A journey to Inner Healing

It was pretty early on that I realized I couldn’t share my struggles and worries with my parents. They would either invalidate my feelings or simply become angry and defensive if they didn’t like what they were hearing. I would keep things to myself until they would inquire about what was happening in my life and with some hope I would try to depend on them. Only to be reminded exactly why I couldn’t trust them. I’m not entirely sure when I completely stopped sharing anything with them other than pleasant events or “safe” topics. Sometimes I would feed them lies just to be able to say something because I had nothing I could share without feeling anxiety, believing that they might end up yelling at me again or sharing with our extended family. Anyways, I’m an adult now and the trust has never been rebuilt nor do I care to try or even want to. I honestly don’t mind keeping things to myself. I never have to worry about what I say being shared with others. We all hope we can trust people to keep what we say to them in confidence to themselves. But most of the time it’s not going to happen.

I very much love my parents and have much affection for family around me. But there’s probably only one person I believe will keep what I tell them private and I try to hold myself that standard as well. I personally don’t like speaking about other peoples lives if I can help it unless it involves me in some way. But, anyways my mother had brought up my brother and asked if he had talked to us about a pretty delicate matter. My sister and I said yes and I tried to move on from the subject, I just didn’t feel the need to recap the conversation since we all pretty much had a talk with him already. But of course my mother and sister are yappers and the subject wasn’t dropped right away. I tried to keep things vague and tried to steer the conversation away.

But there was something that my mother said that gave me pause and although she hadn’t outright told us information he hadn’t shared with us. I was able to pick it up through context clues and in my shocked I blurted it out. It was a very private matter and she looked me like “oh fuck”. She tried to say “I thought he talked to you two already.” I tried to calmly explain he’s not going to tell us every detail, we knew of the general situation but that was it. I was frustrated with myself for blurting out something so private and even now I feel terrible because it was obviously not something he wanted me to know or he would have told me. I told both my sister and mother to never talk about our private business to anyone outside our intermediate family because although things may be kept vague it’s easy to read between the lines if someone is sharp enough.

This is just one example of why I am so reluctant to speak to anyone about anything that I deem a private matter. It doesn’t just happen with family. Friends, colleagues, acquaintances are fully capable of spreading whatever you say and maybe they don’t do it with harmful intentions. After all sometimes you don’t do know their partners, or their families etc. so they feel like that information isn’t going to get back to you. But it can still be harmful if it was a truly delicate matter.

My advice, keep it in your diary. If you can’t share something with everyone or would feel some type of way if it got back to another person when you didn’t want them to know, be more selective on who you trust to share that information with. More times that not people will tell you exactly who they are and what their habits are, believe them.