Dear Paradoxy,

What you don’t realize is that they do love and care for me, but they do not provide therapeutical love and caring.

They don’t love and care for your emotional well-being, for your desires, for your goals and dreams. They don’t care about you as a complete person, who has greater needs than just having a super high paying job. They don’t love and care for your overall well-being, which is more than just your material wealth.

I am sorry, but their version of “love” is not love. Love is not oppression, lack of understanding, lack of empathy, humiliation, coercing the person to do their will.

You define their parenting as love. Whereas it is the opposite of love. Love cannot be abusive and still be called love.

They PURPOSEFULLY ignore my suffering because they are OBLIVIOUS to the fact that IT IS SUFFERING. They don’t even CATEGORIZE it as suffering at all.

They don’t know that I am suffering, they just know that SOMETHING is up

Splendid. So an attempted suicide is a sign for them that you are having the time of your life? That everything is great in your life? That you are just bored and don’t have a better thing to do? Clearly, for them it was a sign of disobedience, or stupidity, not a cry for help. And they certainly didn’t see themselves responsible even in the slightest.

But they express these values of love, care, compassion and mercy through strict discipline and materials. They will always be available to love, care and show compassion for you in most situations except the situations that require therapeutical caring.

No, they expressed the opposite of values of love, care, compassion and mercy in your upbringing. You are convincing yourself that abuse is love. No, it is not.

YES because during the time they grew up, only these things were considered important because it ensures you live a peaceful life in the physical aspect of things. Achieving these materialistic goals are what was normalized and considered important because without money, there is no point in complaining about your mental and emotional health.

Sure, 100 years ago it was all about survival. Nobody cared about mental health. But it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true today either that one needs to be getting the highest paying jobs to be materially secured. That you need to study medicine to ensure a decent existence. So their forcing their will on you, pushing you to choose a career with highest salaries – is a bit more than a “survival response”. I am sorry, but to me it’s already greed. It is having their eyes only on the material, while disregarding anything else.

And how ironical that they should be worried about gold diggers and wicked women who want to take the man’s wealth. In fact, it’s not strange, because they are fixated on wealth (even if they want to accumulate it by honest means and hard work), and of course they are afraid of those who would want to take it away from them.

I am trying to say that I realized that I would still not be the ideal son-in-law because I know what other fathers want in their sons

You mean what other men in your religious community expect from their son-in-law?

It has nothing to do with my parents’ parenting style being “harmful”. That is why I said even if I grew up with DIFFERENT parents, the outcome would STILL BE THE SAME.

they even had other parents try to lecture me. They all say the same thing because THEY ALL think that what they are suggesting is actually what is good for me.

Other men in your religious community are obviously very similar to your father, so I guess you would get the same or similar abuse that you got from your father. But that still doesn’t mean that you are the core problem, that you have some inherent lacks and deficiencies. Rather, it means that this kind of abusive parenting is harmful for the child’s psyche.

I did not fall in love with B because she was similar to my parents. I fell in love with her because I saw her as DIFFERENT from my parents.

Yeah, she encouraged your music development, i.e. your hobbies, which your parents probably thought was bs. But that’s the trick: we often fall in love with someone who is different than our parents in one area, but very similar in another.

In fact, I think you fell in love because she seemed different (and she was different in some aspects). But you stayed for so long (and got so attached) because she was the same as your parents. You tried to get empathy and understanding from her, who is essentially unable to provide it, just like your parents.

 I expected basic friendship, loyalty and respect from her,

I was too blind to see that B was not the right person for me, but my desire to love one person only caused me to try to help her become the right person for me, which was a mistake that I now regret and have learnt from. That desire did not stem from my unmet emotional needs. That desire came from my morals.

By your morals, do you mean that the first girl you date should be your future wife? Because that “rule” too is something you learned from your father. It’s an invented rule.

But as I said, your attempts to make her understand you and your needs – even though she was totally unresponsive – prove that it was an unmet need. You couldn’t just let go.

And in fact, you admitted it yourself:

She is the only person that I wanted to correct. The only person I wanted to understand. I don’t care about anyone else, my parents, family, friend etc. SHE IS THE ONLY PERSON WHO I WANTED TO UNDERSTAND HER MISTAKES SO SHE CAN CORRECT THEM BECAUSE I WANTED TO LOVE HER WITHOUT HER CAUSING ME MORE PAIN.

You didn’t need your parents to understand you, but you needed her to understand you. It is very clear from your words (and from your inability to let her go) that you were trying to meet an unmet childhood need through her.

I have agreed with you that my parents are cruel people that have emotionally abused me. So why are you arguing with my decision to forgive them for not realizing that what they are doing is wrong?

I am not arguing your decision to forgive them. However, I have an issue with you claiming they loved you and cared for you (they do love and care for me, but they do not provide therapeutical love and caring.). Because what they did is not love and care. It was cruelty. Even if they didn’t understand it.

I am also stressing it because you seem to believe that their parenting style didn’t affect the way you are today. That you would be the same “deficient” person, even if you were born to other parents:

It has nothing to do with my parents’ parenting style being “harmful”. That is why I said even if I grew up with DIFFERENT parents, the outcome would STILL BE THE SAME.

This again is freeing them from all responsibility and blaming yourself for having certain deficiencies. As if their lack of love and empathy didn’t leave any trace on you – as if it’s all you and your “badness.” At least this is how it reads to me, and I would like to point out that it’s not the case. Because parenting does affect us immensely.

Of course it depends on the individual too, because not every child will react the same to the same parental treatment. However, our personality is formed in our childhood, and the way we were parented has a decisive impact on our adult personality. In your latest posts you seem to deny it, claiming that their parenting didn’t really affect you negatively.

And what are the odds that you are wrong about the main reason for my attachment? Your advice is based on a third person’s perspective, which means you won’t be able to understand certain things that are hard to describe through words. Some experiences and feelings that I had are too complex to simply give a verbal description detailed enough to make you understand. Sometimes you have to trust the speaker. Especially since it is my life that I am describing.

This is your ego trying to reject my advice, because it doesn’t want to look at certain things. You’ve shared a lot here, certainly enough that I could form a picture of what was going on. Even your own words – the way you phrased things – confirm my assumptions (e.g. that B was the only person you wanted to understand you. And you spoke earlier about the inability of your parents to understand you.)

But you seem to reject it, because you don’t want to make the link between your psychological issues today and your childhood. It seems you want to blame yourself for how you are today and exculpate your parents. That’s a defense mechanism too, because the child never wants to blame the parents. The child always blames themselves.

So you saying that your current problems don’t have anything to do with your childhood is an attempt of the inner child to preserve the “goodness” of your parents, the image of that “goodness”. That’s a survival mechanism for the inner child.

I am not saying you should hate your parents. You said it, and I actually told you it wouldn’t be good. It wouldn’t be a sign of healing. But you need to attribute responsibility where it is due. You cannot solve the problem if you don’t know what caused it.