Dear Paradoxy/Godwin,

Thank you for sharing more of your story, starting from your childhood onward. Like Anita, my heart breaks to read how negatively you think about yourself, and in reality you are such a bright guy and there is so much light in you. So much self-awareness, insight, and so much empathy and understanding for your parents. And for everybody else you believe you’ve hurt… I wish you had even a fraction of that empathy and understanding for yourself, dear Paradoxy.

My parents have influenced the core belief that I am the source of pain for others, but they are not the main influencer. They have behaved in ways that made me feel like a burden to them but that is just a starting point. The real influence came from my own peers.

What you call the starting point (your parent’s influence) is like the foundations of a house: they are laid down first (in the first 7 or so years of our life) and everything else depends on them. If there is something wrong with the foundations – with our upbringing in our formative years – the whole house will be skewed.

Through the relationship with our parents, we learn how to relate to ourselves (whether we are good, bad, lovable, worthy). If our parents sent us a message that we are a burden, we will indeed start feeling like a burden. And that belief will be poured into the foundations of our personality. And we will believe: “I am a burden.”

Everything that happens to us later in our youth and beyond, we will observe through that lens, the lens of being a burden. And so every negative experience we have will confirm that core belief: I am a burden.

This is what happened to you too, Paradoxy. After your first crush became public, you felt “I felt like I humiliated my crush and that I was a burden to her.” Even though it was you who was made fun of, not her.

This event led you to try to take your own life, and after it (thankfully) didn’t succeed, your parents, instead of getting worried about you, got mad at you for “humiliating” them:

My parents felt humiliated by that experience and was very angry with me, making me feel more of a burden.

This act was your cry for help, but for them, it was humiliation. They thought about themselves, although as responsible parents, they should have thought about you and your well-being. Your school friend actually had more compassion for you than your parents, because she was worried about you and so she told her parents. And her parents told the church, and the church told your parents. That’s how it should be, because whenever a suicidal behavior is noticed in a child, authorities need to react. So everybody reacted responsibly, except your parents, who instead of trying to help you, further traumatized you and punished you.

As a result, you felt even more as a burden. When in fact, they weren’t fulfilling their parental duties as they should have. They lacked empathy and compassion for you.

In the next episode, your school friend’s brother was indeed cruel to you:

Then several months later, her brother pointed out to me what a loser I was and how nobody cared about me. And I realized he was right.

Children can sometimes be very cruel. So this boy said something offensive, and it fell on fertile ground. It only confirmed your existing belief (which you got from your parents) – that you are a burden.

I spend my recess times walking around class looking for a friend to hang out with but there was never any who wanted me. This further drived me down the depressive spiral as I felt abandoned by everyone. Not to mention the constant insults I kept getting from my peers. There was no actual bullying, just some hurtful things that I felt were true and I did not have a smart mouth to talk back to the things they said.

So the same mechanism: your peers were insulting you, and you felt they were right, because you felt bad about yourself. Those insults fell on fertile ground. And they only strengthen the core belief: that you are a burden.

The next experience, with a class assignment, lead you to the same conclusion:

I had to get out of the class before anyone saw my tears cause I knew it would just be more humiliation for me and no one cared anyway but unfortunately, one guy and some family friend students saw me crying and asked what happened but I kept everything to myself, crying in silence for being a burden to others.

Your conclusion was that you cause humiliation to others (like you do to your parents), and that you are a burden to others (like you are to your parents).

And so on, and so on. Each new experience solidified this core belief. The whole “house” was built on it. Whereas it is not true, it is just your (i.e. your parents’) perception of reality.

I would like to address the other points, related to your girlfriend, in a separate post, probably tomorrow. I hope at least some of what I’ve written here resonates with you and you see some truth in it…