Yesterday I came to the realization that nothing’s wrong with me, but something’s wrong with way I process emotions. It’s like a light bulb went off and suddenly I felt relaxed knowing an answer I’d spent three decades seeking.

It had been a tough week in terms of social pressures at work and at home, but throughout it all I’d kept a perspective on how my parents used to treat me. My father, a tough, stern, and successful doctor, had always mocked me when I expressed negative feelings. My earliest memory of him is when he came home one day after work and saw me in my playpen. Instead of hugging me or acting normally, he teased me about my efforts to talk. First he asked me a question (don’t remember which, but maybe how was I doing or how was my day), and when I mispronounced a word he started teasing me openly. I remember crying and he teased me even louder and walked away. He must have realized I was different than him, a sensitive person unlike he was. This might have disappointed him in some way because he often acted like this. I remember no physical contact with him unless it was corporal punishment.

My mother was always distant and in her own world. As a toddler I remember a close relationship but somehow, beyond telling me stories, she never wanted much physical contact either. I can only imagine how she treated me as a crying baby. One memory that stands out was when I was older, maybe six or seven. I was playing at the end of the street and some older boys started teasing me. I was very sensitive (still am) and started crying when I believe they took my bike away. (I can only imagine how easy a target I was for bullies, the way I broke down often.)

I ran home, distraught, and found her reading on the couch in the office. She instantly showed concern and got up and walked with me to the end of the street. My bike was still on the ground but the boys were nowhere to be found. I felt better at the time and discovered I could rely on her when in trouble. Of course that was the only time I remember her ever helping me in conflicts with others. As a preteen when I would get bullied in school, she became even more passive and indifferent.

The wall between emotions and the mind

My realization is so stunningly simple I can only wonder at how I never arrived at this conclusion. There is nothing wrong with me - it’s simply that there is a strong wall between my emotions and my mind. Now, intellectually I’d known this for a while. But it feels like I’ve finally broken that wall and can begin to accept my emotions. The avoidance is a mechanism for coping with emotions that I’ve been taught to distrust.

In our house emotions were a sign of weakness. Right now I can’t go into all the ways this was so, but my parents certainly never showed it and made me to understand that altough everyone had emotions, it was best not to display them. Basically I was raised by two abnormal people, and this is the reason one part of me has little to no contact with the other part. Today, most of my existence is spent with a feeling of not only emptiness but a dull pain inside, as if something was never resolved. I still cannot access this most of the time. One learns to access these feelings at an early age through the compassion of others, but what if one never or rarely received compassion? What if no one cared about how you felt, not even wanting to be bothered with that shit?

Hope of reconciliation?

Today it takes me a lot of courage to write or even think about this. Here I am, writing out all this stuff on the internet. What will people think? Likely they will be indifferent, but the society I grew up in shamed you for moral weakness or “character flaws” (this was the message received from adults, whether in school, home, or at friends’ homes).

But writing and thinking all this makes me realize the daunting task I’m faced with. All the Youtube therapists assure me that healing is possible, but is it really? I didn’t have just one indifferent parent but two. There were practically no adults who even remotely filled the role that my parents should have. And this week came my second realization: what if there is no hope for “reconciliation” from a state I’d longed for as long as I’ve suffered? The reality I now see stretching out before me (like a vast, sandy desert) is one of long, continual, but infinitesimally diminishing suffering, while gradually coming to peace with who I am and with my own limits especially.

What do I mean by suffering? Let’s be clear, because suffering takes many forms. For me, suffering is simply the low-grade misery inside of myself, a misery out of which I can jump at any time (in correspondence to my skill of self-denial). But the misery is “me” and is here to stay. The misery is there because I could never reconcile my inner feelings with my outer thoughts, because socially it was unacceptable to display emotions - especially if there was no ostensible reason for them.

Ironically - and as a footnote to this log - my father rationalized his cold behavior by always repeating that one has to be tough in life to be successful (like him). At the end of this 40+ year long road lies the realization that, while he was telling himself this and acting out his inner feelings of resentment and hostility towards us, he was setting us up for precisely the opposite. He was setting us up to be failures in life and in relationships (my brother lives as a borderline-type personality hermit with zero relationships with non-family people). Because a person cannot live an unemotional life of self-denial, and be successful