</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
Dingoroo said:
I'm used to never being taken care of.

I feel like a hypocrite because I tell people it's okay to be sad, but when I see it in myself, I feel worse.

guess it's the kind of childhood I had, where sadness equaled weakness and anger equaled strength,

just for once, I almost want to be taken care of,

but then I see the independent streak in me. it was, in a way, my life-line when I was younger, but now I can never see if it's good or bad. I don't feel tough or strong when I'm sad.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

Hi Dingoroo, you do know what you are saying! You seem to have a good handle on what has affected you in life and this is the first step to healing yourself.

When you say that you want to be taken care of do you think that you might just need to learn how to take care of yourself? This is something that many of us have needed to learn to do. A person learns how to take care of themselves when they are taught by their parents while their parents are taking care of them. If your parents really never took good care of you then you don't really get the chance to learn this (been there, done that).

Maybe you just need to really accept that sadness isn't weakness? Frequently those messages that we hear when we grow up are very difficult to really extinguish even when we know that those messages were wrong.

Do you feel vulnerable if you don't feel strong? To me this sounds like you might have weak personal boundaries? I had these. When you correct these you learn skills that really work to protect yourself so that you can allow yourself to feel sad or whatever and still be able to protect yourself from others.

So you had to be independent to survive as a child? I had to do that too and I have since discovered that I did it because the people that I was around did not have good info, beliefs or life plans, etc. I knew that if I was going to do better I had to distance myself from the mixed up people that I was around.