Dear Paradoxy,

There are some corrupt Christians and Muslims too but the number is considerably small compared to Hindus, but also remember that Christians and Muslims are in the minority here.

You are talking about a country in the Caribbeans, with the majority Indian population, right? I’ve just looked it up, and it could be Guyana, Suriname or Trinidad and Tobago. While you study in Jamaica. That’s why you said your parents live thousands of miles away, right? (“I can’t do anything without fearing them, even though I am thousands of miles away from them”). I was under the impression that the distances in the Caribbeans are not so huge, but they are, obviously 🙂

You will barely find any corrupt activities of the sexual nature among us, which is one of the reasons why my country has one of the lowest divorce rates.

Okay, infidelity leads to a higher divorce rate, that’s for sure.

I believe it is a cycle, where my parents’ insult decreased my confidence, and the lack of confidence caused me to screw up my communication skills and actual work skills, and the lack of those skills provided a reason for my parents to insult me, and so the cycle continues.

The cycle had its starting point somewhere: in your childhood. They call the first 7 years of our life the formative years,  because that’s when the building blocks of our personality are formed. Our parents have a major impact in the formation of our personality. That’s the foundation of the “house”, which we have been talking about before.

After that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you feeling not good enough and unworthy makes you perform worse and have worse interpersonal experiences, which in turn have a negative impact on your studies, as well as your social skills and whether you feel rejected or accepted by your peers.

And it grows like a snowball – we are getting more and more “proofs” that we are unlovable and incapable, which is cementing those false core beliefs. But it all starts with those formative years, where our parents play a key role. What happens later are the consequences of those formative years.

I have been trying to learn it for the last 3 years and I still can’t get it right. I can’t even cut an onion properly. … I can’t even tell whether I used too much seasoning on the food based on the taste?

I was also a late bloomer when it comes to cooking. At 19, I didn’t know how to prepare a single meal. But I can tell you – not “feeling” it and being insecure about the taste has to do with embodiment – with the ability to be present in our body and feel all the sensations. And with trusting ourselves that we can make it right (get the taste right).

You’d need to be in touch with your body and your feelings for that, and you lack that. You are suppressing a lot. So believe it or not, you’d need to learn to feel all the feels if you want to be a good cook. One side-effect of healing would be improved cooking skills 🙂

I can’t even tell the difference between different parts of the specimen. I can’t even identify the difference between the veins and arteries. I know the theoretical part, but I can’t get the practical side at all.

Yeah, I am familiar with the problem: being good at theory, but sucking in practice (in driving skills, for example 🙂 ). Again, it’s the embodiment thing. If you are too spaced out, all in your head, of course you can’t know what’s going on in the body.

Medicine is a very visceral thing – you can’t master it from the books only. When we are separated from our body (like you are – suppressing your emotions, not wanting to feel certain things), we can’t really be good doctors, God forbid surgeons. So again, healing would help you be a better medical student as well.

I am not defending my parents exactly, I am just acknowledging the truth in their criticism.

Oh you are Paradoxy. Let me give you an example. This is what you said about their emotional abuse:

The emotional suffering they put me through has forced me to be the most mature for my age among all my cousins so I am definitely grateful for that as well.

You excuse their emotional abuse and are even grateful for it, because it supposedly made you more mature than your peers. At the same time, you refuse to see how their emotional abuse negatively affected your self-confidence, communication skills and e.g. the ability to make a good impression at interviews.

You refuse to see the negative impact of their upbringing and are even grateful for the abuse they’ve put you through, because it supposedly had positive impacts on you. Which is like saying that drinking poison didn’t really harm you – on the contrary it had a positive impact on your body. Which is called self-deception.

This is why I am saying that you are defending your parents and refusing to see how they have contributed to your present-day problems. Instead, you are blaming exclusively yourself, claiming that you would have been the same person even with different parents. Which is not true.

So you are washing them free from all responsibility, and even claiming that their abuse did you good. Which as I said, is severe self-gaslighting.