[hezaa82]

I'm an adult child of a dysfunctional family/survivor of emotional abuse.

I moved to Japan 8 years ago but my family is in the US. We're not estranged but we don't have a lot of contact. My dad is the person I have the most contact with. We email about once a month, and after a family therapy session in January where I told him that I want him to call me and I'm upset he doesn't call me, he now calls me on Skype sometimes too. (It turns out my parents have really low self esteem so they're afraid of being rejected by me. But that makes me feel rejected by my own parents...)

Anyway I'm in therapy and one of the things we're working on is making my family relationships a little less dysfunctional. I confronted my parents about the indirect communication they have with me, basically my mom going through my dad to get to me. They responded in true Heller family style by ignoring it and pretending it didn't happen. I'm sick of taking the lead and parenting them so I decided to wait for them to make the next move and see if they could get over their fear and actually contact me. But it was bad timing and Father's Day rolled around so I had to be the one to break the ice and email my dad. On my therapist's advice I added that I'd like to talk about what I had emailed him last time (about confronting him about the unhealthy communication).

Then my dad called me on Skype last week but it just made me feel really icky. Sorry, that's the best work I can come up with to describe it. My dad seemed really relieved to hear from me and he kept saying how great it is to talk to me. If it's that great why doesn't he act on his own desires and call me more? Maybe that upsets me - seeing him not doing what he wants. And also maybe I feel like I'm being used to make him feel better about himself? He feels better after talking to me because he's reassured that he's not hated aka he's using me for his own self-esteem? When I tell him about what's going on with me he always responds that everything I'm doing is so great, but I don't feel really heard. I think he has trouble understanding other people's points of view or why someone feels the way they do, so that probably affected me a lot growing up. He did bring up the topic of me being upset about the indirect communication in our family, but he talked about it as if it was all my mom's fault and didn't acknowledge that I meant it was a problem for both of them. I wonder what it would be like to have a parent that was a source of comfort not a source of stress....

Sorry that this is so long and sorry if it's too personal and doesn't make much sense. My therapist is out of town for three weeks so I don't really have anywhere else I can talk about this til she gets back. Thanks for reading.

[kala83]

I have a lot of personal issues with speaking to my own father as well. We never had a good close relationship and sadly we never shall. Its difficult on me because its affecting things in my life now

and I want it to stop I don't know how to deal with the stress in my life...but I am going to cope with it as best i possibly can.

[tinyrabbit]

I really empathise with this. I feel much the same. I basically pretended to myself that things were okay with my family and then I went to therapy and the scales fell from my eyes. Though my parents don't feel rejected by me, but anyway.

I know what you mean about feeling icky. And I think it's hard because you can't necessarily have the relationship you want with them. But you can maybe take small steps to change things.