Dear Ashmitha,

I wrote my previous post before seeing your last post. Now it’s even clearer to me that in such circumstances, where you needed to protect your mother from your father physically attacking her and threatening with knives – that there was no way you would want to express your own neediness. You needed to be strong and resilient for your mother, who was weak and afraid. That makes it quite difficult for you to now express any neediness or vulnerability.