TRAPPED Living With Parents: Depressed, NO Job, NO Friends, NO Social Life

Not all of us are lucky. Sometimes, we are forced to be in the environments we didn’t choose to be in. One of such environments is our family.

You don’t choose to be born in a strong, motivated, emotionally intelligent, caring family just as well as you don’t choose to be born in an abusive family of manipulators, alcoholics, overprotective, insecure people.

In this article, we’ll have a look at one of the million scenarios where a person finds themselves feeling lost and depressed living with parents. The outcomes of that scenario are:

• Recurring depression and anxiety
• Unemployment
• Lacking or degraded social circle
• No interests and intimate relationships

In addition to that, you’ll learn how to improve your life so that you can help your family in the most effective way.

Depressed living with parents: Faceless

You’re born. Here you are. Your journey has begun.

When you turn 30 you’re born again. You don’t understand how come that you’re still living with your parents. You’re unemployed. Your day-to-day routine is computer games, TV, and mobile overuse.

You don’t see much friends around you. There are either no friends or a fair portion of them are alcoholics. You tried to find a girlfriend, but you didn’t have anything to impress her, and she just used you while you had money. When the cash dried out she disappeared too. You concluded “All girls need money, handsome, and successful guys, and what am I? I am a failure, a loser.”

You feel depressed living with parents, you feel miserable. Sometimes, you like to chat about missed opportunities of “I wish”, “If only I”, “I’ve seen better.”  But hardly you ever come to the actual realization of these wishes.

You feel safe living with your mom. She loves you, she feeds you, you only buy stuff to upgrade your computer. Everything is not that bad. You wait till one day somebody will call you and say “Hey, I’ve got a great job for you. You’re already hired, come on.”

You wait until some random girl will accidentally find you on Facebook and text you to go out with her.

Wake the fuck up. It’s not going to happen.

Living in a dysfunctional family

You’ve been living in a dysfunctional family where due to overprotection, control, neglect, and abuse you’ve lost the ability to care for yourself. This is why you eat only what you find in the fridge. You don’t cook, you don’t exercise, you don’t even clean your own room.

In your family, every initiative gets highly critiqued and any question gets answered with an exclamative “I don’t know!” or simply ignored. You’re still treated as a kid who doesn’t have his own opinion. Moreover, everybody is trying to decide for you where you have to work, what neighbor’s girlfriend you have to date, and what your future should look like.

You’re being heavily controlled. Most of the time you’re bothered with problems you can’t solve such as government, climate change, ruin, crisis.

The reason why you’re bothered with these sophisticated issues is that they are a mess, and it’s very easy for you to provide solutions for these problems.

What’s even more important is that those things are not in control, unlike your life. Your life is controlled by your family, why bothering?

So, you don’t care about your situation, but you see yourself as an expert in solving other people or even world-class problems because your problems are already solved. Not by you, unfortunately.

You’ve got behavioral patterns imprinted in your head, and if you try to rebel against the system you’ll be quickly reminded that you’re nothing, and you’ve got no power to live differently.

Dysfunctional family characteristics

There are a lot of characteristics of a dysfunctional family which impact kids and adults who are trapped living with parents in various ways. However, the major characteristics include:

• Control (usually, combined with jealousy, insecurity, lack of attention from the parent’s side) – parents may spy on you, read your text messages, constantly monitor and micromanage your actions.
  
  
• Conflict (powered by extreme denial and disrespect, passive aggression) – parents may unreasonably call you the source of their problems, be too hard on you for no reason, and just initiate conflicts out of nothing.
  
  
• Abuse and Criticism (you’re not perfect, John does it better, you’re stupid, “wanna get beat up again”, sexual abuse)
  
  
• Indifference (sometimes powered by narcissism, aka “you need to win my attention”). Children of indifferent parents usually say “My mom did not interfere with my life. She didn’t even bring me up. I did it myself.”

There are more traits of dysfunctional families, however, these are the combinations that I’ve seen, met, or was told about from people whom I know.

If you’ve found yourself living in a dysfunctional family, you may want to consult a family psychologist as your situation can be unique, and only qualified assistance may be the most helpful.

If you don’t feel like visiting a psychologist, then I encourage you to be mindful and pay attention to what’s happening in your family. Obviously, there is a system, and it’s up to you to figure out all the dots of the system.

Sometimes, the system can be very controversial. When you try to wash your dishes or clean the room your parents may mobilize to prevent you from doing it. However, a few hours later they find you not doing anything and then punish and criticize you for that.

What’s the way out?

How to turn your life around and escape living with parents

In order to change your life and stop feeling depressed living with parents, in order to stop feeling miserable, unemployed, and start feeling happy, you need 2 components.

Analyze the system and establish the set of rules

First, you need to understand the system in your family and note down everything you don’t like, find suspicious, or strange. The list may look something like that:

• I call my mom 3 times a day. When I don’t pick up the phone or miss the call she gets very stressed and angry and then abuses me
• My mother acts strangely as if she had some kind of sexual intention towards me
• My grandmother spies on me, she also digs through my things regularly
• My mother says that when she sees me eating/working then she believes me
• When the whole family gathers they tell old stories about me, who I was, etc., as if to show off how good I am or used to be. When left alone, they blame and abuse me
• Every initiative gets criticized and denied

The list of such traits might be quite big, however, you need to have this knowledge about what’s happening in your family.

The knowledge about your family communication and behavior will give you insights about what’s going on. Use that knowledge to create a set of rules which you need to follow until you move on living on your own. For example, if your mom wants you to call 3 times a day – do it.

Here is the deal. You’re in the theater. Your role is to be faceless. Not because you’re nobody but because you have the ability to act anybody.

You need to play by the rules of the game in order to build your path to your happiness and freedom.

Don’t worry, you’re only playing a game. You’re not following the rules blindly. On the contrary, you very well understand what’s going on and you have made obeying a part of the plan.

Separate from your family

To prepare yourself for independent life, you need to identify your desires and skills. Please, check out this article if you feel uncertain about your future and skills which you can apply to create one.  

Create a wishlist. Such as:

• I want to have a loving family and two kids
• I want to be employed and work as a website designer, accountant, manager, etc.
• I’ll start playing guitar, reading 3 books a month, etc.

The wishlist will remind you where you’re heading and what your goals are.

The problem with living on your own is that you will have to see the world through your own prism after so many years of living in a dysfunctional family. However, you’ll adjust.

“Is it possible to live a happy and fulfilling life with your parents around?”

The answer is NO (99%). The question that you’ve just asked yourself was your fear. You may hate your current family, but your fear will tell you that it might get better.

Has it got better for over 30 years? No. Why would you expect it to get better in another 30 years? Don’t fool yourself.

The best way to start separating yourself from parents is to get a job and get the gym membership on the earned money. Usually, parents won’t object until you get the actual results, good results. Don’t tell them about any results. Otherwise, they will start bringing you back to the “reality” and all your dreams will be heavily criticized.

Why the job and the gym are good? Because they give you room to breathe. Instead of being in a toxic environment you spend time somewhere else where your family is not pressing on you. Being in the new environments activates your own thinking and behavior.

Once you save enough money to rent a flat for at least 3-6 months – move out. Say that your current work demands that you move out. The rest of the journey you’ll figure out on your own.

Do not be afraid to pursue your dreams. You have a limited amount of time – spend it with pleasure. Spend it fighting for your own life rather than being victimized and broken to serve the needs of the ever-hungry beasts.

How to help your family

Well, that’s probably a bit too exaggerated, and your true intentions may be to help your family and not abandon it.

Here is the thing. They have their own demons and mental struggles. Just like in your case, they have their own childhood issues which are probably not in your power to solve.  

Ideally, you would probably like to have a decent job to provide for both you and your parents. Also, you may not want to commit to being an overachiever and rather live a pretty calm and stable life.

Even living that kind of lifestyle will require some effort from you. You can only help your lost and depressed family by doing that externally, away from your family. You need to change yourself before you’ll be able to change others.

As soon as you get your life back to normal you can start thinking about helping your family. That’s what I’m doing right now. Join me on that journey! And together, we will change our lives and the lives of our families for the better!

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