Dear Aum:

“he definitely has trouble saying ‘no’ to the people he loves”- he has trouble saying No to the people  he loves and fears, both.

“he always tries to make everyone happy by giving them what they want”- so that they approve of him, and pleased, they will not hurt him.

“He hates letting people down, particularly his mother and father”- because how they reacted when they felt let  down by him: they hurt him during those times with their words, their tone of voice, their facial expressions of disapproval and condemnation, and maybe with their physical force.

“he hates the idea of them or anyone he loves thinking of him as a failure”- he hates to be hurt by the people he loves and fears, because that’s what happened when his parents .. caught him failing. They punished him, they hurt him.

“he always tries to make everyone happy by giving them what they want, while simultaneously trying to find a way to make himself happy and it never works out”- if he could give you what you want from him, which is that he reveals to you his true feelings, that he gives you the whole glacier, not just the tip  of the iceberg (“He’d always give me the tip of the iceberg, not the whole glacier”), he would have.

He can’t give you what you want. He is unable. Think of things that you are unable to do that some other people are able to do. If you do so, you will put yourself in his shoes and understand more thoroughly how it really is impossible for him to give you what you want, no matter how much he loves you.

The reason it is impossible for him is that he is still afraid, just like he was afraid as a child. Fear is more powerful than love. Think of this: a lioness and her cub in nature are having what appears to be affectionate time with each other. But the moment the lioness hears a gunshot close by, the affection is gone and fear takes over: she doesn’t continue to play with her cub, she attends to the danger.

We are often baffled by why can’t other people change in matters that we don’t struggle with. But if we look inward, we will find ways we ourselves can’t change, ways that some  other people don’t struggle with. In your situation: you don’t struggle  with expressing to him how you feel. On the other hand, there probably is something that you struggle with that is not a struggle for him.

He can’t give you the whole glacier because the whole glacier is .. well, frozen solid. His glacier is not a subject to his choice or to anyone’s demands that it melts. “He says he wants to change, but he can’t”- he would like the glacier to melt but he has no idea how to make  it happen. When you pressure him to talk about his feelings, you are just adding ice to his glacier.

“maybe it was the way he was raised, maybe because he’s the eldest son and there’s a lot of pressure on him”- what is certain is that pressure doesn’t melt the iceberg. Pressure caused the iceberg to form at an early age.

I will stop here for now. If you would  like to, let me know further what you think.

anita

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