OVER and over again, I keep hearing LGBT people in Malaysia sharing about how our parents are controlling us, how we are so afraid of displeasing our parents, to such a degree that we are paralysed.

In fact, many of us would rather hurt ourselves than our parents. We have confined ourselves to living very unhappy lives for the sake of our parents’ happiness – and yet, they never seem happy themselves. Gosh, our families are so dysfunctional! (Though I wrote this for the LGBT people in my group, I feel it may apply to many here, so I am sharing it for all.)

This is a long-a** comment I wrote to one member, who recently expressed the same thing:

Dear xxx, thanks for sharing. What you are going through is not easy. I think part of the difficulty in imagining your way out is due to how you see yourself and your relationship with your parents.

How you see the problem determines your ability to see your solution. So, I want to suggest a few ways you can begin the process of seeing yourself differently. As an equal to them.

You see, our parents are imperfect and human like us. They have learned from our culture’s imperfect ways of expressing love, or even that it is weak to express anything.

People who have difficulty expressing love will also have difficulty perceiving love. People unsure of ever getting love often end up using control to get it. They mistake obedience for love.

Or, they think better obedience than love. Either way, it is not love. It is a form of abuse.

This abuse and control keeps us dependent on them for approval. It keeps us from growing into independent adults capable of love, capable of making our own choices.

And that is the point. They fear our independence from them because they fear we won’t need them, won’t love them, and worse, won’t respect them.

Respect. That is, perhaps, the ultimate measure of worth in patriarchal Asian cultures.

In all societies, parents are socially pressured to reproduce and have children, and then they reproduce the same social conditions through their children.

In other words, they need to ensure their children become them – just as they became their parents.

That’s why they taught us that to respect them is better than love, or that it is the same as love. People who cannot respect you will always demand respect. We think we are disrespecting them if we displease them, we think it means we don’t love them.

We feel irresponsible, bad, not filial, if we do anything to displease them. We have been conditioned from young to believe that our measure of worth comes from our parents’ approval.

Society demands that we depend on others, our teachers, our bosses, our government, for our individual sense of value, and our parents are tasked as the primary trainers so we learn to depend on them for our sense of value.

This need for value keeps us so hungry for their approval that we would do anything to get it. So, we learn to look at ourselves through our parents’ eyes. This is why every decision we have ever made and will ever make is processed this way: what will my parents feel about this decision? Will they approve? Will they be happy?

If you don’t believe me, try it the next time you are merely thinking of doing something different, whether big or small. “I wish I could stay out later, but what would my parents say?” “I wish I could change my job, but what would my parents say?” “I don’t want to get married yet, but what would my parents say?”

We know what they would say. They would say: “What would people say?”

That is how all our lives are regulated by society.

Our own happiness is secondary. Our first concern is our parents’ happiness. Thus, we are trained to see our lives through our parents’ eyes. Through our parents’ frightened, dimming eyes.

But, their fears are the same: being judged by their parents for being lousy children, being judged by their peers for being lousy parents, being judged by their race for being a bad representation of their race, etc.

They express these fears through controlling us because our worth as children helps improve their worth as parents, improve how they are viewed by others. They, too, see themselves through the eyes of their parents, of society. They, too, fear that deficit of personal value.

The problem isn’t our parents. It’s society.

So, you see, our parents are very human, very broken, very unhappy. They think they are independent, but from young, they, too, were subjected to the same conditions as us. They have remained trapped.

So now, they keep us in the same traps. We think we children are not free. Well, neither are our parents.

People who live their lives according to “what would people say?” never live the lives they truly want. They live in fear of being alienated and rejected. They second guess themselves all the time, they do everything to make others happy.

When they do things for themselves, they do them in secret, with guilt and shame and fear, hoping they would not be found out (even then, we notice our fathers getting away with it more than our mothers). In the end, nobody is happy.

What I want to say is this: the only way our parents can learn to be free is through us. It won’t be easy. We need to start seeing each other as equals. And, that we are responsible for our own happiness first.

Our parents’ happiness is not more important than ours. Our happiness is equally important. Your happiness is important to you. It is okay to want to be happy. And guess what? Your parents can absolutely learn to be happy for you.

We need to learn to be independent. And, we need to find our own worth, independent of our parent’s and society’s approval of us. This means slowly taking chances in exercising our own choices for ourselves. Then, learning to articulate to others, to our parents, why this choice is good for us. Learn to talk about what makes you happy, and stand by it.

That doesn’t mean we don’t love our parents. Of course, they only want to accept love that comes in a certain form, through specific actions that they recognise. Their language for expressing love is very limited, remember?

So, we need to help them expand their vocabulary. They, too, need to see themselves differently. They need to see different models for relating that are free of control and abuse. They need to learn not to depend on others for their sense of value.

And, as we become independent, show that we are still capable of loving them. In fact, loving them even though we don’t need them makes our love more meaningful.

I want to add that I’ve not proposed any solution. Strategies to free oneself are not “one size fits all” – what works for some won’t work for others. Some need many small steps towards independence, some need to walk out the door, some need to fight for it, while others were kicked out.

Seeking independence is easier for some than others, and the factors have to do with wealth, education, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. So, I’m not here to judge why there are some among us still stuck, why we can’t leave. We are different.

Those of us who have progressed further along can offer perspectives, create communities, make art, change the landscape to make it easier for others to walk in it. But, the step is still yours alone to take. Take it when you’re ready. Then, make the landscape easier for others.

Actually, we don’t even need to be completely independent before helping others. Realising your own worth as you create a space for yourself in the world could be the beginning of your freedom from needing your parents’ approval.

We won’t change them overnight. In fact, the journey will be frustrating. But, we need to start with ourselves. We need to see ourselves as independent and take the necessary step towards it. We are not responsible for changing our parents. Their change is their own responsibility. But hopefully, one day, they might be inspired by our change to take their own steps, too.

Hang in there. We are here with you, to walk this journey together. And together, we can work to challenge these unhealthy social expectations, and change the systems that chain us all, parents and children. – January 15, 2018.

* Pang Khee Teik reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.