[del677]

Thank you for posting.

I see you come from a very religious conservative Muslim family, and that seems to be the indicator of all the problems. Not the Muslim part, or the religious part, it's the conservative part, it's the insecure feeling your parents have, the downright fear they have, and the way they have adopted to deal with that fear, is to believe that there is One Right Way, and if they can just follow that One Right Way perfectly, then they will be OK.

This is also known as the Rigid Survival Pattern. I suggest a book
The Rigid Pattern: Part Five of The 5 Personality Patterns by Steven Kessler (or you can get the whole book: The 5 Personality Patterns: Your Guide to Understanding Yourself and Others and Developing Emotional Maturity by Steven Kessler. Personally I would title the book The 5 Survival Patterns, since that's what it really talks about.) Being "perfect" is what the author calls the "Rigid Survival Pattern". It basically is a way of dealing with a deep insecurity, and the survival strategy to deal with the deep insecurity is to be "perfect". Only it doesn't work. It's like a dog chasing his own tail. You can never achieve the goal.

Fortunately the book does give some advice on how to get out of this survival pattern.

First recognize when:

you're following the Rules of some outside authority, rather than referencing your own felt sense for guidance.

Solution:
You need to focus on your feelings and sensations as the source of your inner guidance.

(Note: Morality doesn't come from some external source. Morality is based in our emotions. We need to be in touch with our emotions in order to be moral individuals.)

People need to feel loved and cherished just for their beingness, without having to do anything.

To heal, they have to move toward feelings, rather than forms and rules. Their developmental tasks are to learn to feel and value their own feelings and needs, to trust their own feelings as their source of inner guidance, and to allow the full flow of their force energy to move through their body.

If your parents go to church every week, they probably go to a conservative church which reinforces their conservative views and instills that fear into them, and instills the solution to that fear is to obey, so it's both the problem and the solution to it's own problem.

The real solution is to go to a different church. One that is liberal, teaches God is love, God is not fear, God gave us the ability to have feelings, to determine right from wrong, and we should learn to develop those feelings, so we can be kind and caring and loving individuals and do good in the world. The Koran can be interpreted in both ways.

Another book explains the Organic vs. Volcanic view of human nature. I think I have a link to an excerpt, hold on... ok here's the link:
http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/humanbeing/index.htm
it's from the book Human Be-ing by William Pietsch which is an easy read I recommend. This may help to explain why your father has repressed issues on one side of the tree, leaving his tree unbalanced, with unmet sexual urges bursting out on the other side, and the only explanation he can give is it must be God's will, because in their worldview, everything is God's will, it better be, because they're not allowed to have wills of their own, because they live in constant fear, constant, endless, fear, of, life. And God made everything. God is scary! Life is scary! Living is frightening! The only way they can survive, is to constantly, endlessly, control everything, and control their children's everything, to make sure they follow the One Right Way, make sure their Children follow the One Right Way, because "One slip and down the hole we fall."

It's impossible to find God that way, by running away from him. It's impossible to have a loving relationship with God if you fear him, by trying to endlessly appease him.

The only suggestion I can give, is to get in touch with your own feelings, by starting a practice of daily meditation. Meditation, or a state of present moment awareness, is essential in Islamic spiritual practice, particularly in Islamic prayer (salah) and meditation (dhikr). The Prophet himself stated, "An hour of meditation is more valuable than seventy years of worship." If anything it will hopefully at least bring peace to your own mind. It'll probably take a couple months to really take hold. It actually changes your brain and you actually become more peaceful. 10 minutes a day is a good start. Even one minute a day is a good start. You need to strengthen your connection with your inner core, with your body, and with your awareness of the present moment. If you can achieve that inner peace, and it will be difficult with your parents being the way they are, but the hope is your inner peace may spill over to them, and they may begin to sense from you a sense of the true God of love that they have never felt, but which has always been there available to them.

The other two ideas I have come from the first of the 12 steps of Al-Anon. 1) You can't control your parents. You are powerless to "fix" them. 2) Came to believe that a higher power can restore you to sanity. 3) Became willing to turn your life over to that higher power.

Best wishes.

It's easier to melt ice than to chip away at it. Just warm it up and be patient.