In the previous posts, I explored how suppressing the natural storm of puberty forces our stress inward, giving birth to silent survival mechanisms like overthinking, hyper-vigilance, and chronic people-pleasing. Today, I want to pull back the curtain even further. I want to look at the exact behavioral patterns I witnessed growing up, patterns that the younger version of me accepted as absolute reality, but the adult version of me eventually recognized as deeply distorted and unhealthy.

Growing up, a phrase that constantly echoed through my household from my mom was, “This person is saying this about you,” or “They will think about you like this… it is not going to be okay.”

As a child, I took these warnings completely literally. I operated under a simple, terrifying equation: If I do not behave exactly the way my mother demands, the outside world will judge and reject me. It wasn’t until my twenties that this illusion finally shattered. A dear friend sat me down, looked at the immense anxiety I was carrying, and asked a simple, heartbreaking question.

“Why do you care about the opinions of others so much? It is clearly hurting you.”

That single question forced me to look at my childhood through a mature, objective lens. I had to ask myself: Was my mother constantly policing my behavior out of a genuine, loving concern for my well-being?

The answer was painful, but necessary to face. At the end of the day, she wasn’t protecting me; she was protecting her own ego. She was terrified that having a daughter who didn’t fit a specific social mold would bring shame upon her. My behavior was being treated as an extension of her reputation, entirely bypassing my humanity.

When I finally grew older and gained the vocabulary to express myself, I attempted to have an open conversation with my mom. I suggested that she needed to expand her scope that her way of seeing the world wasn’t the only correct way, and that there was a massive landscape of perspectives outside her own.

Her pushback was immediate and defensive. She turned it back on me, saying, “My scope is already big enough. Isn’t your scope the one that’s shallow?”

But as an adult, I looked at her lifestyle objectively. She deliberately chose to interact exclusively with a very narrow, specific circle of people.

There is a profound psychological danger in this. It is vital to evaluate whether the circle surrounding you is healthy or merely convenient. When strict, insecure individuals only associate with those who mirror their exact traits, those people do not become true friends, they become allies in avoidance. In that tiny circle, there is no accountability, no self-reflection, and no one asking the uncomfortable question: “Is how we are living actually right?”

Instead, they simply validate each other’s biases, growing stronger and more rigid inside their echo chamber. To my mom, being questioned by anyone outside that tiny circle triggered a deep, terrifying wave of insecurity. Because she could not tolerate the discomfort of self-reflection, she put up an impenetrable guard.

Because she lacked the emotional bandwidth to handle internal discomfort, my own pain became a threat to her peace, and it was constantly dismissed.

I vividly remember when I was being bullied at school. I came to her seeking a safe harbor, a parent who would listen to what was happening and offer guidance or protection. Instead, she weaponized the suffering of the world against me, saying, “There are people out there who cannot eat or survive one more day. Compared to them, don’t you think your situation isn’t as bad?”

The younger version of me internalized this as a command. I thought I had to be completely patient with the situation, stand up under the weight of it silently, and never complain. It became my survival mentality:

My pain is invalid because someone else is starving.…

But looking back, that was incredibly unhealthy. When a child is being bullied, a parent’s fundamental duty is to listen, to validate, and to co-regulate. Minimizing a child’s trauma by comparing it to global tragedy doesn’t teach true resilience; it teaches emotional numbness and erasure.

This inability to handle emotional complexity followed me into the most painful seasons of my life. When my beloved dog passed away from an illness at 12 years old, I was utterly broken. I had personally poured my heart into taking care of her for 10 years, though for the final two years, I had to move away from home to attend school.

When she passed, my mom called to deliver the news. But she couldn’t just give me the space to grieve. She added a crushing, subtle accusation, “It seems that when a close person is away, it negatively affects a pet’s lifespan.”

I was already drowning in sorrow, and she chose that precise moment to make me feel like my absence, my pursuit of my own education and life, was the reason our dog had died. It was a devastating deflection of her own grief, projected entirely onto me.

True communication in our household was never a bridge; it was a one-way emotional rollercoaster. Every single time I tried to establish a boundary, asking her to please read over her thoughts and calm down before texting me, she would instead unleash a barrage of 20 rapid-fire messages. She would shout words that didn’t connect the dots, reacting like a frustrated, volatile child.

I used to read those messages over and over again, exhausting my mental energy, desperately trying to find a logical thread to understand what she meant. It happened so many times throughout my life that a part of my brain eventually went completely numb. I hit a point where the emotional static was so loud that I couldn’t even tell where I stood or who I was.

When I finally confronted her directly and told her she needed to be aware of what she was saying, her response shocked me. She said: “There is no need to use proper, beautiful lines or structured words to communicate with my own daughter. I am saying what I want to say here, what is the issue with that?”

Hearing that was a massive revelation. To her, intimacy meant the freedom to dump raw, unfiltered emotional chaos onto me without filters, respect, or boundaries.

Like many who grew up in rigid households, I was constantly fed the narrative that this absolute strictness was simply another form of love. And to some small, healthy extent, that can be true. Children need structure; they need to learn discipline, patience, and how to navigate the natural boundaries of the world.

But there is a critical problem: very few parents are actually aware of the threshold where reasonable strictness morphs into something clearly unhealthy.

When a parent’s “discipline” begins to actively deteriorate a child’s mental health, causing them to pull out their hair, develop eating disorders, or go completely numb just to survive the day, it has crossed the line. It is no longer love. It is a profound boundary violation.

It leaves me completely speechless to look back and realize how easily this phrase was used as a universal excuse. It is a dangerous logical trap: if a parent convinces themselves that being harsh or overly strict equals loving deeply, then they never have to self-reflect. They can line up cruel words, humiliate you in public, and completely ignore your emotional distress, all while hiding behind the shield of their supposedly good intentions. But a love that requires you to sacrifice your sanity, your privacy, and your authentic self to keep a parent comfortable is not love at all. It is control wrapped in an honorable title.

Looking at my mom today with adult eyes, I do not deny or erase what she has done. But I have reached a place where I can accept her generational history. I know that the era she lived in heavily influenced her ideas of parenting, and that she likely inherited a deeply flawed blueprint from her own mother.

Part of me holds a mature appreciation for her. But let me be entirely clear, appreciating her history does not mean admitting that her behavior was correct.

True love cannot exist alongside destruction. I refuse to validate actions that cause deep, psychological harm to others. I know the cost of her behavior firsthand, not just through my own struggles, but through watching my sibling. I saw how this exact environment eroded their self-esteem and stripped away their self-confidence.

I choose to believe that most parents do not actively wish a harsh, traumatizing childhood upon their kids. But to those parents who hide behind their good intentions, I want to say this: Look back at how you have actually been behaving.

Because every single time a parent chooses to act out of raw, unmanaged ego, the children who suffer are forced to spend their precious energy trying to pick up their own broken pieces. Young people simply do not possess the biological or emotional ability to pull themselves out of that depth. When you are a child, you are entirely caught up in the desperate, exhausting loop of trying to please the adults around you just to feel safe.

It is only later in life, as we grow into adults with our own emotional understanding, that we look back and realize just how toxic it really was. And in my case, that realization only made the journey tougher. Unlearning survival habits that are wired into your nervous system is a long, heavy battle.

That is why the cycle must end with me.

I am proving that her blueprint is entirely incorrect for who I am. I choose to live my life genuinely, staying hyper-aware of these old patterns so I can actively stop them from evolving any further. To protect my mental health, I am willing to put up an unshakeable distance whenever it is damaged.

I am no longer letting the fear run the show. My brain is no longer numb. I am holding my boundaries, protecting my peace, and choosing a bigger, healthier horizon, not just for myself, but for the next generation.

I know that my mom might have genuinely faced difficulties figuring out how she should have parented or how she could have done things better. But that confusion doesn’t change reality; those unhealthy habits still crossed a line, and fear can no longer be used as an excuse. I have finally accepted that I cannot change her. But I can change myself, and I can still work day by day to build my own healing.

If you are reading this right now, and you find yourself in a similar situation or struggling to untangle yourself from these heavy cycles, I want you to take a deep breath. Look at how far you have come. I want to tell you directly: you are doing great. The fact that you are here, questioning these rules and seeking a healthier path, is proof of your immense resilience.

We are standing in the light now. Little by little, day by day, we are taking our power back.