Dear Sam:

After I read your recent post, I re-read your posts in your previous thread and in this one, shining the light of the  new information into the older posts:

The key sentence for me is the following, regarding your father: “He is very controlling, judgmental and has repressed us a lot, tho of  course he is also very loving in his own way.”

Of your two parents he was always the powerful one, and children gravitate toward the powerful parent, wanting the love of the powerful parent. Your father’s love was your motivation: what you needed and desired.

He wanted you to be thin and physically fit, and you accommodated him to the best of your ability, still do: “never truly feel good in my skin unless I am exercising a lot and am crazy fit”. He wanted you to not have an opinion he did not agree with, so you hid any such opinion. He didn’t want you to want something he didn’t approve of, so you hid any such wants. He cared a lot about perfect appearances, so you accommodated him best you were able, pretending to be and feel perfectly, hiding what is imperfect. He “wanted absolute loyalty and obedience”, and you gave him that.

Your brothers “completely show.. who  they are and my father hates them for it”. You don’t want your father to hate you, so you hide yourself from your father.

The way you operated with your father is the way you operate with men:

– You gave your ex boyfriend the obedience that your father demanded: “I have given him the impression that he has a lot of control to make the decisions”.

– You gave your ex boyfriend the perfection that your father demanded (pretending to be and feel perfectly, and give up/ hide what is imperfect): “he is very happy in the relationship and says I am the best girlfriend he has had… I feel I have cheated him by pretending to be so okay with everything all this time.. agreeing so often to giving up things I find important in a relationship”.

* With your father, you felt that if you became independent, if you showed him what you think and feel (with which he would disagree), you will betray the obedience and loyalty that he demanded, and that will hurt his feelings terribly. Hurting your father terribly would make you a terrible little person.

This fear that you will hurt your father terribly and be a bad, guilty person for it spilled into your exaggerated fear and guilt regarding hurting your ex boyfriend: “the fear of hurting him so so badly… I feel like a horrible person for hurting him… He does not have much of a support system and that worries me.. I see him suffering as he can see I have distanced myself.. last night I told him that I worry about him”.

I am assuming your ex boyfriend is as okay (or as not okay) now without you in his life as he was when you were in his life. And I think that your father will be just as he is now, if you no longer obey him:  he will not collapse.

A child confuses her feelings with her parent’s- it is she who needs the parents terribly, she who feels so terribly hurt when her parent rejects her, but she imagines that it is the parent who needs her terribly, and that the parent will feel so terribly hurt if she, the child, rejects her parent.

“how to just let that go of what made me this way and focus on the future and who I want to be. Try to really see myself for who I am without the pretending”- it will take you believing that your father will survive and be just as he is now after you no longer obey him and dare to be you. If you believe this, no longer feeling like a bad person to choose to be you, you will be able to start the process of becoming who you already are inside, showing what you’ve been hiding for so long.

* I think that your intense fear of hurting your father terribly is expressed here: “I have tried to break up before but I just haven’t been able to utter the words, it literally feels like they are stuck in my throat! Like when you scream in a dream but no noise comes out of your mouth”.

anita

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