Dear Sherry:

“Vulnerability is something I have always struggled with… What if somebody I know finds this”- you are afraid that someone you know will find this thread, read about you suffering, and his/ her response would be to hurt you even more, to make you suffer more.

“It’s so hard speak my truth when at the core of my being, I am ashamed of who I am”- because people you know shamed you to the core of your being.

“my inner critic and harsh judgment has pulled me down so much”- your inner critic is doing to you what the people you know did (and are doing) to you: hurt you, shame you and harshly judge you.

Who are these people you know who hurt you, shamed you to the core, criticized and harshly judged you?

“My own family.. exploit me.. I see cutthroat competition in a space that was supposed to be safe, my own home, and I am withering, without the love, the attention, the support that I seek from them”.

Isn’t it interesting that you are afraid that someone you know will find your thread and hurt you while all along your family members found you a long time ago, and they have hurt you for a long, long time. I am guessing you are living with them?

(I hope you do answer me. I found you, so to speak, but I will not hurt you).

anita

Dear Sherry:

You are welcome and thank you for your kindness.

“My grandfather passed away recently… it pains me that whatever image he had of me, I will never  be able to change it. I do miss him, for I loved him, his honesty and hard work and simplicity. But I just feel like a failure. I was never the granddaughter he wanted”-

– I wish he told you that he had a good image of you and that you were the granddaughter he wanted. If he told you these things, the legacy he would have left behind was that of a granddaughter who feels good about herself, instead of a granddaughter who feels like a failure.

I am sure you loved him and that it was easy for anyone to see that you had a very good image of him (“honesty and hard work and simplicity”). I wish he cared to show you that he noticed that you thought so well of him and that he thought well of you too.

Your grandmother taunts you, your mother cares about her image way more than she cares- if she cares- about you. No wonder you are miserable, living with these people.

You expressed it very well in your previous post: “My own family.. exploit me.. in a space that was supposed to be safe, my own home, and I am withering, without the love, the attention, the support that I seek from them”-

– I am so sorry this is the case for you. I am no stranger to living in a home that isn’t safe, with no love. I too withered. And I tried to hard, the hardest possible for me to get the love that wasn’t there for me. I never succeeded. Decades after, I finally gave up trying to get love where it is not.

Oh, how I wish my mother thought highly of me, how I wished she considered me valuable, that she cared to know what I think and feel.. I wish she looked at me with those eyes of appreciation, the way she looked at others (but not at me).

If  you are in a desert and you are very thirsty, if you stand by a rock and hit it with a stick, you will never get water out of that rock, so you have to move away from that rock and look for water elsewhere. Maybe there  is a little lake you can reach if you start walking away from that rock aka family. Maybe there is water for you elsewhere, if you start walking away.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by .

Dear Sherry:

Before I read your recent post this morning, I expected that you will express a sense of indebtedness toward your parents for feeding you, clothing you etc. Because this is how I felt for many years: very indebted and very guilty for having been fed, clothed, etc.

And then I read in your recent post: “Some part of me strangely feels.. grateful for all they have done- and without I am not sure if I  would’ve been able to write this right now”.

It is true that without my mother and father I wouldn’t have been conceived, without my mother (my father had a third wife and new children later), if no one else took care of me- I would have died. But I am not grateful for having lived decades of anxiety, shame, guilt and overall torture. If I could go back in time and make such retroactive decisions, I would have chosen to not be conceived and to not grow up.. I would have compassionately let the baby that I was- die. I am stating this with no sense of drama, not trying to create emotion within you as the reader. I am stating this with quiet sincerity, because it is true.

Your parents and grandparents, the supposed nurturing adults in your young life, your caretakers- they fed you, clothed you, bought you gifts, toys perhaps, school supplies and such, but not because they loved you. You clearly stated that you experienced and experience no love in the context of your family. What you do experience from them are demands: they demand a return for their material/ financial investment in you.

Keep the Return on Investment principle in mind. It will be better that at some point you calculate how much money they invested in you and maybe you will choose to return that exact amount and free yourself from any debt to them.

“My education is being sponsored by my father and the amount is a lot, but I just don’t feel I am worth it”- maybe deciding to return that money to him when you are able will help you feel worth his investment now. Think of it as a loan that you will return.

Let’s look at your mental state: “at the core of my being, I am ashamed of who I am.. something had gone wrong inside me.. I am not happy with who  I am… the battles that go  inside my mind… my own inner critic and harsh judgment has pulled me down so much… I feel like a failure.. I am sad, I am angry… My mind is this dark place… I am so confused, and scared”-

–  In the US on a legal website I read: “Emotional distress, also known as ‘mental anguish‘, is a non-physical and mainly psychological injury that may be asserted in civil lawsuits.. the law recognizes emotional distress as a state of mental suffering that occurs because of an experience caused by the negligence or intentional acts of another”. Another US website reads: “it’s important to know that you do have rights in a personal injury lawsuit when it comes to emotional suffering.”-

– what I quoted above, as your mental state is the terms I italicized: emotional distress, mental anguish, mental suffering, emotional suffering.

I am not suggesting that you take your parents to court- what I am suggesting is that you can resolve the burden of your sense of indebtedness to them by deducting a certain amount of money as a compensation for the mental anguish caused by your parents from the amount of money they invested in you (education and other expenses since you’ve been an adult living with them). And if you think that in the balance you owe your father/ parents, return that amount in the future and you will be debt free.

Make your indebtedness to them a financial issue because this has been the nature of their investment in you: financial. It was not an investment of love.

I used to be very, very attached to my mother. It took me a long time to understand that I  loved her very much, all along, but she did not love me back- what a revelation that was, to really.. really understand it on a deep level.

anita