There is nothing more frustrating than being told by the person who you think (and thinks) knows you best that you don’t know yourself. At some point you either start to think that you are loosing your mind and are suffering from all facets of mental breakdown, are being utterly manipulated by that person, or that they don’t know you or don’t fully understand you or are not willing to come to grips with the differences between their interpretation and who you are in your thoughts and actions.
The hardest part for me in all of this is the separation between thoughts and actions and guiding those actions by what you think the other person is going to think or feel. After a while you stop feeling like any behaviors are ‘yours’ vs. cultured by the perceived expectations of the outside world. Moreover the less and less time you spend actually examining yourself the less and less you ever get a chance to reflect on what this ‘self’ actually is anymore.
So, in this fashion, I am starting to feel lost and angry and sad and alone and directed and unsafe and insecure and really unable to be myself without having a real sense of who that self is anymore coupled with a feeling that the self I still recognize is unacceptable and behaviors should be reshaped in order to suit the expectations of the people I want to be around.
After a while you get so used to being told you are wrong that you forget you ever had the ability to be right.