Growing up, if I showed any negative emotion my father would get upset with me. If I cried, he would say

“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

If I was angry, I would hear: “Fix your face.”

It made me feel like I was not allowed to show emotions, aside from happiness. It was very invalidating.
Eventually, as a teen, I learned that if I cried, nobody cared; however, if I got angry, my family would give me attention and I would get what I needed. So I learned to become angry, even if I was actually sad, because then I would have my needs met and not be ignored. I think that may be one of the reasons that I have an anger problem now.
As an adult, I still don’t like to cry in front of people. If I cry, I do so in the shower or I cry myself to sleep.
I know I am dealing with emotional dysregulation. And I can’t stop feeling like it is mainly my family’s fault for the way that they treated me while I was a child. But as an adult, I’ve been trying to fix it (because I feel that it is my responsibility to fix it now). It’s so hard..

I feel overwhelmed. Like I feel like I have a lot of things to do. This is a list of things I need to work on/recover from: PTSD, OCD, depression, emotional dysregulation, the list goes on and on.

I think the best thing I can do for myself is to stop and take a deep breath. To acknowledge that I am a human and that my parents did not know what they were doing when they were raising me, remind myself that there is no guide book for raising children. Then I need to take it day by day and continue going to therapy, continue reading and getting information, continue seeking support. I am resourceful and can find lots of supports/resources. I am resilient; I have survived a lot of tough things. I am brave; it takes a lot to talk about things I experienced. If I can just take it day by day, I should be okay.

It sounds so simple, but it sounds so hard at the same time. I’ve experienced a lot of trauma and I’ve kept a lot of it secret from my family, so as not to scare them. But it is exhausting. I am hopeful that one day I will feel better and I will be able to work through all of this. It just seems so overwhelming. It helps if I break it down into steps, like a puzzle, and work through it one piece at a time.  I think I get caught up in the past.. ruminating on the things I’ve experienced and how I could have acted differently, or how my family could have been different. I get tangled up in the weeds, thinking about the things that don’t really matter anymore, unspoken emotions towards the people who just don’t care, things that are no longer relevant.  So it helps to break things down into simpler pieces. I just hope that I can gather the strength to keep on pushing.