“Truth is not far away. It is not hidden.
It is planted deep in the center of your heart.
If you haven’t uncovered it yet, dig deeper.”
By the time I was twenty-nine, I knew that something was off with my life and I was doing nothing about it. Until one day, my bestie, Tanja, pointed to a book at The Halcyon Store and said, “You need to get that book!” It was called, Parents Who Love Too Much. Even though it was a parent book, I purchased it immediately and read it from cover to cover. The examples given in the book resonated with me. I WAS THAT KID! I showed it to my parents, “thinking” that they would catch on and see that the way they were parenting me wasn’t working. Can’t blame a girl for “trying.” My father ignored it, and my mom read it without much input. Clearly, it was up to me.
At the age of twenty-nine, I decided that I needed therapy. I created the illusion of safety because I told myself that my parents “loved me too much.” By going to therapy, I wasn’t disrespecting my parents, I just simply wanted to understand and change myself. I was still being their “good little girl.”
The therapist’s mouth dropped with my stories. Up to this point, I hadn’t received much validation for my plight. My friends (and my artist) were too busy seeing the THINGS that were given to me, continually telling me how lucky I was. In the first session, there was only one ominous statement that I can recall. He said, “It is like you have had a gun to your head your entire life.” As awful as that sounded, I knew it was true. I had lived a life of...”you do this...or else.” I never wanted to experience the “what else” part, so I did as told. As much as I loved being validated, I created an anger that I didn’t recognize. I was waking up to what I knew all along but had denied, a painful place to be in the awakening process. To deeply realize that control and obsession is not love and that now I am responsible for my life was as scary as hell. I knew that my parents weren’t there for MY best interest, but I had no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to get out from the dysfunction. I had leaned on them for my entire twenty-nine years, and now I had thrown myself in the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. I felt disabled to be on my own, and yet I knew “deep in the center of my heart” I could do it. Always a choice.
In the following three years and beyond, I would make life-altering changes that would reveal the enormity of my father’s fear, destroying forever what we “thought” we had.
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