Dear canary,

Welcome back to your thread! Thank you for your kind words, it’s good to know that you feel seen and understood here.

I hope all of this made sense.

Definitely! You have such a deep insight into yourself and you’ve come to some really important realizations. One of them is: “When I am going through a rough time, I feel ashamed.”

Whereas: “When I am having a good day, it is so easy for me to practice self-care and being kind to myself.”

You’ve also realized that it has to do with your father: “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. ”

I believe so too. You were criticized whenever you showed vulnerability, whereas you might have been praised for doing well at school. This then leads to the following dichotomy: when you are fully “functional”, excelling in what your father expects you to excel in (e.g. school), you feel good about yourself. Maybe in those times you even feel lovable and worthy. But this feeling is conditional to your “performing well”, i.e. fulfilling your father’s expectations.

However, when you’re not feeling so good, you feel ashamed of yourself because your father shamed you in those instances. You aren’t fulfilling your father’s expectations, and so you feel like a failure (and you also feel like a freak, abnormal etc…) This makes you feel unlovable and unworthy. I think your feeling of self-love and self-worth depends on how well you are performing emotionally/at school. On how well you are fulfilling your father’s expectations. Would you agree with that?

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.

It’s good that you know what support looks like for you. One of the main things that we as children need from our parents is to validate our emotions. It’s very damaging if the parent dismisses the child’s “negative” emotions. Some parents punish their child for expressing anger and frustration, some parents (like your father) punish their child for expressing vulnerability and weakness. This then invalidates a significant part of our personality, of our being.

What you needed was a listening ear, someone who would say “I know you are afraid and anxious. It’s okay, I understand. Come, let me give you a hug. It will be fine, don’t worry, I’ll help you deal with it.” That would have been a good parental response to their child’s anxiety.

Your parents didn’t have a good response: your mother might have given you a hug, she might have not judged you for feeling anxious, but she didn’t know how to truly alleviate your anxiety – she’d rather let you skip school if you felt anxious. Your father outright criticized you and condemned you.

if I acknowledge my feelings I will spiral, just like from my past, and that is the scariest thing ever for me.

I think that’s related to the fact that your mother – no matter how supportive – didn’t really know how to deal with your anxiety. She didn’t make any steps to actually deal with the cause of your anxiety, for example school bulling. She never went to school to talk to the teacher. She was also hiding your problems from your father, thereby affirming that your anxiety is a taboo and something to be ashamed of. So even though she was somewhat supportive, she didn’t help you deal with anxiety in more concrete ways. She let you – a little child – deal with your anxiety on your own, instead of helping you with concrete solutions (which might have included talking to your teacher, a psychologist etc).

I think that’s why you learned that when you have a problem, she cannot really contain your emotions, she cannot truly help you alleviate your anxiety. So you’ve concluded that it’s better not to tell her how bad you really feel because she wouldn’t know what to do with it. And this would make you feel even worse – it would make you spiral into even more fear and helplessness!

Nowadays, it seems she can help if your distress isn’t too big: “If my feelings aren’t that debilitating the support simply looks like a hug, kind words, or a listening ear from her.”

However, if your distress is quite big and a simple hug isn’t enough to make you feel better – she gets impatient with you and then you end up feeling like with your father:

“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.”

You end up feeling unlovable and unworthy with her too – because she doesn’t have the capacity to help you, even though she isn’t as judgmental as you father. If your distress is above a certain level, she becomes dismissive too, and you end up being judged by her too.

Would you say that’s true?

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.

It seems you are still trying to get support from your family, specially your mother, but you end up feeling even more frustrated (and unlovable and unworthy). What you would need is to realize and accept that you’ll never get the kind of support you hope for from your family, because their ability to do so is limited. This is true even if nowadays your father is less judgmental than before. But as you’ve said before, he can still be dismissive (e.g. he tells you you’re feeling better when you don’t). And as you said in this post, your mother can be impatient and thus dismissive too.

That’s why I think it would help you a lot if you stopped going to them for emotional support and expect them to finally see you and understand you. Try to accept that they won’t be able to give you the kind of emotional support you need, and that that’s okay – because you can get it elsewhere and give it to yourself too.

Another very important thing would be to realize that you aren’t unlovable and unworthy for feeling anxious and emotionally distressed. You aren’t less worthy because you are vulnerable or because you show vulnerability. You are completely lovable and worthy, even if you feel emotionally distressed.

This is what you’d need to realize and tell yourself in times of emotional turmoil. You can tell yourself: “I am allowed to feel anxious. I am lovable and worthy, even if I feel anxious”.

How does that sound to you?