Dear canary,

Thank you for speaking with me, I appreciate everyone that has commented. I feel much better and at peace after speaking and being honest

You are welcome, and I am glad you are feeling better now. And that you see that you are enough and don’t need others to validate you:

I realize that whenever I feel inadequate, I need to bring the attention back towards myself. I need reminders of who I am and what my strengths are. I don’t need others to validate me and agree with me.

And also, that you don’t need to take advice from people who are harsh and criticizing:

I know that the only opinion and advice that I should take is from those I look up to. Someone who I look up to will never criticize me in a hard way because they are loving and gentle.

These are all important realizations!

In this last post of yours it also transpired that your father was rather a bully in the family, whom everyone feared, including your mother. You perhaps received less of his yelling and open aggression than your siblings, but still you grew up afraid and hiding your anxiety and your school problems from him, because you were afraid of his anger (My father would never see me cry, only my mother would. I didn’t speak to my father about my anxiety as a child, so he didn’t know what I was dealing with. I was too afraid to ask him for permission to remove my facial hair because I assumed he would get angry and say no, so I never did.).

Your mother was afraid of his anger too:

She did not agree, she was willing to let me remove my facial and body hair but she was afraid to speak to my father about it because he would become angry.

She was afraid of him, he thought he knew better how to raise children, and she didn’t dare to say anything.

I wouldn’t say my dad lacks empathy, he is very emotional and loving but he was just blinded by his own mindset at the time.

Well, he certainly wasn’t emotional and loving when you were a child, since he kept you all in fear. Your mother didn’t dare to mention that you have problems at school and that you were being bullied. Neither you or your mother dared to say anything to him, lest he explodes in anger. Your siblings were terrified of him, even more than you were, because he yelled at them much more.

So you grew up with a bully father, and I believe you’d need to acknowledge it. Even if he has changed since, he did inflict a wound, and I believe his behavior contributed to your anxiety. Because if you needed to hide your fears, if you couldn’t speak openly about your feelings and about being bullied, no wonder this would exacerbate your anxiety and your sense of helplessness. If you were told to be strong and not a crybaby, while this terrifying man is looming over you – how else would you react? And you knew that your mother couldn’t protect you either.

It is very difficult to bring all the focus towards myself because I realize that I care about everyone’s opinion of me. Even a stranger’s opinion of me matters to me, and I’m not exactly sure why.

Maybe strangers’ opinions matter to you because you’re still subconsciously seeking approval from people who remind you of your father – from fear inducing, judgmental and strict people? From people who lack empathy? Or just in general, you seek approval because growing up, you never received it with a father like that?

If you had to hide a part of yourself (your weak, vulnerable, fearful side – which every child has), of course you didn’t feel validated and appreciated. Of course you felt unseen and not completely understood.

It’s much clearer to me now where your sense of not being seen, understood and appreciated is coming from. It’s from your father. It’s fine that he’s changed since, but your mental health is suffering now because of how he treated you in your formative years. You’d need to be aware of that in order to heal it…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Tee.