Funny, my dad is a psychiatrist who wouldn’t allow me to have upset feelings. My emotions were always wrong, I was always wrong to have certain emotions and I was not allowed to feel. I developed an eating disorder and ate through my emotions then threw up to get rid of them. Ugh. I never was allowed to be angry either. Nice huh? So I never learned regulation and I never learned how to deal with my feelings as a kid.

This is what I came across and it surprised me and also I found it upsetting too. Of course it doesn't mean that every teacher or psychologist or psychiatrist dismisses or tells their child not to feel. But, I have seen children that had anger issues or suppressed their feelings because they were constantly corrected for having feelings instead of being allowed to feel and understand their own feelings. We are after all emotional beings and we all need to learn how feelings are normal and that it's ok to feel and work through whatever we do feel. YES, you are correct in that because you were not allowed to have and express your feelings it can create a big problem with learning how to regulate your feelings.

Actually, that is one of the big reasons making it a point to sit and read to your children is very important. That is because really good children's books help children learn about empathy and age appropriate emotions and it helps them be able to verbalize their own emotions that they don't always understand. It also creates a really good way of developing a social connection with your child as you can talk about the stories that you read together. When we are babies the only way we can communicate is through crying so it takes a child TIME to figure out how to do more than that. Also it's important to really consider attention span in a child, it's just not as long as an adult. I am ALWAYS explaining that to parents who think I should be at a job much longer than I know the children will want to engage with me.

I think with my ex, I keep having new revelations as I move forward. Like, now I am thankful that he walked away from me, or else I may have clung on for several more months trying to make it work and ruining myself in the meantime. He did me a huge favor by cutting me loose, and now I see it that way. His extreme cruelty towards me in the end gave me no choice but to walk away fully and not cling on. It was a blessing. I needed to let go and he allowed me to. That was a gift. My own neediness bothers me but that’s where I was at the time. Needy. And now I see the whole relationship as a big mistake on my part. Probably the biggest mistake of my entire life. But I have to accept that. The perfectionist in me struggles with that. Yes, he let me down immensely. That was a rough crash landing and wake up call. But I disappointed myself most of all. I let myself down.

What I noticed about you is that you need a lot of reassurance. With your father constantly correcting you when you were experiencing "feelings and emotions", it left you with genuinely struggling with your own feelings and emotions and that is often the core source of "neediness". Now, just in the past few years they are actually recognizing this very real challenge and have explained it as "childhood emotional neglect"". That relationship you had did not work out because that guy was never going to fit into what you had wanted him to fit into. That's NOT perfectionism, that is more about wanting something so badly that you were willing to overlook some negatives about him that you could never fix and it did not matter how much you cared and wanted to see what you had wanted to happen in that relationship. A lot of people make that mistake when it comes to relationships. People can get very caught up in relationship euphoria and get blinded to the red flags that always end up blowing up in their face at some point.

So I made a vast mistake, I exercised poor judgement and I was emotionally needy. I have to forgive myself and have self compassion for where I was at that time. I want to work with my therapist on that part.