Hi Tee, thank you very much for your response.

That’s fascinating that the pandemic actually enabled you to feel safer because your father couldn’t just pop at your door at any time to harass you. Maybe this feeling of safety encouraged you to stop taking anti-depressants too? (you said you’ve been weening off for the last couple of years, which coincides with the pandemic). Which also means that the reason you were taking anti-depressants all this time was your father and your inability to say No to him, to protect yourself from his harassment, I imagine? But eventually you succeeded:

I’m trying to remember the circumstances but yes, I think I’d been wanting to come off the antidepressants for a while and mainly felt that with such a solid block of time at home it was a good opportunity to ride out the symptoms. Although it was very hard and obviously the pandemic was an awful thing, it was really helpful to have that opportunity to learn to sit with my new and difficult feelings in relative safety. I never quite felt able to do that at work, where he could turn up whenever he liked if he really wanted to.

Congratulations on distancing yourself! How is your relationship with your father now?

It also seems that unlike with your father, you felt safe with your husband – safe enough to start reducing the anti-depressants and discovering and expressing your authentic feelings, and showing more and more of your authentic self. I am happy for you!

Thank you! Yeah, my husband is kind, affectionate and dependable so I do feel safe with him. I know it is generally said that daughters of abusive fathers will often pick spouses who have the same traits. I think I turned it on its head a little bit in that I didn’t follow this pattern, however subconsciously I kind of expected more of the same.

My father passed away back in August and we hadn’t spoken for years. He wouldn’t take ownership of his behaviour or try to change it for the better, so sadly there was no way of having any meaningful relationship with him. When I learned he was ill I was considering the possibility of reconnecting with him in a way that would have been surface level and required lots of boundaries, but he passed away very suddenly. Honestly, now he’s gone it’s been easier to grieve for the lack of relationship fully and to be kinder to myself about how everything went down. For years I felt a lot of shame and blamed myself for it all but I now see that I was between a rock and hard place when it came to him.

It wasn’t silly. He was having an emotional affair with people in the cyber space, and was neglecting you… so you were totally right to make an issue of it. And I am glad that this game doesn’t exist any more, but also that he had already reduced the time he was spending on it, even prior to that. It seems it lost its emotional grip on him, which is good news.

Yeah, you’re right. For many months this game and these people seemed to be his world and he was always looking for opportunities to hang out with them…the comment he made to that woman was only a small part of the bigger picture. I’m relieved that the game no longer exists in all honesty because it means a clean break as far as I’m concerned. I now have a better idea of where my boundaries with gaming and the associated social scene lie and if something like this ever comes up again the future I hope that we can both approach it in better ways.

It’s great that you don’t trust the inner critic any more, and when you hear those deprecating words, you try to talk to yourself kindly. That is the way to counter the harsh voice of the inner critic: to talk to yourself with warmth and compassion, like a good, loving parent. You are doing a great job, and all I can say is: Keep up the good work!

It will take some time to stop the automatic thoughts from popping up, but it’s important that you notice them and sort of observe them, but not identify with them.

Apparently it was Martin Luther who said “You cannot keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair“. So you notice the deprecating, harsh thought, but you know it’s your Inner Critic, and you counter it with the voice of the Inner Good Parent, or the Inner Coach, as some call it. Someone who loves you and cheers you on, rather than someone who judges you and puts you down.

Thanks for the encouragement, I’m currently keeping a log of my daily negative judgements as part of my DBT workbook and it’s eye opening how negative my thoughts are on the whole and how willing I’ve been to just go along with them. Meditation is helping with this a lot as the emphasis has been on just allowing thoughts to come and go. That Martin Luther quote is a great one, I’ll have to write it down somewhere and keep it! I think just identifying in the first place that my inner critic is behind these thoughts has been quite profound for me as for a long time I just didn’t see it and took everything I thought as being significant.