Dear Sesha:

“My parents… used to be very demanding and discouraging at the same time” – I have this image in my mind: your parents demanding that you jump high, but they are holding you down at the same time. You want to jump and make them proud, but you are stuck under the weight of them holding you down.

Let’s say that this simple image is figurately correct in regard to your experience. How does a person feel, being expected to jump, wanting to jump under too much weight?

Maybe the answers are in your original post: “My head is filled with racing thoughts” – you can’t jump, but your thoughts are jumping. This is what happened to me when I was a child- I felt stuck, and the more unmoving/ stuck I felt (as if paralyzed)- the more moving/ racing were my thoughts!

“Feelings of loneliness and worthlessness suffocate me… I am so tired” – (1) being held down and seeing other people jump, makes you feel like the exception, the odd one, and that feels lonely and worthless, doesn’t it? That’s how I felt when I was a child! (2) the thoughts race but the muscles are rigid and in pain, tired from trying and failing to jump, again and again, including the diaphragm muscles, the muscles that make it possible for us to breathe freely and take in enough oxygen.

“I became so tense and nervous around people. I acted and talked weirdly and stressed” – being held down, not being able to move, feeling that you are suffocating- no wonder a person would be, and appear to be so tense and nervous, act and talk weirdly. Any person (and most other animals) will react this way. We all need room to breathe, the ability to move around freely.

“I am not going anywhere” – being held down=> unable to move=> not going anywhere.

Back to your recent post, regarding your parents: “But they changed and don’t do it anymore especially since I moved out” – good thing. Unfortunately, they repeatedly held you down during what is called your formative years, the years of your childhood, so naturally, your childhood emotional experience of being held down extended to your adulthood and to beyond the home where you grew up.

“In every failure or rejection, I was alone” – I wish to know more about this part. Why did your parents leave you emotionally alone when you were hurting? Didn’t they notice that you were hurting?

“My little sister… She even ignores me and gives me the cold shoulder when I am at home… we grew up in the same circumstances, but she seems to have her life together” – I wonder if she copies now the way your parents used to behave in the past: ignoring how you felt, giving you the cold shoulder when you needed their help?

These are probably difficult questions to contemplate but contemplating them can help you. It helped me!

anita