Dear greenshade:

You are welcome.  I am glad to read that you moved out of your parents’ home in March 2021, two months following your last post on your previous thread Breaking Point (Jan 11, 2021), and about two months following my reply in that thread, where I suggested that you “move away from your parents, leave them both… Away from them both, you have a chance to escape misery and experience a better life”.

Fast forward a year and two months, and currently, May 2022, you are living away from your parents (but in regular contact with them, I assume?). Congratulations for moving away!

This is what you shared today: “I am also more anxious around enforcing my boundaries for time off, and it feels like a violation when someone tries to encroach on holidays. I also interpret it as them playing a control game (I’m the boss and I need to know you’re available whenever I ask). In general, however I feel if someone is more respectful of my boundaries generally, I also have less of a reaction if they reach out over holidays… the intent and energy of that interaction feels different“.

As difficult as a workplace may be, it is your early life experience, particularly with your father, that is encroaching on your workplace experience, and as a result, you feel much more anxious and distressed in the workplace than you would have felt if you didn’t have the childhood experience that you had.

Growing up, it was your father who disrespected and violated your boundaries, encroached on your right to move, to go to the bathroom, and to sleep (see quotes below), insisting that you avail yourself to him whenever he wanted you with him; he was the one who played control games against you with the intent to do so.

Here is what you shared about that early life experience (June 30-July 1, 2016): “if he got angry, he would yell for hours, and we would not be allowed to get up or move. If I had to go to the bathroom while he was talking, he would get angry and would not let me go. I remember sitting in one place being yelled at every day for 3-4 hours… We had to do whatever he wanted irrespective of what was going on in our lives. If he wanted to drive around the city for hours, we would do that it did not matter if I had homework or tests… Once I remember I had 104 fever and I had to go walking with him because he wanted exercise. We were not allowed to sleep at night… He would take our cell phones and house keys and we would not be allowed to talk to people without him being present. We weren’t allowed to cry or get angry. If we were quiet, he would get angry too… When he was manic, he became cruel and enjoyed hurting us” –

– he held you hostage. No wonder you felt very distressed, as an adult, in that 9-5 job (“I wish I could stop obsessing over the fact that I can’t leave my office whenever I want“, Oct 4, 2016). In the current job, any limitation on your freedom is likely to feel worse to you than it would feel to your co-workers, because as children, they were not repeatedly and for many hours, held hostage by their father.

On October 11, 2016, you shared about your father: “Once he apologized to me for treating me badly, he was crying, with his hands covering his face but I saw him peak out at me from behind his hands and smirk. There are other multiple instances where he’s told my mum I’ve said things I haven’t and vice versa, not to set us against each other but to get his own way. I also feel he tries to control me using guilt; when I was travelling for work, he would call every few hours and keep telling me how lonely and sad he was”, etc.  –

-this was your childhood experience; your father was repeatedly insincere, and he repeatedly played control games.

Today, you wrote in regard to your current workplace: “I also interpret it as them playing a control game“. You also shared today you react less negatively to being asked to work during holidays if you feel that the intent is not to control you, “the intent and energy of that interaction feels different“- your father’s intent to deceive you (and your mother) and his cruel, selfish energy caused you a lot of distress as a child, a distress that you re-experience as an adult, when you sense such intent and energy in the workplace.

Your last sentence in your most recent post is: “I usually prefer working in smaller less formal set ups with people with similar value sets, but I am feeling internal pressure to change that about myself” – it makes sense that a more relaxed workplace is a better fit for you (and for anyone who suffers from excessive anxiety). If you want to change that about yourself, that is, to endure a higher stress level in regard to employment because of significant professional/ financial benefits in doing so, you will need to create a separation from your childhood experience with your father, so that this past experience does not encroach on your present experience. Did you ever discuss this topic in therapy?

I compared your childhood experience with your father to being held hostage (the detention of an individual, against their will and without legal authority, for a particular motive).

I want to close this post with a quote from an apa. org (American Psychological Association) article titled Adjusting to life after being held hostage or kidnapped: “According to research, hostage survivors often develop an unconscious bond to their captors and experience grief if their captors are harmed… This is typically referred to as the Stockholm syndrome” – if this is true when the captor is a stranger and the one held hostage is an adult, it must be true when the captor is the child’s father (although in the latter case, it will not be called Stockholm Syndrome).

An encouraging quote from an article from The National Library of Medicine, titled Kidnapping and hostage-taking: a review of effects, coping and resilience: “In recent years, there has been a move in the trauma field from a ‘pathogenic’ model (which emphasizes illness and problems of adjustment) to a ‘resilience’ model (which emphasizes coping and ‘personal growth’ through adversity) … this perspective offers a more positive and optimistic approach”.

anita

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