Dear antarkala:

“It was someone in my extended family… It all suddenly stopped once I hit puberty in my 8th grade“- I hope that this someone in your extended family doesn’t get the opportunity to do to others (other pre-pubescent girls, perhaps) what he did to you. If there is something you can do to protect others from him, I hope that you do what needs to be done.

“I never talked about it to anyone before that but it is only these days I am slowly opening up with my closest friends and I am realizing the intensity of what happened day by day. I don’t think I gave it a name of sexual assault until then… it was for at least a year or more“- keep talking about it, bring it further to the light, as slowly as you need it to go about it.

“As I said, my mother does not know. She just in general says I am too sensitive and overreact to things. This especially happens when I tell her how hurting it feels when my dad criticizes me or when I tell her how my father and grandparents are proud of everything my brother does because he is a guy, how they treat me in front of him as if I am nothing, and that I do not feel respected enough or seen enough or encouraged enough“- it is not true that you are too sensitive and that emotionally you over react.  I know that your mother is wrong on this point even though she’s known you for 25 years, and I’ve known you for only 5 days. Your reaction to your early life experiences is proportional to the experiences.

Adults often forget how they felt growing up, how very sensitive they were (all young children are). So, they unrealistically expect children to be less sensitive than they themselves were as children/ adolescents.

“When I tell her I feel a little different from everyone, that I feel things too deeply and sometimes wonder if I have depression and I am unable to do basic things in life and feel very under-confident – she tells me I am overreacting and too sensitive and should just have more will power and try harder to be more disciplined and achieve the things I want in life“- she is right about the benefit of a strong will-power and self-discipline. If she validated your sensitivity (as being proportional/ appropriate to your life-experiences growing up, she would have strengthened your will-power and self-discipline. She means well, and she’s partly right, partly wrong.

“She never said no to therapy though – she said if I wanted to go, she will support me“- a good thing!

“Completely, yes! I am that friend/ confidant of her. She shares everything with me. I started supporting her as I grew up and pushing her to stand up for herself and even stood up against my dad and my grandparents demanding she should be treated better for everything she does for the family. She gradually started doing that… She always tells me she feels blessed to have a daughter like me and she cannot imagine her life without me“- yes, indeed, your mother is blessed to have you as a daughter. I feel empathy for your mother and appreciation for her resilience through the years, as well as for her work as a teacher. I’m sure that she benefited many children over the course of her career.

Unfortunately, there is a problem here (in the paragraph I quoted right above) that needs to be addressed: it’s not a good thing for a child/ adolescent to be placed in, or to be encouraged to fill in the role of an adult. A child needs to be a child while the adults take care of adult things. A parent is supposed to confide with the other parent/ other adults, not with their child.

It is not the child’s job to teach her mother to stand up for herself, it’s the other way around: it’s the mother/ parent’s job to teach the child. So, what happened in your childhood and adolescence was role reversal, in this regard. A child needs to feel safe at home, as in being with parents who know how to take care of themselves (and of the child). When that’s not the case, the child feels anxious.

“I once remember during an argument I threw a glass of water at my mother’s face in front of my whole extended family and to this day I don’t know why I did that and I cannot get that image out of my head“- you were angry at her. It is difficult to be angry at your mother, isn’t it? It made me feel very guilty when I was angry at my mother. Maybe you were angry at her for not taking care of herself, for not standing up for herself…?

“My school teacher once described me as a lady don to my dad and I once remember one of my teachers telling me my walk is too manly“-

– I had to look up “lady don” (online): “This phrase is often used to describe a woman who possesses qualities traditionally associated with masculinity, such as confidence, assertiveness, and a commanding presence”.

Seems to me, antarkala, that your role reversal situation was that of you being your mother’s.. father, teaching her to stand up for herself, to act confidently and assertively, a parenting job traditionally done by the father in the family. Your mother was.. femininely weak, passive (a traditional female role) and you, for the purpose of helping her/ strengthening her, took on the manly traditional role. So much so, that you even walked in a manly way.

This is how much you loved her and needed her to be strong.. not yet strong yourself, you took on that role.

“(I) could never relate to girls having crushes…  The concept of having kids never appealed to me”– this is congruent with your masculine/ manly role taken so to help your mother.

On March 25, you wrote in regard to your boyfriend: “Initially, I did get thoughts like ‘maybe he is not strong enough’… “I don’t think he is manly enough’“- what this is telling me is that you need to..  finally not be The Strong One, to.. finally have someone else be the strong one, so that you can relax.

Is that what it is?

anita