Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
Sometimes a parent who seemed cold or impossible to please turns out to have been working with a different wiring altogether. Learning that can loosen something no amount of arguing with yourself would.
One young woman spent years reading her father's behaviour as a verdict on her, and later came to understand him as autistic, which she had never known. It does not make the childhood easier or excuse what was hard. What it changes is the sentence you carry: the difficulty was in how you two were wired to meet, rather than in you being someone he could not warm to.
Qur’an and Sunnah
avoid making too many assumptions (Quran 49:12). The instruction covers the assumptions you have made about people who hurt you, as well as the ones you fear they make about you.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱجۡتَنِبُواْ كَثِيرࣰ ا مِّنَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِنَّ بَعۡضَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِثۡمࣱۖ وَلَا تَجَسَّسُواْ وَلَا يَغۡتَب بَّعۡضُكُم بَعۡضًاۚ أَيُحِبُّ أَحَدُكُمۡ أَن يَأۡكُلَ لَحۡمَ أَخِيهِ مَيۡتࣰ ا فَكَرِهۡتُمُوهُۚ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ تَوَّابࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
Believers, avoid making too many assumptions- some assumptions are sinful- and do not spy on one another or speak ill of people behind their backs: would any of you like to eat the flesh of your dead brother? No, you would hate it. So be mindful of God: God is ever relenting, most merciful
Qur’an 49:12read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of twenty five studies of men's anxiety found it often appeared as irritability, risk taking or withdrawal rather than any admitted worry, with expectations about masculinity discouraging both disclosure and help seeking. That is one documented way a father's distance can be something other than what it looked like from the outside. It is about anxiety rather than autism, so treat it as an illustration that behaviour is often misread, not as evidence about any particular parent.
Fisher K, Seidler ZE, King K, Oliffe JL, Rice SM. (2021). Men's anxiety: A systematic review.. Journal of affective disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Blame for yourself loosens when a behaviour you took personally gets a different explanation.
When not to
A different explanation for a parent's behaviour is not the same as safety, so if what happened was abusive, that stays true whatever the reason behind it.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The steps that actually shift this are boring. Booking your own appointment, answering a call you would rather ignore, saying something to the person at the till.
There is a moment worth waiting for: when you can say what your anxiety does in your own words, without borrowing anyone's phrasing. That is usually when it starts to loosen.
Build the ladder from what you do now, not from what you think you should be managing. If phone calls are currently impossible, the first rung sits somewhere below a phone call.