Hey folks,

Growing up, I was known for being a really happy and social kid. I had a pretty good social life up until the end of 9th grade. 

9th grade was the same year my parents announced they were getting a divorce. Just a year earlier, 8th grade, was when I came to terms with some really traumatic stuff that happened to me when I was 5 years old that my parents never really did anything about.

The stress from my parents’ messy, messy divorce and their inability to really help me process what had happened when I was younger slowly imploded my social life. I went from doing something every weekend with friends to playing video games, smoking weed, and crying in bed while contemplating suicide.

My inability to pull myself together kind of spilled over into college. I was good at making friends, but I was a loose cannon (drinking till I blacked out, doing dumb belligerent shit, bitching out friends over nothing, etc). It burned lots of bridges over 4 years.

Today, life is going better. I have a well-paying job in a city far, far away from home that I’ll be moving to soon (I’ve been working remotely for about a year), I have a long-term girlfriend who I love very much, and I haven’t had any suicidal thoughts in a long time. 

But I struggle with strong feelings of resentment towards my parents and family and I still have lots of residual social anxiety from everything that’s happened. Every time I try to bring up my traumas for closure, they always wave it off, saying “I get that it sucked but it’s in the past”. My dad had a father who told him the same thing, and he grew up in a rough country. I want to hate him for leaving me in the dust, but he’s only applying all that he’s learned. 

Basically, I feel like I was robbed of my adolescence, and by extension, a proper college experience. And there’s a very clear line of when I had a stable social life before and after the onset of the divorce. My parents try so hard to love me, they really do, but they’re just from a different time. They fall very short of what I needed from them. The irony is that I’m the baby of 4 kids, and my much older sibs (they were all already moved out pre-divorce) have joked about me being shown more attention than the three of them combined. 

How can I work to resolve my feelings of resentment towards them? How do I exercise compassion from them while accepting the fact that they were the direct cause of the strong social anxiety I developed and still struggle with today (although the pandemic has definitely played a big part). 

Thanks for any advice. If I sound like I’m finger pointing, please lmk. Asking for bluntness here.