Hi Tee,

I hope you are doing well. I know it’s been a long time since I have posted, but during this time I have been trying to gain support from my family and abandoned support from this thread.

I just wanted to say thank you for all the support you’ve provided me, as your kind and warm words stuck with me. I truly feel understood because of you. I have been trying to understand my own self during this time, and things have been up & down. I am back again because right now I am at a low. I need to speak about this because I feel I have no one to talk to in my personal life about this, and also because people are misunderstanding me or not understanding me at all and I feel so understood and welcomed here.

Firstly I want to respond to your question.

You can get in touch with your inner child in a meditation/visualization, or perhaps by having a photo of yourself as a child, or have a doll that represents you as a child, and hold that doll in your arms, caress her, talk to her, tell her you love her, how precious she is, etc.

In short, the goal is to become a good, loving, compassionate parent to the child you once were and that still lives within you.

Do you think this is something you could do?

During this time I have been trying to practice being kinder to myself and my inner child. I think right now it’s hard for me to speak my inner child with kind loving words because a part of me feels ashamed and awkward doing so. I know it will feel awkward at first because I am not used to this behaviour, but I realize that I have so much shame inside of me!

When I am having a good day, it is so easy for me to practice self-care and being kind to myself. I am easily able to eat healthy, exercise, and say kind things to myself as well as to others. But when I am having a rough time, all these “good habits” go down the drain… and I know that during these rough times I need these the most. I realized that when I am going through a rough time, I feel ashamed. I feel ashamed of feeling this way. I believe this feeling of shame comes from my childhood when my father would tell me that “I am okay” or that “I shouldn’t be sad” etc. So this same feeling comes back to me when I am going through a hard time!

What I’ve been trying to do during my hard times is ask other people for support especially my mother. I am closest to my mother the most and whenever I feel ashamed of releasing or even acknowledging my feelings I go to my mother. I tell her, I need some support. The support looks different every time. If my feelings aren’t that debilitating the support simply looks like a hug, kind words, or a listening ear from her. This helps me enough to practice speaking kindly to myself again after my feelings are acknowledged by someone else, I feel like I am allowed to acknowledge my feelings and from there I can deal with them.

The main reason I go to my mother for support during a rough time is because I feel like my “negative emotions” need to be acknowledged by someone else, before I can acknowledge them, because I feel shame around acknowledging or even feeling my emotions.

I know my mother isn’t perfect and that she is trying but sometimes she cannot support me. She is a busy mother, she works and does every ones chores, I feel super bad for her and wish things were different. Because she’s so busy, she cannot find time for me all the time. And if she does, it’s limited. And because she is so stressed from her own work, she can’t be patient with me and lashes out on me. And that turns out horrible. It makes me even more horrible, I feel like a burden. It’s embarrassing to admit but when I am super stressed I cry loudly enough for the whole neighborhood to hear me… my father is unable to provide me with support as he is still dismissive and makes me feel worse. My brother can help me sometimes but I am not that close with him and he only provides me with advice (I don’t even need advice I just need someone to listen to me!), and my sister is unable to provide me with support I am looking for. I have a best-friend who is also unable to provide me with the support I am looking for. My family and friends are supportive in their own way and I genuinely appreciate it, but the support I need during my bad times just looks like a listening ear from someone who understands me, empathetic words. As I said before, I think I just need someone to acknowledge my feelings first before I feel like I am allowed to feel that feeling.

I don’t know if it is wrong of me to seek support from people, especially my mother, it’s super hard for me to initially acknowledge my “negative feelings”. When I try to, I open up my journal and stare blankly at it. I have sooooooo much to say and so many feelings going inside of me, but I just cannot put them into words! I can’t even mentally acknowledge them, because I am so afraid of spiraling. I always think that if I acknowledge my feelings I will spiral, just like from my past, and that is the scariest thing ever for me. I am soooo afraid of being the same person I was from my past, and having the same unhealthy habits. I feel like such a failure if I act that way from my past.

Actually I think by writing this out, I feel like the reason I feel like such a failure or feel ashamed for feeling “negative emotions” is because I am a perfectionist that is too hard on herself!! I feel like I have no right to feel sad or stressed especially over “little things”. Whenever something in my life isn’t going as planned I am so hard on myself.

I hope all of this made sense. I have a lot of things going on in my life currently and it becomes hard to talk about it. But I think it’s easy for me to talk about my feelings in this way because it makes them seem valid. But for my actual feelings, I feel ashamed of them, I feel like they’re not valid, I feel like they need to be acknowledged by other people first for me to acknowledge them.

I don’t know if it’s wrong of me to constantly seek support from my mother because it’s too much pressure on her. Or if it’s wrong to seek support from other people. I feel so ashamed to listen to myself, and even cry! I feel ashamed to cry even if there’s no one there and it’s just me crying alone in my room. I feel ashamed to even feel or acknowledge the feeling. But when someone else acknowledges it first, it gives me the power to deal with them. And from there it becomes easier for me.