Dear Paradoxy,

You are right that my parents did not need to crush the person who is having the suicidal feelings. But they did what they did and I consider that the past, something that I have moved on from a long time ago.

It is not the past unfortunately. The pain your spoke about and the feelings of emptiness and wishing you were never born, which you’ve shared here, are all the consequences of being treated like that by your parents. Your pain is current, it is still ongoing, even if the events happened quite a few years ago.

My father is not highly educated. Both of my parents only had a community college level basic education.

I was referring you what you said that your father has “a highly respected and high-earning job as a marine electrical engineer in cruise ships and cargo ships“. He has college education, as does your mother.

For someone with college education, living in the 21st century, they should know that when a child or a teenager has suicidal ideations, and even attempts suicide, is an alarm bell that something is going on in their psyche and that it should be carefully addressed. Berating and shaming their child in such a sensitive moment, instead of seeking professional help, is to me a sign of wilful negligence, I have to say. Their reaction is an example of severe emotional abuse.

What is worse is that your father had childhood trauma himself. You said:

He was … abandoned and belittled and treated like trash by his own family and distant relatives too, and he was traumatized by an incident when he was 5 where he was falsely accused of stealing 10 cents and was tortured for weeks with physical beating by his teacher until he had to admit to stealing to stop the pain, even though he did not steal the money.

You went on to say:

The trauma from that incident was so severe that I have seen him cry about it even now and he is almost 50 years old. But these harsh situations made him grow his resolve to be better than everyone who treated him poorly, to the point that he was the only person to have a highly respected and high-earning job as a marine electrical engineer in cruise ships and cargo ships, while everyone else had average engineering jobs or teacher jobs etc.

As a result of his severe childhood trauma, your father got better in terms of his career, his professional success, than any other member of his family, or perhaps even a wider community. However, his trauma unfortunately hasn’t made him more compassionate, neither towards himself nor his own son.

He clearly suppressed his pain and marched on, having no time for stupidities like emotions. He was of the conviction that men “do not have time to feel pain. We have responsibilities and other issues to worry about.”

And he believes that those who can’t simply shake off their pain and their trauma are idiots. If you are a man and you can’t clench your teeth in the face of pain and proceed with your responsibilities – you are an idiot. That’s approximately the message he has given you.

Can you see this?

And now, you are being drawn into the same kind of reasoning. At least one part of you is: the part who is making excuses for your father and saying that the best is to just press on and clench your teeth:

It is too late to be Godwin-the-child, I have a med degree to finish and I am too old to be behaving like a child. I should be focusing on my future career and etc. Med is already a pain on my behind so I do not have the time nor energy to share to Godwin-the-child.

You asked me how to heal. By acknowledging that there is a wounded part in you, your inner child, who is still very much alive and very much influencing you, even if you don’t care to admit it. And then getting in touch with him and his emotional needs, which have been suppressed and dismissed all these years.