assume they don’t feel distress (and they may not feel it when you see them because they are busy working. Their distress will show later when you are not watching).

Someone watching you is thinking the same: Girija has this well paying job and a degree, oh how fortunate she is!

My next point: most of the people you see and complain about at your work, in the hospital recently, they are not as unloving and as unkind as the people you grew up with in your own home.

In your own home, having lived your whole life with your father, mother and a good part of your life (if not all), with your grandmother, these three adults have been crueler to you than anyone you interacted with outside your home so far. I know this because you shared enough about your life at home, at work and elsewhere.

So what happens is you assume everyone outside your home is bad while reality is they have been better to you, kinder, than your adult family members at home. You close your eyes to how bad they are and you project your father, grandmother and mother into the outside people.

“My mother always took care of us, besides emotional stuff- I thought that was love”. Well, you are an emotional person, and it is not your fault that you are, you were born that way. “people are too strong, harsh even cruel. No one stops to see where another is coming from”- these people are your father, your mother, your grandmother. “I can never get her to listen.. My mom was never ‘supportive’. She never took our side”.

February 2018 you wrote about your work place: “no one has the time to listen. We are assigned a mentor but I guess they are busy too, so it feels like I should be knowing these answers.. My mentor especially liked to be rude and critical and extremely disinterested in guiding me”- none of the adults in your home listened to you, guided you. You wrote that your mother expected you to come up with the answers yourself, didn’t bother to listen and try to help you. (And it was worse at home because a child is more needy than an adult).

As a result of being reared and being treated as if you had no  such thing as emotions (humans are emotional beings more than anything else, by the way), you developed the belief that you are deeply flawed, disappointing, useless, too weak to handle life. You feel shame as a result. Fear preceded and followed these beliefs, intensifying with time. Next you naturally get angry, fight with your mother and feel even worse about yourself as a result, guilty,  and the ball of distress and sickness, so to speak, gets bigger and bigger as it rolls down a muddy hill.

Here are some of your words regarding your belief that you are deeply flawed, a failure, your experience of  shame and guilt: “how can I believe in myself… and accept my flaws. How do you do it? Know you are flawed and that these flaws are visible to anyone easily if they look. How do  I overcome the shame of who  I am.. I know I’ll have no one to blame but myself. That I failed because I didn’t change… I need to change now.. It’s inherently a problem with who I am”.

When you talked to your manager, “the explanation I gave him was to ‘correct his perception’ of me as a person, not as a team member”.

At one point, March 2019, you made some progress: “I actually feel like I’ve made more progress in the last month… I managed to meet a deadline and was even rewarded for it… I’ve learnt to reach out to people outside my own team when I’m stuck on something technical and people are very helpful”- see, some people on the outside are .. nicer than the people in your home.

But your life time core beliefs took over soon after that progress. It takes more than a short term experience (or a youtube video or a book or any quick fix) to change an early  life experience that lasted throughout your Formative Years, the years where so many thousands of connections were formed in the brain.

April 2019 you wrote about the hospital experience: “it made me feel like I was interacting with robots. Is this reality? We don’t care and are just here to get by?”- in your home, yes, this was and is reality. You were treated like a robot, a being without emotions. This is why you “feel very hollow inside”, your emotions were not seen by anyone, ignored, so it feels hollow, empty and painful inside.

“Always felt in any social situation like I shouldn’t be there”- just like in the social situation at home where you were “stuck being down and weak while everyone else bombards me with their expectations”, you didn’t refer to your home life when you wrote this last part I quoted, but it was  your home experience nonetheless.

“I depend on my mother a lot at home- she is the  one that wakes me up everyday. She even checks on me from time to time- go bath, eat now, etc.”- this is not enough for a human child. Would be nice if it was enough, but I  don’t make the rules. It is not enough for adults either, there has to be more than that.

“something needs to change”, you wrote at  one point. “how do you know what to change and what to accept”- accept that you are an emotional being. Accept that you were not treated as an emotional being at home (and still not). Accept that your anger at your mother is understandable and does not make you a bad person, that you always loved her no matter what, even when angry at her. Accept that what you referred to as your laziness and procrastinating, having no passion etc., these are not flaws, these are the results of  your upbringing.

In your post before last you wrote: “People act toward what is in their best interest and I have often been hurt by that… my social anxiety comes from this”- your social anxiety was born at home, that is, in the context of your original and most significant social group- your family. Your parents acted with their best interest in mind, which was to not bother themselves with you.

“I cannot engage with people as I think they will hurt me”- some people outside will hurt you worse than your parents did, such people as human traffickers and murderers. But most people will treat you better than your parents treated you.

Let me repeat that: most people outside will treat you better than your parents treated you.

“I am the shadow of what I am expected to be in all areas of my life”- you are not a satisfactory robot, I agree. And you can’t be.

Might as well be the human that you are- attend to that hollowness inside, that emptiness where your emotions are no matter how ignored all these years. They still need to be seen and heard and attended to.

There is nothing wrong with you. There is no Flaw. There is no badness about you. May you have the courage to endure your fear and distress and do what is right for you.

anita