My life has gone on, I eventually got involved in helping others through volunteering and by helping training people in the skills needed to find jobs.

I felt like you during the darkest period of my life, but eventually I rediscovered my faith in God, and this has really helped me.

My advice to you is to talk to people on the internet or in your community, (my physician recommended my psychologist). So find someone who is recommended and go see him. You need to get help and you will find a psychologist so much more caring. Also, you need to get out of your house and I would suggest volunteering and would recommend you visit around until you find a church you feel comfortable in. Reaching out to help others and getting contacts at your church will allow you to reconnect with yourself. There is nothing more healing then helping others. So many people have broken hearts and souls and so many need kindness and loving. And you have much to give. What you give you will get back a thousand fold. You will find comfort from God when you reach out to him and the members of your chosen church will become your friends and your support system.

I will keep you in my prayers and hope you find, by reaching out, the inner strength to get through this horrible time. A.

Looking back there was a total lack of respect on both sides, and a fundamental lack of understanding… for me, I felt stifled and uncomfortable at the thought of expressing myself in front of them, so any kind of communication felt totally unnatural… so I couldn’t show them who I really was (a bright, vivacious young woman who was hurting deeply and in desperate need of help.)
So they just saw my emotionally closed-off persona who was constantly angry and would lash out verbally without any good reason- and that was how they viewed me. If I had felt comfortable enough to let them see the ‘real me’ that everyone else saw, it would have been a different story… instead I was treated like a problem child and they constantly relied on the advice of my older siblings (self centred, culturally imperialistic, manipulative sods- but that’s another story!) I felt dehumanised, segregated and anxious in their presence which culminated in a mental breakdown and I left school, locking myself up in my room for the best part of a year and going out of my mind. Now that my circumstances have changed I feel as though they were kicking a dead horse- they had not earned my respect or my trust as a child and seemed to only care about my education- so no matter how they approached me I would still react by shutting down my emotions, as a defence mechanism. I feel terrible about the way I treated them, but at the same time I think that as grown adults they should have been able to help me instead of making my mental state worse. The family continues to blame me for past actions, not acknowledging that I was a minor at the time and that the responsibility fell upon them to do something about it. The whole thing has a continuing effect upon my ability to function as a human being and the only thing that stops me from ‘cutting them out’ is my feelings of pity towards my inept parents and fear of my siblings and their ability to shatter my reputation within my own community… I feel very unprotected and unsafe within my family situation, but thank god I have my boyfriend’s family looking out for me… hope this insight proves useful to someone.C.