Dear Sesha:

“To recognize that they did wrong and move on is the best way to continue to live” – to recognize what damage their wrongdoings caused you, heal from the recognized damage and move on.

Your healing is not about (figuratively) taking your parents to court, proving their guilt and declaring them guilty, and then punishing them, or declaring them innocent, and absolving them from guilt. Your healing is not about judging your parents. It is about seeing and understanding how they negatively affected you. Without this seeing and understanding, there is no starting point to healing.

Stated again, your healing is not about your parents. It’s about you. Your parents will not be helping your healing and therefore, they don’t need to know the details of your healing. So please, try to not get caught in feelings of guilt in regard to judging them and blaming them. They don’t have to know anything about what constitutes your healing. Your healing is your personal project.

Healing has to include figuring how your parents negatively affected you because parents are way too powerful over their child’s mind and heart, way too powerful to ignore. In the young child’s mind, parents are gods. Gods are powerful, as long as your faith in them as gods continues.

Likely, you think that you fully know, now, that you are in your mid-twenties, being the intelligent, educated adult that you are, that your parents are not gods. But the one who is currently, like before, “feeling those intense emotions… desperate for comfort… very clingy and vulnerable… overwhelmed with those intense emotions… cry a lot… get paralyzed and every suggested possible solution… (she) reject and continues to whine“- this person crying, whining… she is still the 2 or 3, or 5-year-old of 20 years ago who believes her parents are gods.

This young child’s gods walked away from her and naturally, being 5, she was too young and unprepared to be left alone. “Many times, they just stand up and go…. they walked away… I want that people don’t leave me alone“.

Let’s say you were in your bedroom with your parents. You cry, they walk away while you are crying, without any effort to comfort you, settling into the living room sofa, watching TV. They did not disappear from your life, they were only a few steps away, but those two people/gods in the living room were no longer the gods that you trusted before. They became gods who betrayed the trust of their greatest believer-follower-admirer.

“I wish that they didn’t let me down emotionally when I most needed them… I know in my core he would not catch me even if I need him the most” – the gods, particularly your father perhaps, betrayed your once unquestioning trust. You know in your core that if you fall, your father will not catch you.

“It feels like I can never reach those high jumps like others did” – it is no wonder that you are afraid to jump high, that you don’t trust your ability to jump high and survive the jump- the higher the jump, the greater the fall… and there’s no one to catch you.

“For me it is almost normal when he walks away” – you adjusted to his habit of walking away from you, so it feels almost normal, but the kind of normal you experience is full of “racing thoughts of self-blame, shame and worry. Also, feelings of loneliness and worthlessness“.

I have a comment about your sister. It so happens that my younger sister seemed to me, when I was growing up, to be perfectly healthy, mentally and emotionally, so very different from me: she was social, had so many friends, popular, smiled a lot. I figured at the time that she is proof that I was the odd one, that something was very wrong with me. Otherwise, I thought, why would a sister growing up with the same mother, the same circumstances as I did, be so healthy while I was so sick. A couple of decades later, I learned of her panic attacks, and her severe sense of shame. I was wrong about her after all. I didn’t know.

anita

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