I’ve been in therapy for about five months and a lot of the time my T and I talk about my parents and how they messed up (emotional abuse, questionably inappropriate behaviour etc). I love my parents but I think I am very angry at them. Right now we are spending the next two weeks together and I constantly find myself lashing out and struggling to stay calm. I think I made my mum upset last night and although part of me realises I’m entitled to feel this way, I’ve noticed that I’m horrible to her when she’s trying to be nice. I don’t know why, but it throws me off. Now I feel like the most horrible person on earth and I can’t shake off the feeling that I don’t deserve good things and that my parents were always right in treating me the way they did. I think I’m gaslighting myself in the sense that I question my reactions to the bad aspects of their parenting and even though logically I know they were wrong, emotionally I feel like I deserved it.

Right now, the anxiety is so bad that I feel ashamed to even tell my therapist about this because I’m afraid he’ll give up on me. I hate the way I’m treating my mum but at the same time I know that if I attempted to explain to her how I feel she wouldn’t understand. Even my therapist said I should lower my expectations because it sounds like my parents would not react well to my show of emotion and honesty.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to get out of this post. Maybe I’m just venting, so feel free to ignore. I want to be a better person and be nice to the people who have hurt me but I can’t do it. I don’t have the self discipline to stay emotionally detached and the more I try to make things work, the worse it seems to get. I feel like a horrible, bratty, failure of a person and it really hurts.