Dear Jess:

You shared that your parents were always nice and supportive. About their support of you, you wrote: “They have always provided support but not always the right support for ‘me’. They are their own people, they have their own lives, jobs, my other siblings to take care of”.

Growing up, you felt more connected to your friends than to your parents, you felt understood by your friends. You noticed that you were “less family oriented than a lot of peers” .

I noticed the  quotation marks you placed around “me”, in the context of your parents providing support to you, meaning, as I understand it, that they were supportive of all their children in the same, identical, nice, and superficial way, seeing their children perhaps as  standardized children, and therefore their treatment of you was nice but aloof, and you felt unseen and understood as a person who is more than a surface, or an appearance of a person.

It’s possible that their aloof, impersonal support of you created an acute emptiness and loneliness in you that is responsible to those “emotional/ physical slumps on  regular basis” (in the title of your thread), and motivated you to look for a close, personal support from friends to fill in that emptiness.

anita

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