august 2026
He would ask me “why do you always pick the opposite of what I pick?” and I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t that I was being contrary, I genuinely couldn’t tell that I preferred the other option until it was slipping away from me. As if I hadn’t developed the ability to make decisions with certainty, or that ability had already been overridden by the fear of my mother’s unhappiness if I made the wrong one. Every choice felt like a trap, and I remember already at age five carrying doubt and disconnection from my wants and needs.
There are certain wounds a parent can create that greatly harm their child's perception of how to make decisions and what life is supposed to look like.
My mother’s love did not feel real to me. It felt so inconsistent that I came to not believe in it at all, because at any moment, she suddenly hated me. I hear mothers speak sweetly and sentimentally of their daughters being off in their adult lives, how proud they are of them, the hugs they give when they see them, how much they adore them - and I feel sick to my stomach like I'm looking into the mouth of a bear.
I didn’t like my mother’s hugs, and she wanted them often. I was aware young that the hugs were more to comfort her than me. If I didn't feel like I could trust her and didn’t want the hug, she told me what a cold unaffectionate daughter I was. Feeling obligated to give the hug to prove to her that I loved her, not because I felt comforted by her, wasn’t just "not comforting," it was distressing. It felt empty and cold, as if I was being taken from.
I felt guilty for not wanting my mothers affection, like I must be ungrateful and heartless like she said. But, that closing off is to be expected in these circumstances. She is severely mentally ill, traumatized from her own childhood and my father’s infidelity, and had no one in her life, so I became her sole support system as her oldest child. Instead of relying on and confiding in adults, she relied on and confided in me. Feeling like your mother’s life is in your hands, and if you don’t fix it she’ll be gone forever, ruins a child’s mind, expending all of their mental and emotional energy fawning to make her happy, always living in worry and terror.
It's interesting to see how this carries into my adult life. I do not need her approval or affection, but the cloud of guilt still lingers over me, and I still feel the punishment when I step out of her bounds.
She’d done a good job over the years solidifying a verbal narrative that she was a dependable mother, but every time I needed her, she turned against me, disappeared, or made it about herself. I had to think from her perspective at all times, constantly evaluating everything with the lens of how she would feel about it. It was the entire system under which I existed. I had to cut off every piece of my personality that didn’t fit within hers.
She mentioned often that when I was a baby, I rarely cried. I think I knew before I was even born that she would not be able to handle me. But once I was old enough that I wasn’t just a miraculously docile toddler and became a child with a developing perspective of my own, she began to resent me. Something about me was always wrong. The mother that praises perfect behavior is also the mother that attacks and controls when it isn’t perfect.
She trained me to betray my pain with my own automatic demeanor. I spoke too well, learned too well, smiled too well, for anyone to believe me if I spoke up. No one ever noticed what I was going through because of this mask I wore. Complying to the structure that she had created was all I knew.
It's so unconscious that I can't see it right away. Sometimes it's not until months after making a decision that I realize she was still controlling my choices with the voice she created in the back of my mind. I mistake it for myself, sometimes. And it is a part of me - it's the part that is a scared little girl, demanding we get it right. The part that controls from the background under the guise of an inner wish, when really it is an unresolved wound attempting to repeat itself and finally be addressed, wishing to be rescued from the story.
Continuously trying to prove yourself as capable and obedient, as trained by people trying to live through you or project themselves onto you, will eventually warp your own sense of desire. The internal compass that directs you to what you want out of your life becomes recalibrated according to their conditioning, and you forget what it feels like to want something. You confuse the urgency of proving yourself with a spark of desire.
My sense of self worth, still based upon her structures, was crumbling in the face of time passing. I couldn't shake the thought that I was “supposed” to go to grad school in my twenties, that I was "supposed" to be accomplished at a younger age. I applied to go back to school, with very little time to consider. The deadline was approaching, and all I could see was that I would miss my chance soon.
When I got in, I was so proud to have shown that I was still just as capable as I was. It felt like I was being given a chance to prove everyone wrong about me, to prove that it wasn't my fault I had to drop out the first time. I didn't realize that finding out the studios were now in a different building, with smaller windows and a much different atmosphere, would mean losing the tether to my hope about it all and result in dropping out for a second time.
I don't know what I want until it’s almost too late. That's the curse of being conditioned to do what other people expect, sometimes you don't even know until the walls start closing in that something isn't right.
One could argue that I was in it for the "wrong reasons.” But when someone has faced significant trauma, is a safe beautiful room to work in and a few supportive people really the "wrong reasons," or just the things I actually need that I am trying to find a way to fulfill?
This is the trap they talk about when people advise against attaching one single story as the only path to how a certain feeling can be acquired. The stories I was told had convinced me that the only way to have a safe space and a support system was to prove myself in grad school, because that was the path everyone I'd looked up to had insisted on for me. Their biases clouded my own discernment to the point that seven years later I didn't realize I was still running the same story they sold me.
Without that story, I came to understand that this was the wrong path.
I’m finally remembering what I knew as a child: I do not need to be told what to do in order to be a good, intelligent, and productive person. Breaking myself is not the price of admission to a life I'm going to be happy with. I will not repeat my mother’s behavior within myself anymore. At the end of the day, being true to yourself is all you really have. And that is a beautiful and liberating thing. The revelations that have come from this situation have set me free from a pattern that had trapped me for many years.
To have strength, clarity, and discernment is a blessing.
What I find disturbing is what happens when that catalyst is ignored repeatedly. When someone tries to avoid their despair instead of facing it, it only ends up trapping them. I myself have seen my mother allow herself to be trapped in her own despair my entire life, and this is where I had once learned to do the same. It’s a frightening thing to feel your own resilience slowly stripped away by someone who chooses their own misery above all else. A similar erosion happened to my mother as a child. The source of the learned helplessness can be traced back generations, I’m sure.
This is where I believe a person can find the potential for breaking that loop. In seeing it. A person will never help themselves if they don’t admit something is wrong with their approach. There is a necessary pain that comes from examining the problem and choosing to change it, the pain of seeing the time wasted and the cost of action required. The pain of realizing how much responsibility one actually has.
When a person allows their fear of this pain to create an intricate system of avoidance, they are hunted by their pain at every moment. A house of cards hoping there won't be a breeze. Any multitude of things can remind them of this pain and bring everything crashing in, and the only way to uphold this avoidance is to attack and eliminate everything that brings their awareness to what they're ignoring. This is why these people will lash out verbally and physically at their children without logical reason: the child is somehow reminding them of the cage they are still in, the child is unknowingly bringing the parent’s awareness into an area they unrelentingly avoid.
As that child, I faced a lot of hostility from my mother for things I knew even very young that I did not deserve. Despite being an excessively high performing student, I was constantly criticized for being "lazy" if I fell behind on a household task. Despite doing everything I could to support my mother emotionally as a child, I was attacked for being "selfish" if I had needs of my own and couldn't keep up with her demands. These demands were a part of the structure of avoidance, and punishing me for not meeting them enforced the rigid mental laws protecting her from changing. In an effort to hide from the truths the subconscious already knows, truths about their responsibility in their own life, the parent lashes out at the child, effectively teaching the child to avoid anything and everything that causes the parent to consider their pain.
In turn, the child must create an even more complicated system to avoid causing their parent to notice this pain that they themselves are not yet able to even understand. Each negative reaction teaches the child a rule to follow, and their developing mind learns “don’t say that” “don’t ask questions” “don’t make that face” “don’t explain your point of view” “don’t defend yourself” “don’t speak your mind” “don’t have opinions” “don’t have feelings” “don’t have needs”. I learned to disappear in plain sight. I learned to smile and say the right thing, and that who I am does not matter.
Because, inevitably, when a person hides from their pain and avoids changing for long enough, everything will remind them of it. There isn’t really a single thing a child of a miserable parent can do "right", because nearly everything reminds the parent of how unhappy they are. It becomes the child’s assumed responsibility to fix this, because it seems to the child that they are precisely the reason for their parent’s misery, and it seems to the parent like they are justified in forcing these adaptations on their child because they see their life as harder than anyone else’s. This belief enables their inaction by allowing them to deem their situation impossibly hard to fix. To them, in their cognitive dissonance, it is completely reasonable to expect their child to manage their emotions and one day solve all their problems, because they see themselves as helpless and their children as having all the opportunities they didn’t.
They fail to see, however, that they are actually repeating the same cycle onto their children, in a new format. They think that the slight differences from their own childhood differentiate them entirely from their parents, not noticing all the similarities that make their own child feel exactly the way they once did. And then, just as their parents did, they blame their lack of emotional control, effort, and resilience on their life circumstances, and invalidate their child’s perspective that things don’t have to be this way. Because they know it’s true, and that is the deepest layer of the pain they continue to run from, the pain of knowing deep down it is their fault nothing has gotten better because they didn’t try as hard as they know they could have to overcome it. The pain grows and grows because deep down they hate themselves for giving up too.
The problem I notice that perpetuates this situation is that because of the way the child must adapt to uphold the parent’s justifications of helplessness, the child is taught to see this learned helplessness as logical, often from a very young age. The child believes their parent, the person that is telling them nothing can be done about their problems and behaviors, that this is just how it is. The child believes their parent, the person who shows them nothing they do or say will ever be enough to stop the misery. And the child grows up to become exactly the same, repeating the same helpless beliefs. I know this because I’ve spent years working through it, and I’m only recently finding my own strength and resilience again.
In my experience, the only way out of the despair some people spend their whole lives upholding, is to stop running from the collapse. To surrender to how painful it is and see the situation truthfully. To feel the grief and regret of lost time and mistakes made. To acknowledge how much self-hatred has grown out of inaction, and stop blaming others for this continued negative self-perception. The only way to escape the despair is to look at it and let it kill the part of you that’s keeping it alive.
When you let the collapse happen, a new perspective is available. Yes, it is painful, but it is also incredibly freeing. To be honest with ourselves, no matter how painful, is to be free. To work through the pain is what allows room for genuine and productive consideration, and intentional consideration is what allows new choices to be made. It is what opens the space in the psyche for something different to happen, for the loop to end.
I continue to research Carl Jung’s perspective and find it very helpful in processing these thoughts. I have been returning to this topic over and over for years, and somehow it continues to become more and more relevant in the context of my own life. I am beginning to see the benefit in this circling back to old problems. I’m fond of the concept that it’s not actually a circle, it’s a spiral, and each time, you’re looking at the same concepts from a slightly different angle, assessing the same problems with a new layer of awareness. I think it is important to see the repetition as meaningful. It’s not something that can all be accomplished the first time around, it takes several times returning to the field to dig up everything that is buried there.
I find hope in the fact that I have chosen to see the pattern and make the choices. I am still searching for hope that one day my mother will take ownership of her own pain and become someone who chooses change and growth. If you are someone who knows what it feels like to spend your life protecting your parent from what they avoid, only to be blamed for it and abandoned when you can’t, if you have had a parent refuse to change, no matter how much it hurts you, if you have a parent who would rather choose abandonment over trying to work on themselves: I am so sorry.
We each have the opportunity to stop running from ourselves and make the choices our parents didn’t, to face our mistakes and learn from them, to take responsibility and choose our path intentionally. It really is the only way out, and we can find comfort in doing so. The solace is in knowing we are making the choice to grow.