Surviving the war

It's a long story, but thank you for the question. A bit of background first: I grew up in Rhodesia during a time of war. My father fought in the army for the ideals of white, Christian civilization -- a very masculine ideal. When the war was lost, he began bashing me, taking out his rage and disappointment about how things had turned out on me. He also swore to bring me up in the Rhodesian way, with really a military standard of discipline, no mistakes allowed. He expressed his hatred of women and emotion, and took revenge against the new world values by sticking to the old ways in relation to me. That is how I became emotionally repressed in the first place. I had no idea how much rage I had against my father, as well as with how I had been treated as a newcomer to a new culture. I had not been permitted to express emotion growing up (the change of regime in Rhodesia happened when I was about 12), with the consequent upping the ante of rage attacks from my father). Whilst I remained in Africa, I was still more or less adapted to that situation, though, as it was not common for anybody to express strong emotion or to act in their individual self-interest. That is the background. When I came to Australia, aged 15, I found that people here already had predetermined ideas about me. I was very shy, but they thought I was arrogant. I had no idea how to conduct myself in modernity, and asked questions, but people presumed that I was seeking attention in an unwarranted way. Also they had been told that I was racist and egoistic and superior, none of which I was aware of being, as these attributes did not belong to me, or to the culture I had been brought up in, which was a Rhodesian, feminine culture (think of the women as lieutenants in a civil system, operating the structures of civil life in war time. ) Anyway, I really didn't fit in and had no way of relating to anything about me. That was when the stress of not being able to adapt, or to understand the new situation I was in took its toll. My father felt I had let him down, and began bashing me, trying to install Christian values into me at this point and thereafter. Every time somebody was angry at me, for reasons I could not fathom, he began bashing me. I struggled a great deal with an increasingly weaker constitution, basically because I needed a great deal of assistance, but when I tried to ask for it, I only got reprimanded. During this time I developed a lot of rage, but because I was unused to expressing emotion, and found it distasteful in the extreme, as well as dangerous if I felt a negative emotion against my father welling up, I did not understand that this internalized rage was creating an auto-immune disorder. Every time I got angry, I got sick. I could not allow myself to get upset in any way, as I would immediately come down with a virus. I only started to turn the situation around after I hit rock bottom. That was a deeply shameful place to be. i was the victim of a dysfunctional workplace and was the scapegoat. I had been trying to prove that I could survive Western culture, by building my energy and my knowledge, but all my efforts had fallen into a heap. My health disintegrated significantly with this crisis of workplace bullying. My digestive system broke down and I could hardly eat solid food after that (indeed for quite a few years). I had to build myself up again. Part of how I learned to see my own anger was when I felt that I had lost everything ain terms of any social standing or belief system I could salvage. When I realized suddenly that I had lost everything, I began to sense my own rage, as though I had moved into the eye of the storm where everything was peaceful. Everything around me slowed down and I could feel my rage for the very first time. This gave me the inner strength to start looking for a new perspective, which I found in Nietzsche. Since I had to start again from scratch, I had bought some books by Nietzsche and tried to use them to understand psychology. I had to return to live at home whilst my health recovered, and during this time I kept getting bashed by my father, but it seemed to matter less than before, since I now had a goal and an agenda for my recovery. I still didn't understand about psychology or about the new world I was in, but I was learning about emotion from Nietzsche, and I was finding a basis to reorient myself. My goal more recently has been to reintegrate my emotions into my general state of being, so that I make myself as whole as possible.