“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
~Sigmund Freud
I always thought that some emotions should be left to be understood by the other person. We don’t need to go on speak out everything cause that just reduces the essence of that emotion. Never too late to realise that, it’s not even wrong to express it all. I mean you might be lucky to have someone who understands your silence but even if you don’t have, it’s fine, maybe it’s great (cause then you’ll get to know yourself better).
I invariably expected my family members to be my therapists, i wanted them to understand my situation and then bear all my anger composedly. What i needed to understand was that if i need a professional counsellor to help me understand people then how can i expect my family to treat me the way my counsellor does! My parents are as normal people as i am and not some professionals and on that i didn’t even consider the biggest differentiator, the age factor. They’ve grown up in a different era than me, then how am i even supposed to expect them to understand those “high school teen problems”?
I shouldn’t have and neither should you, it hurts them, when we have such extravagant expectations from them when we’re not ready to fulfil one for them. It hurts them, when they get those inferiority feelings as parents just because they weren’t able to match up with our imaginations.
Speak your feelings out, share everything with them, that they need to know or you want them to know, for once look at them as other human beings and not some “idealistic parents”.
As a 5-year old, i always wondered how can people get the spelling of ‘accept’ wrong and write ‘expect’ instead of it... Now i feel the difference between them. Where ‘accepting’ makes you happy in long term, ‘expecting’ can just have dramatically opposite results. Be careful with which one you choose to use.
This is what I’ve learned from my experiences, might be a bit different from yours. So don’t forget to share your learnings in comments. And,
