Hello Anita,

Thanks for checking on me.  I am good! I hope you are well too 🙂 Sorry for late reply, I had language exams to prepare for.

Also, I have been looking into childhood traumas myself, I read Alice Miller’s “The body never lies” and was just trying to dig into my own childhood.

I think I understand better now what you were telling me about “how I felt as a child” by my parent’s actions or inactions and obviously how some of these feelings are now suppressed/repressed or I choose to disassociate myself from them because it is painful to look into, also painful to let of my illusions. I was definitely deluding myself thinking that the fact that my mother hit me when I was a teen was something that I came to terms with. Deluding myself thinking that her authoritarian upbringing is something which didn’t harm me that much. I thought a lot about the source of my anger and rebellious nature. And why this is the reaction I have to most uncomfortable situations/relationships in life. I am sure it was because my parents forced me to be the way they wanted me to be. To behave well, study hard, be a good kid, make them proud,  be clean, etc.etc. I was a very shy, timid and confused kid. They  drilled obedience into me.

Later, as a teen with hormonal changes in my body, I could no longer take these demands and expectations. I refused to eat. For one year, I stopped eating much. As a teen, I was convinced I wanted to lose weight to look better for boys, but now i know the reason why I stopped eating was because I could no longer take being forced to live up to my parents’ expectations and “culture”.  I was trapped and I had no way out.

It is very interesting how these feeling “trapped” is something that followed me throughout my life. Whenever I find myself in difficult situations now, I feel trapped and dying to escape and run away. Just like I felt back then when i was a kid who just wanted to leave her family. So because I had nowhere to go and could no longer accept the fact that nobody understands me or wants to listen to me, all I could do was rebel. This is when my mother starting beating me. When she would try to force feed me food “for my own good” and I wouldn’t eat. She thought by attacking me with a broom and hitting me, I will stop rebelling. She never understood how much I suffered from the lack of understanding, genuine contact and just human respect and what she did was unacceptable or damaged me further. I felt very humiliated and damaged. All I wanted was to escape. And I remember a few times I even ran away from home….

So what I am trying to say, you are right, things were not AT ALL rose-tinted, pretty and loving about my parents as I was presenting it to myself and to everyone else. I was a victim of my parents and their culture and mentality related expectations.

When I did leave my family home at 17 and started living alone, suddenly I was all free, and this seemed like what i always wanted. but i still couldn’t be happy. I was very depressed and sad and I hated myself. I started having serious acne problems. I am pretty sure it was my body showing my self-hatred on my skin. These problems only stopped after I became more or less happy being in a new country and having a new life. but it took 6 years minimum to adapt.

The lack of genuine communication and understanding is also something which I have been seeking my whole life. I am drawn to people who are misunderstood, mistreated and sad, be it artists, poets or just people I meet. I share their pain. And I no longer want to lie to myself that I had a happy childhood.

My teenage years including my first sexual experiences were an absolute disaster as well. The reason being nobody ever talked to me to explain the actual changes my body is going through, nobody explained to me anything and it really frustrated me. I had to obey my “culture and mentality” and be a good girl. i wasn’t even allowed to be seen with any boy at 17, let alone date any. It was absolutely insane, but my parents expected me to be a virgin when i get married. How is this ok? I always knew it was not ok, but I never looked into all the pain and conflict it caused in my psyche and body. Even though, luckily after many years, probably 10 years or so, I was able to break away from this “mentality”, and asserted my own feeling about the subject to my parents,  I still have certain feelings of “shame and guilt” feelings that were drilled into me to everything relating to sex.

I spent a long time adjusting myself in all of my relationships when I was misunderstood out of the fear of abandonment to the point where I no longer knew what it was that I actually wanted. Luckily this has changed. In my current relationship, I have a space to talk about my feelings and thoughts. Even though when I fell in love with the man I am with, I also liked the fact that my mother would approve of him, but I do not love him because of this reason now.

It is also interesting about my OCD, intrusive imagine I had before was violent in nature, and it was usually always the same image. Whoever was sitting very close to me, this image would pop in my head that there was a knife in their throat and they were bleeding. it bothered me very much. But now this image changed. Now I see myself being attacked and feel the actual fear. Either someone pushing me, or strangling me or hitting or killing me.  This is strange, but I feel like these intrusive image change signifies some kind of improvement and means i am approaching my fears closer.

I know these images are just symbols that mean something and I am no longer ashamed of them. I also know for a fact it is related to my childhood fears. Fear is something I am looking into now very deeply. It will probably be a long journey…I realised I have been running away from looking into my fears for a long time. Fear is like sorrow or pain. I am much more familiar with sorrow and pain than fear as I have actually been in life situations where there was no escape and I had to live with physical as well as mental pain. Then I saw it wasn’t as bad as I thought…and it changed me. But fear…i was never ready to face it. Now I am. And I think maybe when I get to the bottom of it, my OCDs might improve too. Unfortunately, at the moment i have to do all work by myself, as the therapy I signed up for is free of charge and i am still on their waitlist. If my therapist can’t help me, I am not too bothered. I know it is extremely difficult to find a reliable and open minded therapist these days who are not the victims to conventional morality and brainwashing themselves.