Moving Towards Safe Relationships

I am speaking up about my emotions and learning self-forgiveness as I peel back more layers of childhood emotional neglect

“You yelled at me and scared me three times today. I didn’t like it,” said one child to their caretaker. Imagine feeling safe enough as a child to say how scared you are feeling to your parents and friends. I was scared countless times by the loud yelling in my parent’s house as a child, but never had the confidence to protest how scary this was for me. I believe most kids in my hometown in the Chinese ethnic enclave in Los Angeles would not feel safe enough to be able to speak directly about their emotional state and how others were affecting them. Even if they gathered the courage to speak this honestly with their parents, the parents would get angry or play the victim, making the child feel like they are being disobedient for protesting. This also makes an honest and productive discussion impossible.

After many months in therapy focused on cultivating greater emotional intelligence, I am much more comfortable speaking with this level of honesty to my family and friends when it is necessary. I am now empowered to give my “inner child” a voice for how she is feeling, especially when she perceives a slight or misunderstanding. Being able to speak freely about my needs makes me feel like I am doing a better job standing up for myself. I am finally demanding to be seen and not be neglected or forgotten. It has also resulted in deeper and more fulfilling relationships with my friends and family. There is more intimacy and feels of closeness, which I shied away from before.

I am getting better at identifying safe relationships in both friendships and romantic relationships, and am choosing to invest more time in these relationships. I now choose friends who are actively engaged and emotionally supportive of me. They are people who will accommodate me into their lives, even when it costs them some of their convenience, and are willing to do it over the long term. I am applying the same rules to romantic relationships. A friend once told me: “I don’t care what my boyfriend does, he can go do whatever he wants. But when I need him, I need him to drop everything and come to help me.” She has exactly the right idea.

I used to have an aversion to letting people into my life too quickly because I was worried that they would swallow up all my time and energy. When relationships started to take up more hours of my time beyond the occasional dinner and drinks, I would start to pull away. But I later realized that more time with others is necessary to develop deeper connections and prove to people that I’ll be available for them as I would like them to be for me. As I began to let people into my life more and more, I began to feel emotionally fuller and my defenses started to melt away. The bonus is I felt safer and calmer than ever before in these friendships.

In my journey towards safe relationships, I have already noticed there is more truth, equality, growth, and self-forgiveness with these people. I am more in tune when others make requests for me to help them. For example, when I have a friend who had a pregnancy scare, I chose to continually follow up with her until she got confirmation that she was in the clear. I had the opportunity to be there for her as I would need a friend to be for me when I am in a crisis. Curiously, some other friendships I had which were awkward before began to flourish with my new understanding of emotional availability. I was able to pick up on others’ emotional bids, even when they weren’t stated directly, and I was able to take care of my friends on a deeper level.

Learning to receive forgiveness and give it to myself has been a long journey. I tend to torture myself over my mistakes, ruminating over how I could have done things differently or tried harder when something doesn’t go as planned. The ruminating can go on for months and extends to both romantic relationships and work situations. Often my critical inner voice flares up, naming all the shortcomings that supposedly led to the failure, and trying to tell me the future is bleak. When I receive forgiveness though, I can accept the realities of who I am and become healed and accepted.

One technique I learned to overcome critical inner voices, especially subconscious ones, is to write down explicitly what the critical inner voice is saying or what the limiting belief underneath the critical inner voice is. When these thoughts are put into words, it is easy to see how unreasonable and cruel these thoughts are. With the help of a supportive person, preferably a therapist, it becomes much easier to talk back to and negate these critical inner voices and their underlying beliefs and replace them with empowering voices and beliefs instead. Problems that were intimidating before become much smaller when no critical inner voices are questioning my abilities and competency after I address the underlying belief.

Making the effort to give apologies when they are needed is another form of self-forgiveness, even though it may not initially appear as such. By withholding apologies, I believed I was not admitting to weakness, but I was withholding forgiveness from myself instead. When I apologize, I receive the gift of forgiveness from another person and thus can forgive myself for inflicting the hurt. A load I didn’t realize I was carrying is lifted. “Being forgiven for our weaknesses, imperfections, and badnesses means reconciliation. It means that someone else knows [our imperfections] and doesn’t condemn us,” says Dr. Henry Cloud in the book Safe People.

These are some other skills of receiving forgiveness which are not initially obvious:

• Knowing how to admit my faults without rationalizing or making excuses.
• Knowing how to take in forgiveness without attempting to make up for my faults, or to pay for my trespass.
• Knowing how to ask, “Will you forgive me for hurting you?”
• Knowing how to feel empathy for the pain I cause others, rather than guilt.

I still have some fears that a partner would leave or reject me after getting to truly know me. Along the same lines, I still have a critical inner voice questioning whether I am worthy of an intimate romantic relationship and have some fears of intimacy. In the past, I sometimes fell into the unhealthy habit of creating separateness by being judgemental and critical of my partner. I would judge small things about my partner such as the clothes they were wearing or their hairstyle choice, which served to drive a wedge between us.

One way to resolve my fears is to let go of my unhealthy thought-processes and learn to think as securely attached individuals do. They are programmed to expect their partners to be loving and responsive and don’t worry about losing their partners’ love. They feel extremely comfortable with intimacy, closeness, and vulnerability. They find it easy to communicate their needs and respond to their partners’ needs, and to do it on an equal level. Securely attached individuals respect their partner’s needs, feelings, and requests for closeness as equal.

My interactions with my family have changed slightly as a result of the inner work I have been doing. It has become much easier for me to identify my family’s present unsafe behaviors and defend myself against them or avoid them. I also see more clearly their pain and can be kind and empathetic. For example, my mother’s tendency to panic under slight pressure became very obvious during our last call when I suggested she learn a simple technique on her iPhone. I think the combination of her anxiety and constantly being yelled at and called “dumb” by my father triggers her panic. My poor mother’s voice became frenzied and she immediately jumps into a fight or flight response (she is usually in fight mode). I patiently and gently walked her through the steps, repeating myself several times, and keeping my voice low and calm. I made a conscious effort to be a safe person myself for my mother.

I also began to see the bigger role my father plays in driving the anxiety of both my mother and me. My father’s untreated anxiety leads him to panic around situations that are slightly unexpected or intimidating. He is also constantly in fight or flight mode. His tendency to fall into panic and yell loudly with alarm and frenzy throws everyone around him off their centers. In one incident several years ago, I was parallel parking with him in the car and his anxious backseat driver directions completely threw me off. Instead of parking neatly and expertly, I took twice as long to finish parking and had to maneuver back and forth several extra times because his alarming voice made it more difficult to think clearly. His untreated trauma makes him an unsafe person towards me.

One other powerful force in my childhood who often prevented me from speaking up about my emotions and is a source of childhood emotional neglect is the matriarch of my family, my grandmother. As she was one of my childhood caretakers, she often preached the typical Chinese value of obedience. Her constant reminders to follow her orders, be quiet, not talk back, and never raise my voice, sent me the message that I was inherently bad. She had the habit of telling me to be “better” by changing something about myself. “You look like you got skinnier. You look like you gained weight. Did you remember to wash your bedsheets? Go out less and stay home and clean your house more often. Why is your Cantonese so poor?”

Her lessons on obedience became such strong behavioral conditioning that it lasted well into my adulthood. As was the case with my parents, I know my grandmother had the best intentions in her heart and does not know how to function in Western society. These lessons don’t allow room for me to make decisions that are against her and my parents’ wishes. It became a big obstacle I had to overcome to live my life according to my values which are very different from theirs. I was plagued with feelings of guilt and dreamt of my parents and being reprimanded by them and my grandmother. Some mornings, I woke with tears in my eyes with a vague feeling of helplessness and anguish. After working on finding my emotional voice in therapy and letting go of guilt for being “disobedient”, the nightmares subsided.

I exercised my new voice recently in a video call with my grandmother and aunt. It was the first time I spoke to them in three months, yet it only took ten minutes before they started commenting on my appearance and telling me what to do. “You look like you’ve gained weight. Your face is rounder. Your hair looks so long. You should cut it.” These comments would have normally caused me to feel guilty and lazy for having gained a couple of pounds (despite my existing efforts at eating healthy and exercising regularly) and compelled me to set up an appointment at the salon. This time, I took a different approach and I stood up for myself, firmly stating that my weight is not their concern and that I prefer they refrain from such comments. I refused to feel guilty and lazy due to their comments about my appearance. I was able to keep myself feeling safe despite their unsafe words.

“Injury to instinct cannot be underestimated as the root of [issues] when women act mad, are possessed by obsession, or when they are stuck in less malignant but nevertheless destructive patterns. The repair of injured instinct begins with acknowledging that a capture has taken place, that a soul famine has followed, that usual boundaries of insight and protection has been disturbed. The process that caused a woman’s capture and the ensuing famine has to be reversed…

…Regaining lost instinct and healing injured instinct is truly within one’s reach, for it returns when a woman pays close attention through listening, looking, and sensing the world around herself, and then by acting as she sees others act; efficiently, effectively, and soulfully. The opportunity to observe others who have instincts well-intact are central to retrieval. Eventually, the listening, looking, acting in an integral manner becomes a pattern with a rhythm to it, one you practice until it is relearned and becomes automatic again…

…If our own wild natures have been wounded by something or someone, we refuse to lie down and die. We refuse to normalize this wound. We call up our instincts and do what we have to do.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.