For a long time I believed that asking for what I needed was a way of breaking the peace. I did not arrive at that belief through a single event. It gathered over years, in small lessons that were easy to miss while they were happening.
I woke once with the vague sense that a door had just been slammed—or pulled shut with a violence that made the frame shake. I could not tell whether I had really dreamed it or whether some old memory had simply surfaced while I slept. What stayed with me was the tension in my body, as if I were still in the room I once lived in, listening for what would come next.
I had not heard that sound in years, and I doubt I had ever dreamed it before. Yet it still put me on edge. In our house, a door shut that way was not just noise; it announced that my father was angry and that the atmosphere would soon turn heavy.
When I was young, my father was quick-tempered and stubborn. Trying to talk with him, or to change his mind, was difficult. It was especially hard to summon the courage to ask for something, because he usually had a reason—or several—to say no. One area where this showed up clearly was health. Both of my parents pursued it with an almost ascetic intensity. In first grade, there was a bakery a couple of blocks from home whose pork-floss buns were famous. My grandfather would buy them for me. When my father found out, he scolded my grandfather: pork floss was “not healthy,” and I should be given less junk food. For the same reason, KFC and McDonald’s were never options when we ate out.
After a while, I stopped making requests about food. If asked what I wanted, I would say, “Whatever—I’m fine with anything; you decide.” Why ask for something that was certain to be refused? My grandfather understood what I wanted, though. He would slip me the pork-floss buns at times and places my father would not notice. Then, in second grade, my grandparents were sent back to their hometown because of “differences in educational philosophy.” After that, there were no more pork-floss buns. Later my grandfather wrote to me. He said a big Walmart and a KFC had opened downstairs in his neighborhood, that he knew I liked them, and that he would take me there when I came back. I understand now that people have desires, and that a person should know what they like to eat. The years I spent pretending not to know were simply years in which my needs had grown used to being suppressed.
Entertainment was another front. For a long time my father treated smartphones and the internet as a poison, or as something wild and dangerous. That view ran through my childhood and lasted until I started boarding school. He was highly guarded around anything new that fell outside his understanding, and he tended to reason in slippery-slope terms toward the worst possible outcome—including worries about computer viruses. In middle school, when I was learning to play bridge, I needed to use the computer in his office to register on an online platform and practice. He fiddled with it for a while and then refused. Since I was not allowed to have a smartphone and was kept away from the internet, I felt the peer pressure at school. I was left on the margins because I lacked common ground with classmates. That pushed me to do the most rebellious thing I had done up to that point: I took my Chinese New Year money and went to a store to buy a smartphone myself. It was probably my first serious defense of my own needs. I used it in secret for more than two months before it was discovered and brought under control.
Despite moments like that, most of the time I was a compliant child with good grades. I learned early to hide and suppress my needs, to avoid making trouble for my parents, and in that way to protect myself from verbal attacks and punishment. But I still made mistakes. I failed to meet my father’s standards, or I could not stop myself from disagreeing with him about something, until the disagreement became “talking back.” He would dress me down, say what he wanted to say, then go back to his room and slam the door. Usually my mother would go in to soothe him, and I was not allowed to cry.
Sometimes the conflict was between my parents. They would close the door, but I could still hear their hysterical argument through two walls, and it left me frightened. In the end it was almost always my mother who gave way. She would calm my father down again, then open the door with resentment still in her expression. If the conflict had been between my father and me, my mother would usually come to my room and try to comfort me and talk with me. I am grateful for her care, but she also wanted me to settle down as quickly as possible. Once I felt sympathy for how hard she had it, it became difficult to raise my own requests again. Even if I did, she would tell me she understood, but that she could not decide—my father would not agree.
That pattern reinforced a belief in me: expressing my needs would not only fail to get them met; it would damage the harmony of the family and cause emotional injury. For years that belief lay quietly inside me. It lasted until I noticed how hard it was for me to state my needs clearly and without embarrassment to people I was close to, and until I learned that many INFJs have the same difficulty. These days I practice making sentences with “I want…” and “I need…”. If you have also lived through that kind of suppression, it may be worth trying.
Years later I still think about the few visits back to my grandparents’ hometown. There I could use a phone and a computer freely, and I could go to sleep and wake up at times that felt comfortable to me. My grandfather would ask what I wanted to eat. I would say I wanted Wuxi xiaolongbao, and he would take me to have it. When his appetite was poor, he would not eat, but he would watch me enjoy the food I liked, his eyes smiling. He is gone now. Yet a new Wuxi noodle shop not far from my home lets me taste that familiar childhood flavor without going back to the old hometown—and with it, the security of knowing I was loved without question.