My parents are from Sri Lanka but I was as born and spent the first 8 years of life in Saudi Arabia and those years were the best years of my life. I just remember being happy and with friends etc. When we came to the UK however is when things started to go wrong. My parents are from South Asia and I know in this culture it is common for parents to be very overprotective and smother their children. Add to this was the fact that they were strong Christians and so I grew up going to church all my life, surrounded by its morals and values. I made a commitment to Christ when I was 14 I’d say but my faith in God has always struggled and been difficult (but that’s a whole other issue). Growing up my father would take me to private tuition classes for nearly every subject right from the age of 8 to pretty much til I was 18. He would constantly feel the need to help me and would get annoyed and upset if I refused his help. I remember one time he started crying when I did. He would sometimes do homework for me! They made sure I was taken care of and so I lived a very sheltered life. My dad would pick me up from school even though it was a 10 minute walk home til I was like 16! I always felt I had to be studying and doing homework all the time. I can think of so many examples – I remember when I was 16 my father didn’t let me stay round a friends house because he didn’t know his parents personally! When I was 18 I went to the cinema with my cousin and didn’t get back til about midnight. My parents went crazy, found my notebook where I had written down my friends no.s (before the days when everyone had a mobile phone) and called all my friends to ask where I could be! Even though I did tell them I was going out to the cinema, because I didn’t return at a reasonable time, they flipped and my dad even drove around the neighbourhood looking for us!! I got home and my parents treated me like I had committed murder when all I did was go to the cinema to watch a movie.

Aside from all of this, I suffered abuse from him too, mostly verbal in the form of constant criticisms and fear-induced statements, all these should haves, ought tos etc. My older brother (who has turned out to be a younger version of my father) beat me up quite a lot and had his own issues and at school I was bullied, although I did have friends I never really felt happy. There was never one person that was there for me, in a good way.

So my memories from those years are largely negative. All I would hear from my parents were really a series of imperatives, about not doing this or that, telling me to be careful whenever I went out etc. I was treated like I was disobedient or rebellious if I did things my own way or did something they didn’t agree with or didn’t want to see me doing. And yes, it’s as if I couldn’t make mistakes, if I had failed or did something that was risky. Like my parents didn’t want me to play rugby because they heard once of a story about a 8 year old boy who had died in a scrum (I think they may have made this up actually). And you see I always felt like I couldn’t rebel and speak out against this, because then they would say I’m getting angry and thus being disobedient. We only learn when we make mistakes, we only discover ourselves when we take risks and try different things out. And yet despite all this, to this day I have never really been rebellious. I never smoked, took drugs, hardly ever drink, although I’ve had serious girlfriends I never slept with any of them (due to my Christian beliefs), I never once got into any trouble at school.

On top of all this I never received the love, affirmation and positive encouragement that every child and every individual should receive from their parents. It was always negative from my father, he hardly ever praised or encouraged me, whenever he did, it would be performance based (if I got good grades) or did well at sport or something. Never once did they really say and treat me as loved and accepted for who I was, regardless of however I behaved. But of course I know parents aren’t perfect and human love will always be conditional to some degree.

It’s only when I was about 22 did I realise how flawed and messed up their own views and ways of thinking really were. Because they treated me like I was disobedient and rebellious, it felt like I was the problem, that I was the one in the wrong, when to be honest it was the opposite. I was just trying to break free and discover myself. I wanted to study Spanish for A level, yet my dad didn’t allow it cos he wanted me to do maths because it would be “better” even though I KNEW I would not enjoy it and ended up doing badly in it. Spanish was my favorite subject and I wish I had done it for my degree/major.
Even as I grew older into my 20s they have treated me in similar ways. For example, 2 years ago (when I was 26), I went to a friend’s party and had like 2 beers got back home and my mum the next morning figured that I had been drinking because she smelt alcohol on my clothes. I remember how upset she was and then my dad wrote me a letter the next day saying how I should not drink alcohol, because it is addictive!!! I mean…seriously who says something like that to someone WHO IS 26!? They went onto say how children need their parents help irrespective of their age and that families should always be interdependent. No mention whatsoever of being self sufficient, independence, standing on my own 2 feet i.e. being a fully responsible adult man.