Dear SereneWolf,

Omg yeah It wasn’t easy! and they tried lot of things to make me stay. But I was really stubborn about it and figured every answer to their worries. And still, they’d call me every day for more than two months.

It seems you were pretty resourceful, already at that age. And really self-confident in a sense, because you knew you could make it on your own, without your parents’ protection. The fact that they worried and called you every day is normal I think, because you were a minor when you decided to live alone… so I wouldn’t call that excessive worry.

In fact, I am thinking now that their biggest mistake as parents wasn’t excessive worry (because you sort of gave them the reasons to be worried 🙂 ), but rather, it could be the criticism and judgment that you grew up with. Feeling constantly criticized (e.g. your father was very harsh with you when you didn’t hand him the proper tool right away), always compared to others, perhaps always feeling that something is wrong with you and that you’re not good enough? Like, being seen not with loving, accepting eyes, but with strict, judgmental eyes, who always evaluate you and seek a reason to criticize you?

This seems to me the greatest wounding that you’ve experienced. I’ve experienced the same from my mother. She took my good results at school for granted, never praised me for that, and at the same time she looked for every opportunity to scold me. There was always something wrong with me, in her eyes… and so I grew up with the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with me. My self-esteem was zero.

Children who grow up being heavily criticized develop the harsh inner critical voice (which we’ve talked about already), but they can also develop the outer critic, as the flip side of the inner critic. According to Pete Walker, the outer critic is our defense mechanism against getting hurt in intimate relationships:

“CPTSD typically include an attachment disorder that comes from the absence of a sympathetic caregiver in childhood. When the developing child lacks a supportive parental refuge, she never learns that other people can soothe loneliness and emotional pain. She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.

To the degree that our caretakers attack or abandon us for showing vulnerability, to that degree we later avoid the authentic self-expression that is fundamental to intimacy. The outer critic forms to remind us that everyone else is surely as dangerous as our original caretakers. Subliminal memories of being scorned for seeing our parents’ support then short-circuit our inclination to share our troubles and ask for help.”

The above is the excerpt from Pete Walker’s book “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving”. It could be that you felt very unsafe and criticized when you showed vulnerability or weakness in front of your parents. This might have given you the message that being anything less than “perfect” means being judged and rejected. It also might have led you to believe that the person you are in the relationship with is there to judge you and criticize you.

You might even subconsciously believe that this is what relationships are all about: competition, who is better, who is more successful, who is more “perfect”. If so, you naturally want to either win in that competition (be the “more perfect” one, and judge the other person for her supposed deficiencies), or you want to leave the competition altogether (not be in a relationship at all).

Would you say this is true for you? I have more to say and I’d also like to answer your questions, but let me know if the above resonates with you?