Dear surfthesky:

You are welcome. You shared that you were raised mostly by your  grandparents while your very young mother attended university. Your biological father left shortly after you were born, and your step father entered your life when you were 4. You moved a lot and lived in 3 countries. Your mother and step father “weren’t really interested in talking.. or just spending time” with you, they criticized you a lot and they were “very demanding, very strict”. There was fighting within the family, “fighting a lot in a very bad manner”. You have 2 younger siblings, one with ADHD,

You (21 next month) are now living away from your parents and siblings, in a bigger city. You haven’t talked to your parents for a while, wanting “time to figure things out without their presence” in your life, “But the need to satisfy them, to show them that I am time-worthy is definitely existing”-

– My thoughts today: when you were a child, your parents didn’t care to spend their time with you in positive, loving ways (putting the attention and effort required to get to know you and to show you empathy and affection). As a result, you felt hurt and figured that your parents thought that you were not good enough for their attention.  You tried in all the small, child-ways that were available to you, to become good enough for them, but they did not notice or appreciate your efforts. Instead, they criticized you and demanding more and more from you.

Currently, as you consider what to study and do in life, you “keep searching for the ‘perfect thing’,  because each thing you tried so far in life to be good enough for your parents was imperfect/ failed. You want to be “super successful” because all your smaller successes so far in life failed to get your parents to value you as good enough.

The topic of your thread is “How to find yourself?”- first thing to do is to grieve the fact that you did not receive your parents’ loving attention. Second, to understand that the reason for that has never been that you were not good enough/ worthy of their love. It will take time and work to fully and thoroughly understand it emotionally, beyond rationally, but when you do, your motivations in university and in life will change, and surfing the sky with a new motivation, you will no longer feel lost.

anita