Thanks for the replies.

To RebirthandRestart2018 I think you made some really useful insights. No I didn’t really challenge either of them at the time. I have this tendency to always pause before I respond or react to things. I think this is something I learnt growing up in a home with a parent who had a very volatile temper. I think this is a defensive strategy that I have learnt and it worked in my family home because I found the ways to sort of go ‘neutral’ or blank to avoid giving rise to further confrontation and emotional outbursts. Obviously, this strategy is probably not serving me well now as an adult because I know I tend to go into emotionally blank states and also don’t speak up when I don’t like things because I fear expressing strong emotions. So, I think this may be another side effect of this defensive strategy is that I allow things to ‘slide’. People can say fairly confrontational or even hurtful things to me and I will never react to them with my true feelings at the time. I always want to give myself a bit of ‘time’ to process their words and see how I feel about it. But I think that it also leads me to de facto accepting things that people say or at least not challenging them and I guess this is really just acquiescing to whatever their interpretation. I think later I realise I didn’t like something or I should have challenged it but it is kind of too late and instead of those being expressed at the time, the feelings I had transform into a quiet resentment. I guess I am the classic passive aggressive people pleaser.

So I am starting to see how not being able to express my real emotions in an appropriate way at the appropriate time allows other people to sort of project their own interpretations of my situations onto me. Even though I may not accept them, if they were not challenged at the time they can become the de facto interpretation and it leaves me feeling quite disempowered and uncomfortable because all the emotions are sort of boiling under the surface. I have also mentioned these things on other threads in relation to expressing anger.

I have never really thought about boundaries being a reflection of your values. I have thought about my own values in terms of politics and society, but I don’t think I have ever thought about my own values in interpersonal relationships. I think I have always felt so grateful to have a friend or a partner that I kind of didn’t worry too much about whether the relationships were always matching my values or serving me. I remember a few months ago I did a yoga retreat and there was a truth telling session and we were asked to say what are the things that we will not accept in a relationship and I was the only one that couldn’t answer. I had just never thought about it. So I guess I still have a ways to go in considering what I want and need from my relationships.

To Anita, I also found your comments useful. I like the concept of how people have their own narratives about you and that maybe your own narrative actually disturbs their narrative of you. But actually your life should be your own narrative and the other person should be able to listen wholeheartedly. I think that this was definitely a problem in my previous relationship. Somehow I never really felt heard or understood. I often felt that when I was trying to share how I felt about something, especially if they were negative feelings, then I would get stonewalled. It’s like he just couldn’t relate or somehow those negative feelings were a reflection of my own failures as a person rather than maybe a basic human response to a stressful situation. So, this caused a lot of problems in our relationship. As I am a person who tends to swallow my emotions rather than express them, I often had things bottled up for possibly months at a time before I would try to express them to him and then when I did I tended to get a fairly non-responsive reaction. I felt that he had his own understanding of what was happening but wouldn’t let me know about them and instead would just go silent. So we really had incompatible communication styles, especially in relation to emotions.

Hello Anita,

Thanks for your response again. The question you have asked me is probably one of the central defining questions of my life. I suspect that my relationship with my father has caused me all kinds of troubles in my adult life.

I would say that as of now, we have a good relationship. As he is now getting quite old and I am also not young anymore, I guess he has mellowed out more and I have over the years learnt different ways of relating to him that have allowed a good relationship to develop. I am pretty happy about that. But I think the calm exterior of our current way of relating tends to mask some deeper unresolved issues. I don’t think that he has any idea how much contorting I have had to do to keep a calm face on things and how much inner turmoil that has caused.

The fact is, during my teenage years I had an extremely negative image of my father. I saw him as an imposter into our family home (the relationship between my parents broke down when I was still a child but they were on and off living in the same place throughout my teen years – though they never thought to clarify what their actual relationship was and whether we were happy with their strange arrangement). I felt that he had sort of ‘given up’ his role as a father when he initially moved out but then the constant coming and going made me feel like he wanted to keep his fatherly authority but not actually be there in a caring, comforting way. There were also frequent verbal confrontations with him. There was also one incident of physical violence where he slapped my face after I said something to him when I was about 14 or 15. I was so shocked I almost can’t really remember if it happened or not.

So those years set in place a very deep resentment and anger towards him. But because he had a very volatile and terrifying anger, it was impossible to express the depth of those feelings directly to him. So I learnt to keep those feelings bottled up and maintain my calm exterior. And part of that was learning how to control my emotions when I sensed that a confrontation may occur. It also learnt how to manage the flow of conversations so that trigger issues could be avoided. I think some of the trigger issues related to when I wanted to talk freely about myself, my goals, ambitions, dreams etc. I often felt that he did not really want to talk about anyone else, that somehow he would find a way to wedge in his own dreams, ambitions etc into the conversation instead. It was like instead of a father, I had a very competitive older brother but who as a father figure had the tendency to wield his authority in an extremely domineering and destructive way. I think the overall effect was that I learnt to minimise myself, control and bottle my emotions and reduce my needs so as to not rock the boat in the family home.

In my adult life, I have often struggled to find my way in life. Somehow I have felt scared of going with a clear vision of my own life. Instead I have often ended up compromising situations. Attaching myself to institutions (educationally), organisations or relationships as a way to give me some stability and strength. I still fear being really on my own and directing my own life, though I am now really in that situation after the end of a second long term relationship.

So, I guess, long story short, I still have huge amounts of anger and resentment towards my father (and probably my mother because she never took a strong enough stand) but I have no idea how to get those emotions out and just move on. A couple of months ago I did discuss some of these things with him, but it sort of degenerated and ended with him saying ‘you have hated me for 20 years’ – which indicates to me that he is not really ready to hear or understand how his behaviour has really affected me and my siblings).

I suspect that those bottled emotions probably have had an impact on the breakdown of my two relationships. One idea that has occurred to me is that maybe I have wanted to end my relationships as a proxy way of ending the relationship between my parents. Like I am kind of acting out what I wanted to see my mother do, but instead I am ruining my own life because I allowed two (generally good albeit needing improvement) relationships to end. I feel like as a child in a dysfunctional family I had no choice about how things went, so as an adult I am always sort of striving to get out of relationships and avoid commitment because I was kind of stuck in a dysfunctional dynamic within my own family that I felt I had no control over and still feel like that. So is it possible that until I get some resolution of those old emotions I will not be able to truly move on and create my own healthy relationships and life? I hope that is not the case, but I am starting to wonder if I can just keep ignoring those old feelings without them somehow bringing me down.

Hello Anita,

I have been thinking about your comment a lot and that is why its taken so long to respond.

No I don’t think it is helping me to keep all those feelings bottled up under the surface. I think it generates a lot of self-loathing because I kind of beat myself up and ask myself ‘why haven’t I ever just said what I really think?’ It makes me feel weak because I never found a way to express those feelings. But the problem is that this pattern of swallowing down negative emotions is such a big part of my personality and my way of being that it is hard to isolate it to just one relationship. I think it kind of permeates my whole life. Until very recently I wasn’t even able to identify those feelings as ultimately stemming from feelings of anger. It’s like anger was so impossible for me to feel that I couldn’t even identify that feeling, let alone the way it became subjugated into resentment when it went underground and unexpressed.

Somehow I learnt some extremely unhealthy coping patterns in my family home and I have never really been able to identify them until now. I think that underlying all of this subjugation of feelings is fear. I felt that expressing real feelings would lead to anger from my father and so I learnt to hide them and in fact I prided myself on my ability to maintain a calm exterior and not be ruffled by his emotional outbursts. But now I realise that I have paid an extremely high price for that coping strategy – I don’t know how to express myself fully and honestly and for sure that was a major part of my long-term relationship breaking down. I became a people pleaser through fear of expressing myself fully in my own family. It gets to the point where I don’t know what I feel or what I want.

So, I am in this position where I have identified the problem and I know where it comes from and how if affects my life, but I really don’t know how to move forward from this point. Do I deal with these issues in my own life first and gain confidence in expressing myself in different ways, or do I directly express myself to my family of origin and hope that that will somehow be a catalyst for change in my own life? I really need a clear roadmap and direction to deal with this that I can follow step by step.