Dear Caroline:

Thank you for wishing me a wonderful weekend and I hope that by the time you are reading this, you don’t feel as sad and cheerless as when you submitted your post, almost 5 hours ago. I hope that you don’t feel badly about referring to him as your friend. I want to reply further when I am more focused, tomorrow morning (in about 12 hours from now).

anita

Dear Caroline:

I re-read some of our communication so to be better prepared for this reply. A few things I noticed:

About your extended family, you wrote: “grandparents or uncles never talked to us, was never interested in asking me anything… they just rejected (me)”. About your male work colleague (previously referred to as a friend), you wrote: “I have to admit there is a success, my ex-friend was very polite to me today in front of other people, he even asked me questions“-

– do you notice the parallels: your grandparents and uncles never talked to you, never asked you any questions, rejected you in front of the whole extended family; they were clearly not polite to you at all. So, when your work colleague was very polite, on that one day, in front of other people, asking you questions- that felt extra special, positively special, because it was very different from the opposite treatment you received as a child.

It felt like a SUCCESS because this is what you wanted growing up and onward: to be treated well, and you tried (and failed) to make it happen. When your work colleague treated you well, you felt like you made it happen, that it was your personal success!

“my mom started being ashamed of me…she naturally thought her child was inferior.. .. But I don’t think my dad was ashamed of me. He did not care that much, he even stood up for me sometimes“- your mother as well as the extended family rejected you, which means that they also did not stand up for you, except for your father who sometimes stood up for you.

“Now I don’t think it was friendship at all, it was his benefiting from my passiveness and people pleasing“- I think that being passive and people-pleasing is how you tried to survive and to change your extended family’s rejecting behavior: if you are passive, if you do nothing- there’s less to reject;  if you please them- maybe they’ll think better of you and treat you better (or at least, they won’t treat you even worse).

“I was afraid to ask what was his floor number… I knew I could not ask him if he already had told me this once, because he will scold me…  I ignored my neighbor and his dog because I was afraid and knew I had to maintain eye contact so that he sees I am listening to him… he once told me someone sent him wishes and I asked what was the occasion and he scolded me that I did not know what it was (Easter coming in few days)“- Mr. Right (work colleague) was eager to let Ms. Wrong (Caroline)  know that she is indeed Wrong. By treating you as Wrong, he awakened and maintained your craving and eagerness to change his opinion and his treatment of you from rejecting to accepting, from impolite to polite.

* As to his motivation, what did he get out of treating you this way? My guess is that it tickles him, he enjoys it.

“Today, after a week since my message to him, and two weeks after his ‘escalation’ I feel weird. Free and happy but also sad that I was abused and did not realize that, I was just trying to survive, walking on eggshells, avoiding asking stupid questions, or doing anything that would piss him off“- your work colleague is like any one of the family members who rejected and abused you growing up. Your reaction to him is the same as your reaction to your rejecting family members: (1) “just trying to survive, walking on eggshells”, etc., so to not  piss them off, so that they don’t treat you even worse, and (2) ambitiously trying to change their opinion and treatment of you from rejecting and impolite =>  accepting and polite.

* In regard to your work colleague:  if he acted politely toward you all the time, he wouldn’t enjoy himself, it wouldn’t be fun or interesting for him. As I see it, there is no emotional motivation on his part to be consistently nice and polite to you.

“I will definitely be careful although I know a few nice people and I don’t think they would act this way“- yes, there are nice people, imperfect but nice. Resolve to only have nice people in the personal settings of your life (often people can’t choose the people in their work setting).

“I visit my mom’s family once in 5 months for birthday parties. I do not feel I belong to any of the families…I think there is mutual respect there (except for my family, but as I mentioned some of them I do not talk to anymore and some of them I meet for the minimum time during the year)“-a single visit with family members who reject you, is one visit too many. Any such visit (including the anticipation and aftermath of each visit) serves to maintain your childhood trauma and your reactions to it (the mental Freeze Response we talked about, the passivity, walking on eggshells etc.)

“It has been overwhelmed at work lately. Since I thought my coworkers may think I am dishonest, I get anxiety every day and feel like a fraud“- I still don’t quite understand your worry about being thought of as dishonest and a fraud. Growing up, did you feel like your rejecting family members, including your mother, thought of you as dishonest and a fraud… and/ or did you feel like this because your behavior was passive and people-pleasing, but inside you (understandably) felt angry, very angry perhaps?

anita

Dear Caroline:

I read your three posts and will reply further in the morning (in about 14 hours from now). For now, I want to say: your lack of confidence, low self-esteem… this is how I used to feel and behave in real-life. I am still practicing a new, confident, I-am-no-less-than-anyone  behavior that involves really feeling equal to others (not any less). I used to always be cautious around people, always ready to let them know… that I know that I am inferior, so that.. they’ll go easy on me, so that they won’t hurt me too much.

I changed and I keep changing, and you can too!

anita

anita

Dear Caroline,

you are very welcome.

It’s happiness and relief mixed with no hope for the future. I see people who had happy, respectful families and you can see it in their eyes, in their behavior.  I will never have that.

I am sorry that seeing things as they are caused you so much grief. Please do not fall into despair, because there is so much hope for the future, now that you know what the main problem is. You can still build happy, mutually respectful relationships, even if this wasn’t possible in your family of origin. Things can change, you are only 32 years old and an entire life is ahead of you!

I think at some point my mom started being ashamed of me. Not sure why, I think I was a normal child, she had some issues of her own, was not feeling confident, pretty or loved so she naturally thought her child was inferior too. I often felt that, she was afraid I was going to look not pretty, someone would comment on my appearance (I had acne) and she immediately was downcast.

My mom’s family never liked me, my dad or my mom. We use to go there for holidays etc but grandparents or uncles never talked to us, was never interested in asking me anything. They did not like my dad because they thought he was drunk. They just rejected him and us, that’s all what they did.

So this is what I think has happened: your mother never felt loved by her own mother (My mom’s family never liked me, my dad or my mom.) Because of that, she felt ashamed of herself. She transferred that shame onto you, when she became ashamed of you as well. You were a normal, healthy child, but for her, you were a potential source of shame. That’s why she saw your acne as a potential source of shame for her, in front of her family. It’s not just that she felt defective, but she also felt that you – her offspring – was defective and not good enough for her family.

So she exposed you to huge amounts of toxic shame, which you absorbed of course, because that’s what children do. But please note that there was NO REASON for her to be ashamed of you. She was ashamed of you only because she was ashamed of HERSELF. No other reason, there was nothing wrong about you!

Luckily, your father didn’t shame you and even stood up for you a few times, so that helped a little. But not in a major way, since the overwhelming message you received in your childhood is: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

You got this message not only from your mother, both also from your mother’s family, and from your father’s family. And each time you visited, this message was reinforced.

Unfortunately, your mother is still visiting her mother and still taking the shaming and the lesser treatment without saying a word: I see how my mom visits her mother and still plays this game and I don’t like that.

I even told her recently that what happened to me is the result of the family dynamic. But she has her reasons, does not want to argue etc. But I think it still affects me, the fact that she is still doing this.

You see that well – it does affect you, but most importantly, it affected you immensely while you were growing up.

Luckily, there is a way out. In order to counter the toxic message you received in your childhood (that “You should be ashamed of yourself”), you need to start telling yourself: “There is nothing wrong with me. I deserve to be treated with respect!”

Of course, you won’t be able to do it overnight, but start befriending yourself with this new message. You should have heard it in your childhood, but it’s never too late – you can “deprogram” your old programming and start anew!

And thank you for the song by Beth Orton! These verses seem quite pertinent:

Once that I saw how to see
All of your love was looking back at me
It was hard not to full fill the prophecy we’d always been

Once that you see what happened in your childhood, you can start feeling love for yourself, and fulfill the prophecy that you have always been: a beautiful, worthy and deserving human being!