u/PeterOlintoforPrez

I'll try to paint the picture as clearly as possible. I'm a 31-year-old male, living in the United States, and my life has come to a complete halt. I'm still looking for answers as to what happened to me. I'm working with a therapist, a spiritual advisor, and a psychiatrist.

I've been lost for most of my life and I've come to learn that I might have been operating on some kind of autopilot, dissociated state, enmeshment, no sense of self, or (likely) a combination of the four. I think I failed to individuate from my parents and I've definitely failed to launch. It felt like someone snapped and I became 31 and I don't know what happened to my life. I'll explain...

I grew up in a college town in Oregon and my dad is an immigrant from the middle east. He started a business when he arrived in the U.S. (started it the same year I was born) and he's now worth +$100M because of the business he built. I believe he was in some kind of survival mode when he moved to the U.S. Dropped out of school when he was 14, didn't know english when he immigrated, is a workaholic. He recently told me the wealth didn't bring him happiness, just made his life more complicated. But he did want to prove himself in this country. My mom is American and I've now come to realize that neither of my parents are very sophisticated.

I went to a local state school for college, studied Accounting, worked at an accounting firm, then at a real estate firm, and recently went to a top business school on the East Coast. During my 20s I kind of drifted, just working jobs, not really traveling, barely dating, almost like I was just sleepwalking. In business school I was surrounded by ambitious peers who were sophisticated, well-educated, resourced, and privileged. I was getting pressure in school to take over my dad's business and honestly I didn't know what to do with my life. It was a really stressful experience for me and I started to notice the gap in maturity, life experience, sophistication, worldliness, and confidence between me and my peers. Business school came and went in a flash, and after graduating I had a mental breakdown. I realized I didn't know who I was, what I wanted from life, that so many years had passed; it felt like I was on planet earth for the first time. Like I didn't know how to be a human before. I ended up going to a mental health treatment center after months of just being depressed back in my childhood bedroom. At the treatment center I learned about enmeshment, attachment styles, sense of self, dissociation, generational trauma, all of it. It was overwhelming and I think I came to realize that I was living an unexamined life. But why? I think a lot of it comes down to parenting and how you were raised.

I'm now living in my family's second home in a resort town in Oregon. I've gained about 70lbs in the last year. I've been depressed for over a year now. I'm lonely. I'm disoriented. I feel stuck in this life and this body. I'm basically just existing and feeding myself. I want to be someone else. I don't understand how people can be so ambitious but also find the balance in life to enjoy it. I see other people living their lives and I don't understand how people just seem to go about their lives. I wake up every day and the instant I'm conscious I'm flooded with grief and regret for the life that I've slept-walked through. I don't know how I ended up here. My career is fucked. I can't work because my head is so messed up now. It feels like I somehow screwed up the one life we get on this earth. I thought I was doing the right things and trying my best. In my 20s I made some very questionable life decisions that I look back on with complete confusion. It's like I wasn't in control of my own life. Like I didn't know the rules. I feel like I never defined my values that come naturally to others.

I don't have one memory of my dad spending time with me growing up, so I definitely have a father wound. My younger brother has had his own struggles. Neither of us are thriving despite our dad's success in this country. I have no purpose and I have no confidence in being able to get married or have kids. Honestly at this point things are so bad that I just want to move to Amsterdam, buy a houseboat, and sail off into the sunset.

So yeah, that's where I'm at. Does anyone know how this could happen to someone? Or have a name for what I'm going through? Please let me know if I can clarify anything or if there are any questions as to what specifically I'm experiencing. It feels like I'm completely stuck and I don't know what happened or how this could happen to a human.

I'll try to paint the picture as clearly as possible. I'm a 31-year-old male, living in the United States, and my life has come to a complete halt. I'm still looking for answers as to what happened to me. I'm working with a therapist, a spiritual advisor, and a psychiatrist.

I've been lost for most of my life and I've come to learn that I might have been operating on some kind of autopilot, dissociated state, enmeshment, no sense of self, or (likely) a combination of the four. I think I failed to individuate from my parents and I've definitely failed to launch. It felt like someone snapped and I became 31 and I don't know what happened to my life. I'll explain...

I grew up in a college town in Oregon and my dad is an immigrant from the middle east. He started a business when he arrived in the U.S. (started it the same year I was born) and he's now worth +$100M because of the business he built. I believe he was in some kind of survival mode when he moved to the U.S. Dropped out of school when he was 14, didn't know english when he immigrated, is a workaholic. He recently told me the wealth didn't bring him happiness, just made his life more complicated. But he did want to prove himself in this country. My mom is American and I've now come to realize that neither of my parents are very sophisticated.

I went to a local state school for college, studied Accounting, worked at an accounting firm, then at a real estate firm, and recently went to a top business school on the East Coast. During my 20s I kind of drifted, just working jobs, not really traveling, barely dating, almost like I was just sleepwalking. In business school I was surrounded by ambitious peers who were sophisticated, well-educated, resourced, and privileged. I was getting pressure in school to take over my dad's business and honestly I didn't know what to do with my life. It was a really stressful experience for me and I started to notice the gap in maturity, life experience, sophistication, worldliness, and confidence between me and my peers. Business school came and went in a flash, and after graduating I had a mental breakdown. I realized I didn't know who I was, what I wanted from life, that so many years had passed; it felt like I was on planet earth for the first time. Like I didn't know how to be a human before. I ended up going to a mental health treatment center after months of just being depressed back in my childhood bedroom. At the treatment center I learned about enmeshment, attachment styles, sense of self, dissociation, generational trauma, all of it. It was overwhelming and I think I came to realize that I was living an unexamined life. But why? I think a lot of it comes down to parenting and how you were raised.

I'm now living in my family's second home in a resort town in Oregon. I've gained about 70lbs in the last year. I've been depressed for over a year now. I'm lonely. I'm disoriented. I feel stuck in this life and this body. I'm basically just existing and feeding myself. I want to be someone else. I don't understand how people can be so ambitious but also find the balance in life to enjoy it. I see other people living their lives and I don't understand how people just seem to go about their lives. I wake up every day and the instant I'm conscious I'm flooded with grief and regret for the life that I've slept-walked through. I don't know how I ended up here. My career is fucked. I can't work because my head is so messed up now. It feels like I somehow screwed up the one life we get on this earth. I thought I was doing the right things and trying my best. In my 20s I made some very questionable life decisions that I look back on with complete confusion. It's like I wasn't in control of my own life. Like I didn't know the rules. I feel like I never defined my values that come naturally to others.

I don't have one memory of my dad spending time with me growing up, so I definitely have a father wound. My younger brother has had his own struggles. Neither of us are thriving despite our dad's success in this country. I have no purpose and I have no confidence in being able to get married or have kids. Honestly at this point things are so bad that I just want to move to Amsterdam, buy a houseboat, and sail off into the sunset.

So yeah, that's where I'm at. Does anyone know how this could happen to someone? Or have a name for what I'm going through? Please let me know if I can clarify anything or if there are any questions as to what specifically I'm experiencing. It feels like I'm completely stuck and I don't know what happened or how this could happen to a human.

I have felt lost for most of my life. I think I have a deep father wound and never built my sense of self. My father is an immigrant to the U.S. and never really guided me or built a relationship with me. I’m a like able person and can make friends easily but I’ve really drifted throughout my 20s. I’ve struggled knowing how to build a career, was never that good of a student, really just kind of have been working and exercising most of my 20s and not much else than that. I’ve barely dated. Didn’t really travel much. Not really sure how to take a vacation and just enjoy myself.

I’m genuinely curious how some people are just so good at life. They are worldly, smart, travel the world, are ambitious, well-educated, have good careers, fulfilling social life and relationships, they’re happy, they know how to dress well, usually affluent, they know how the world works. For example one of my friends has his pilot's license and flies all over Europe. How are some people just so confident in how they carry themselves throughout this complex world? I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking through my life and I had a mental breakdown recently because of it. I was super naive and never even knew it. Feeling really stuck.

I'm 31 years old and I'm just now starting to understand how I got here. I recently got out of a mental health treatment center and I'm sitting with this overwhelming question: how did my entire life just... happen to me without me ever actually choosing it?

Here's my story. I grew up in a college town in Oregon. My dad is an immigrant who built a successful business from nothing — genuinely impressive. But he never once sat me down and asked what I wanted to do with my life. Not once. He assumed that because he'd built something, my brother and I were "set." He wanted to prove himself in America and he did. But somewhere in that mission, asking his sons who they wanted to become never made the list. He's not a bad guy. He just never talked to me about life or guided me at all.

My mom had her own dynamic — I won't get into all of it, but I suspect there was a lot of enmeshment there. I'm not sure I was ever fully "seen" as a separate person with my own inner life.

So I graduated high school with no real sense of self and said I wanted to study "business" and go to a school with a football team. Not because I'd thought about it. Just because those were the most culturally legible answers I could reach for.

Then it just... kept going like that.

- Graduated from local state school, moved to SF at 22 for a job at a Big 4 accounting firm

- Got my CPA because I guess that's what accountants do

- Got recruited to a real estate private equity firm by a mentor (let's call him Surrogate Father) — who I now realize I was using to fill the void my emotionally unavailable dad left. My actual dad never guided me, and I latched onto Surrogate Father to fill that role.

- Covid hits, move back home to parents to work remote

- Surrogate Father says move to Nashville, so I move to Nashville in 2021. Month to month lease. No end game.

- Move to NYC for a summer to housesit for Surrogate Father. Watch his cats.

- That somehow becomes my full time life. Move to NYC permanently with no job lined up.

- Quit my remote job to work remotely for my dad's business from my apartment in Manhattan. Looking back, pure enmeshment.

- Feeling completely lost, getting pressure from Surrogate Father and others to take over the family business

- Apply to a top MBA program because it seemed like the next thing to do

- Business school is a whirlwind. Stressed out of my mind. Spending my time trying to do real estate deals for my family, helping plan family vacations, doing succession planning — anything except focusing on my own life or my own development.

- Graduation comes fast. Mental breakdown. Depression. A genuine reckoning with what happened to my 20s.

- Treatment center.

- Now I'm 31, sitting in a quiet place trying to figure out how any of this happened.

The thing that haunts me is that I went to business school explicitly to focus on the family business — and then at graduation realized that wasn't what I wanted at all. I spent two years and an enormous amount of money preparing for a life I didn't actually want. And I didn't even know that until it was over.

I'm starting to think the through-line is that I never individuated. I never actually separated psychologically from my family system and built an identity of my own. I used Surrogate Father as a stand-in because my real father never filled that role — and so I just kept outsourcing my decisions to whoever was in that position. Surrogate Father's suggestions became my life's itinerary. All the while, I never just...stopped and enjoyed life. Oh and I barely dated during all of this time too.

I'm pretty angry at my dad. He gave what he had. But I genuinely went 30 years without anyone — including myself — asking what I want. What do I want from my life? What kind of life do I want to build?

And now I'm on the other side of a breakdown trying to answer that question for the first time.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? The feeling that your life just happened to you — that you were a passenger the whole time without realizing it? I'm looking for anyone who has insight into the enmeshment piece, the failed individuation, the surrogate father dynamic. I genuinely still don't fully understand how this could happen to a person. How do you just... live 30 years without ever asking what you want and let your life spiral out of control?

Any perspective would mean a lot.

Background

My dad is an immigrant who came to America from a war-torn country and built a successful business from nothing. Remarkable achievement. But he was in pure survival mode his entire life and never left it. He recently told me he never asked himself what he wanted from life. He didn't build a relationship with me. When I confronted him about it recently he shrugged and said "why can't we start now" — and then told me part of the blame was on me because I never gave him strong enough hugs. He has no hobbies, no male friends, no inner life outside the business. Zero accountability. Zero self-reflection. Zero self-improvement.

My mom I believe is a narcissist. Her entire identity is performed through social media — Instagram and Facebook full of perfectly curated family photos, devoted wife and mother narrative, using me and my brother as props. She texted me during business school that her best years were slipping by and it was on her heart every day. At my graduation — while I was having a mental breakdown — she was posting the moment on Instagram as the first stop of her May adventure. She has never apologized. She still doesn't see it.

What happened to me

I'm 31 now and I'm only beginning to understand that I may have been chronically dissociated, without a real sense of self, and completely unable to reflect on my own life for essentially all of it.

Here's what I mean...

I didn't choose my college. I just ended up at the university in my hometown because it was the next obvious thing. My college essays were about my dad's immigrant story — not about who I was. Because I didn't know who I was. I got senior year without it registering and I think I was probably depressed without knowing it. I was that disconnected from my own feelings.

I was also genuinely naive about the world — and I didn't even know that either. I didn't know how competitive college admissions were. I didn't know that your first job shapes your trajectory. I didn't know that the choices I was sleepwalking through had real, permanent consequences. Nobody had equipped me with that awareness and I wasn't awake enough to develop it on my own.

When college ended I didn't reflect on it. Didn't ask what I learned, how I grew, what I wanted next. It just ended and I moved toward the next external signal — an accounting degree means job in accounting, so I went to PwC in San Francisco. I wiped those two years from my memory the moment I left because they meant nothing to me. I had never wanted to do accounting. It just happened.

Then I met two male mentor figures. And this is where it gets hard to explain.

The first one influenced my college major. The second one recruited me to my second job in real estate. Then he told me to move to Nashville from the west coast (no job there, just working remote). Then New York City (again no job there, just working remote). Then business school. At every single fork in the road one of these two men was pointing the direction and I followed without question. Not because I was weak exactly. But because I had no internal compass of my own to consult. There was nothing inside saying wait, is this what I want? And I didn't even know I was doing this at the time. It just felt like life. In hindsight I was lost and didn't have purpose. It's like I couldn't take an inventory of my own life.

I moved to Manhattan to watch my friend's cats for a summer. Then signed a lease nearby because I'd gotten used to the neighborhood. I drifted into a relationship because a girl I was seeing asked how she should introduce me to her parents and I took the hint. I went to business school in New York and for my life story — the moment you're supposed to stand up and say this is who I am — I told a room full of classmates about my dad's falling out with his brother.

I was 30 years old and I still didn't have a story of my own.

When business school ended I said I was going to join my family business and went back to the west coast. The place I grew up. Back inside my mom's orbit. Back into my dad's story. With an MBA and no idea what I actually wanted.

And then I had a mental breakdown.

And for the first time — genuinely for the first time — I felt like I knew my life was actually happening. Like I had finally arrived inside it.

Where I am now

I wake up every single day and the first thing that hits me is depression. Deep regret. Grief for a life I feel like I missed. Like I was handed this one life and I wasn't there for it — not really. It didn't feel like something I created through my own values and choices. It feels like something that happened to me.

I have suicidal ideation. Not because I want to die but because I feel stuck — stuck in this body, stuck in this life that doesn't feel like mine, stuck grieving years I can't get back.

I'm in treatment and I have support. But the weight of it is immense.

What I think was going on

I think I was living an unexamined, unexplained life. No narrative coherence. Just disconnected chapters that began and ended without being processed or integrated. Birthdays would pass and I wouldn't register them as mine. Years would accumulate and I wasn't tracking them. I couldn't see my future. I couldn't reflect on my past. It's like I was a ghost moving through a life that technically belonged to me but never felt like it.

I think the combination of a narcissistic mother who enmeshed me and an emotionally absent father who never modeled interiority or selfhood meant I never developed the internal architecture to actually live consciously. No sense of self. No agency. No narrator tracking my own story.

I didn't know I was lonely in Nashville. I didn't know I was depressed in college. I didn't know I was dissociated. I just didn't know.

Has anyone else experienced this? Does this resonate? What do you think actually happened to me?

I've been doing a lot of work recently trying to understand why I've felt so disconnected from my own life for as long as I can remember. And the more I dig, the more I keep coming back to my dad.

His story

My dad is an immigrant who came to America from a war-torn country in the Middle East with nothing and built a successful business from scratch. By any external measure he won. He's created genuine generational wealth. It's a remarkable achievement and I don't want to take that away from him.

But here's the thing. He recently told me — completely unprompted — that he never asked himself what he wanted from life. Just said it like it was a neutral fact. No awareness of how significant that statement was. No recognition that it might explain anything about himself or about us. He said that he missed a lot in his life, and that he wanted to prove himself in America.

That's my dad in a sentence.

What alexithymia looks like in him

He cannot reflect. Not won't — cannot. If you try to have a genuine conversation about feelings, about the past, about relationships, about what things meant — he just doesn't have access to it. The dots are there but he can't connect them.

When I recently told him I was frustrated that he'd never built a real relationship with me he didn't sit with it, didn't grieve it, didn't say I'm sorry. He just shrugged and said "why can't we build one now?" Like the previous 31 years were a minor administrative detail we could simply skip past.

And then — this is the part that floored me — he said part of the blame was on me. Because I never gave him strong enough hugs.

That's not deflection in the calculated sense. I genuinely don't think he's being cruel. I think he literally cannot access the emotional logic of what I'm saying. The feeling isn't there so the understanding isn't there.

Survivalistic autopilot

I think he's been running on a kind of survivalistic autopilot for 30 years. Immigrant arrives, builds business, provides for family, keeps going. That operating system got him somewhere extraordinary. But it never switched off.

So now he's worth significant money and he has absolutely no idea how to enjoy it or share it or even fully feel it. No hobbies. No male friendships. No travel with his wife. No curiosity about the world outside Fox News and calls with extended family overseas. He sits in his recliner. He goes to work. He visits his 98 year old mother. That's the loop.

He created generational wealth and doesn't know what it's for.

How it affected me

I'm 31 and I'm only now understanding that I think I absorbed his emotional blindness without knowing it. I moved through my entire 20s without reflecting on my life, without knowing what I wanted, without feeling the weight of my own choices. Chapters would begin and end and I couldn't process them. Birthdays would pass and I wasn't registering them as mine.

I didn't know I was lonely. I didn't know I was depressed. I didn't know I was dissociated. I just didn't know — exactly the way he just doesn't know.

He couldn't model emotional awareness because he didn't have it. Couldn't teach reflection because he'd never done it. Couldn't show me how to enjoy being alive because he never learned that either.

I think I inherited a version of whatever this is. And I'm only now, painfully, trying to learn what he never could.

Does this resonate with anyone here?

I've posted here before about enmeshment. But I want to lay out my whole story and ask what you think actually happened to me, because I'm still trying to make sense of it.

Background

My dad is an immigrant who came to America from a war-torn country and built a successful business from nothing. Remarkable achievement. But he was in pure survival mode his entire life and never left it. He recently told me he never asked himself what he wanted from life. He didn't build a relationship with me. When I confronted him about it recently he shrugged and said "why can't we start now" — and then told me part of the blame was on me because I never gave him strong enough hugs. He has no hobbies, no male friends, no inner life outside the business. Zero accountability. Zero self-reflection. Zero self-improvement.

My mom I believe is a narcissist. Her entire identity is performed through social media — Instagram and Facebook full of perfectly curated family photos, devoted wife and mother narrative, using me and my brother as props. She texted me during business school that her best years were slipping by and it was on her heart every day. At my graduation — while I was having a mental breakdown — she was posting the moment on Instagram as the first stop of her May adventure. She has never apologized. She still doesn't see it.

What happened to me

I'm 31 now and I'm only beginning to understand that I may have been chronically dissociated, without a real sense of self, and completely unable to reflect on my own life for essentially all of it.

Here's what I mean...

I didn't choose my college. I just ended up at the university in my hometown because it was the next obvious thing. My college essays were about my dad's immigrant story — not about who I was. Because I didn't know who I was. I got senior year without it registering and I think I was probably depressed without knowing it. I was that disconnected from my own feelings.

I was also genuinely naive about the world — and I didn't even know that either. I didn't know how competitive college admissions were. I didn't know that your first job shapes your trajectory. I didn't know that the choices I was sleepwalking through had real, permanent consequences. Nobody had equipped me with that awareness and I wasn't awake enough to develop it on my own.

When college ended I didn't reflect on it. Didn't ask what I learned, how I grew, what I wanted next. It just ended and I moved toward the next external signal — an accounting degree means job in accounting, so I went to PwC in San Francisco. I wiped those two years from my memory the moment I left because they meant nothing to me. I had never wanted to do accounting. It just happened.

Then I met two male mentor figures. And this is where it gets hard to explain.

The first one influenced my college major. The second one recruited me to my second job in real estate. Then he told me to move to Nashville from the west coast (no job there, just working remote). Then New York City (again no job there, just working remote). Then business school. At every single fork in the road one of these two men was pointing the direction and I followed without question. Not because I was weak exactly. But because I had no internal compass of my own to consult. There was nothing inside saying wait, is this what I want? And I didn't even know I was doing this at the time. It just felt like life. In hindsight I was lost and didn't have purpose. It's like I couldn't take an inventory of my own life.

I moved to Manhattan to watch my friend's cats for a summer. Then signed a lease nearby because I'd gotten used to the neighborhood. I drifted into a relationship because a girl I was seeing asked how she should introduce me to her parents and I took the hint. I went to business school in New York and for my life story — the moment you're supposed to stand up and say this is who I am — I told a room full of classmates about my dad's falling out with his brother.

I was 30 years old and I still didn't have a story of my own.

When business school ended I said I was going to join my family business and went back to the west coast. The place I grew up. Back inside my mom's orbit. Back into my dad's story. With an MBA and no idea what I actually wanted.

And then I had a mental breakdown.

And for the first time — genuinely for the first time — I felt like I knew my life was actually happening. Like I had finally arrived inside it.

Where I am now

I wake up every single day and the first thing that hits me is depression. Deep regret. Grief for a life I feel like I missed. Like I was handed this one life and I wasn't there for it — not really. It didn't feel like something I created through my own values and choices. It feels like something that happened to me.

I have suicidal ideation. Not because I want to die but because I feel stuck — stuck in this body, stuck in this life that doesn't feel like mine, stuck grieving years I can't get back.

I'm in treatment and I have support. But the weight of it is immense.

What I think was going on

I think I was living an unexamined, unexplained life. No narrative coherence. Just disconnected chapters that began and ended without being processed or integrated. Birthdays would pass and I wouldn't register them as mine. Years would accumulate and I wasn't tracking them. I couldn't see my future. I couldn't reflect on my past. It's like I was a ghost moving through a life that technically belonged to me but never felt like it.

I think the combination of a narcissistic mother who enmeshed me and an emotionally absent father who never modeled interiority or selfhood meant I never developed the internal architecture to actually live consciously. No sense of self. No agency. No narrator tracking my own story.

I didn't know I was lonely in Nashville. I didn't know I was depressed in college. I didn't know I was dissociated. I just didn't know.

Has anyone else experienced this? Does this resonate? What do you think actually happened to me?

For context — my mom was enmeshing and I've shared some of that here before. My dad is an immigrant from a war-torn country who came to America in survival mode and never really left it. Built a successful business. Emotionally absent my entire childhood. Never asked himself what he wanted from life — his words.

I'm 31 and I'm only now starting to understand what actually happened to me.

The thing I keep coming back to is drift. My whole life has been drift. I didn't choose my college — I just ended up there. I didn't choose my career path — someone recruited me and I followed. I moved cities because other people suggested it. I went to business school and when it ended I just told peers I was going back to the family business and went back home without once asking myself what I actually wanted.

Chapters of my life would begin and end and I had no ability to reflect on them. College ended and I didn't ask what I learned, how I grew, what I wanted to carry forward. Jobs ended the same way. Relationships. Entire years. Just... gone. No integration. No narrative.

I was working remotely for a period — physically alone, no real community, no roots — and I couldn't even register that my own life was happening. Birthdays would pass. Years would pass. And I wasn't tracking them as mine. Like I was watching someone else's life from a slight distance and even that felt blurry.

It's like my life was never a coherent story. Just disconnected chapters with no through line. No author.

I'm learning now that this is probably what enmeshment does when it combines with an emotionally absent father. You never develop a self. You never learn that your interior life is worth consulting. You become incredibly good at reading external signals and following them. And you drift.

I didn't know my own life was happening. I feel like I've had no agency over my own life and that things just happened to me.

Is this familiar to anyone here?

I'm going to try to put this into words because I think others here will recognize it.

I'm 31 and I'm only now understanding what happened to me growing up. My mother is a narcissist. Not a diagnosed one — but everything I've learned about narcissistic parenting maps onto my childhood with frightening precision.

She was always there — but it was never really about me. From a very young age I became her emotional surrogate. Her sounding board, her anxiety container, her confidant. She would text me while I was 3,000 miles away at graduate school to unload her stress about the family business, her retirement fears, her marital frustrations. Not "how are you, how's school" — just downloading her overwhelm onto me and expecting me to manage it. She needed me close, so she unconsciously made the world feel unsafe. That's enmeshment.

She never individuated from her own mother — who I'm fairly certain was a narcissist herself — so she never let me or my brother individuate either. My emotional bandwidth for thirty years went toward managing her feelings, her image, her anxiety — while I had no idea who I actually was.

To make things worse my dad is a first generation immigrant who built a remarkably successful business from nothing — and is one of the most emotionally unavailable people I have ever encountered. He operated entirely in survival and provision mode his entire life. No attunement, no curiosity about who I was, no transmission of values or life knowledge or emotional presence. He told me recently he never once asked himself what he wanted from his life. He has no favorite music, no favorite movie, no inner life that I can detect. When I brought up the concept of a sense of self he genuinely didn't know what I meant — at 68 years old. He was physically present growing up but never actually there. And when I recently told him he never built a relationship with me his immediate response was "why can't we build one now." No acknowledgment of what was lost. No sitting with the weight of it. Just a pivot to the next action item. I got two parents who failed me in completely different ways — one through engulfment, one through absence. Together they covered every angle.

I grew up with no sense of self. Chronically dissociated. No direction. No inner life. A ghost moving through my own existence without knowing it.

When I try to bring any of this to her now she immediately defends her image. No accountability. No genuine apology. Just protection of the story she tells about herself — the devoted mother, the loving wife, the woman who gave everything.

She posted about my graduation on Instagram twice. The same day I had a mental breakdown at the ceremony. She couldn't see my collapse because the photo opportunity was more real to her than I was.

She took every significant moment of my life and made it content. My trip to Europe at 20 — posted. A family trip where I finally confronted my father in a letter about his absence — posted as a fun family vacation within days.

The performance of family was always more important than the actual experience of being in one.

I'm in therapy doing serious work on this. It's equal parts devastating and clarifying. If you grew up with a narcissistic mother I'd love to hear how you recognized it and what the healing has looked like.

I’ve been doing deep work in therapy lately and I keep coming back to my dad. I want to try to put it into words because I think others here might recognize pieces of this.

My dad came to America as a young immigrant from a war-torn country with nothing. Left school at 14. Built a remarkably successful business from scratch — by any external measure he won. Completely. And yet he is one of the most joyless, emotionally absent, hollow people I have ever encountered.

He has no favorite movie. No music he loves. No inner life that I can detect. When I brought up the concept of a sense of self recently he genuinely didn’t know what I meant. At 68 years old.

He told me he never once asked himself what he wanted from his life. He just executed a program — survive, prove himself in America, build, provide, endure. The business was his identity and I now believe it was also his escape. From the marriage. From himself. From the stillness that might have forced him to feel something.

He was physically present growing up. Came to games. Was home at night. But he was never actually there. No attunement. No curiosity about who I was. No transmission of values or life knowledge or emotional presence. No accountability. He made major financial decisions involving my name without ever explaining them. He based his entire approach to preparing me for adulthood on a secondhand rumor from another kid’s dad.

When I try to talk to him about any of this he says he did his job. He provided. He calls me ungrateful.

I am 31 years old and I spent the first three decades of my life dissociated — no sense of self, no direction, no idea my own life was even happening — and this man is a central reason why. You cannot transmit what you don’t have. He never had a self to model for me.

The worst part? He admitted he missed a lot in his life. He knows. But there’s no grief in it, no accountability, no turning toward the sons who paid the price for his proving. Just a shrug and forward movement.

I got extremely unlucky. But I’m awake now.