Dear Lindsey22:

“I’m sorry to read that your mother’s behaviour towards you was full of harsh intention” – thank you for your empathy.

“Was there a reason your mother behaved this way, do you know?” – she was angry.

“Intention to hurt is something that should be talked about more” – yes. There is nothing more difficult for a child to accept than the idea that her/ his parent has or had the intention to hurt her own child.

anita

• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by .

Dear Lindsey62:

You are welcome to return to this thread any time you wish, no such thing as a late reply. I read your perfectly worded post and agree with what you expressed. Iam wondering, did you intend to reply to the OP of the deleted thread, but she deleted her thread before you were able to reply?

If you replied to her, what would you have said to her, I wonder. You can, if you so choose, address her here. Maybe she is reading, maybe someone who struggles like her is reading.

anita

Dear Lindsey62:

You are welcome. It’s good to read from you whenever you post. It’s been very slow on the forums for some time and today, your post is the only one so far that I will reply to, so I want to take my time (it will be a very long post), not only to reply to your recent post, but to process my own experience with bullying (not school bullying, but Parental Bullying). It helps me to develop my thought when I type them and see if I gain a deeper understanding as a result. Please feel free to read or not to read what follows. My primary intent here is to help myself; my secondary intent is to potentially help another member who may be reading this post.

There is a poem called Hokusai Says, “Hokusai says, look carefully-He says pay attention, notice- He says keep looking, stay curious- He says there is no end to seeing- – – He says live with the world inside you- He says it doesn’t matter if you draw- or write books. It doesn’t matter- if you saw wood, or catch fish- it doesn’t matter if you sit at home, and stare at the ants on your verandah- or the shadows, or the trees- and grasses in your garden- It matters that you care- It matters that you notice- It matters that life- lives through you- — He says don’t be afraid- don’t be afraid- Look, feel, let life take you by the hand- Let life live through you.” –

– what this poem means to me is that the life in me (emotions, sensations, thoughts and interpretations) needs to be in a state of flow: it needs to freely move through me. What happened in my life as a child (and in the lives of so many, unfortunately) is that the life inside me got stuck, blocked, trapped, no longer flowing: my breathing became shallow, constricted; I developed motor and vocal tics, I was distressed in so many ways, and generally uncomfortable being me.

I think that the first time I talked about my childhood was when I was in my early 20s. It felt good. In my 30s I read many self-help books, attended self-help groups and talked a lot more. I understood more and often felt a relief, but the relief didn’t last. I was repeatedly disappointed, feeling further distressed about the distress returning and persisting.

The poem I quoted from was introduced to me by my former psychotherapist 11 years ago, in the beginning of my first quality psychotherapy experience. What the poem means to me is that the distress returns because there is more to see (more to understand), more that I didn’t yet see. As the poem says, there is no end to seeing.

The life inside us, made of our emotions, sensations and thoughts, is complex (very complex when one’s childhood is very disturbing). I didn’t understand earlier that it takes the right attitude to seeing more and more: it takes not expecting magic and having the patience to make small progress today and build on top of that progress the day after, and the day after, for the rest of one’s life.

The wrong attitude I had earlier:  I can see/ understand everything today, and tomorrow and onward, I will live happily-ever-after. As a result of this wrong attitude (which is also an unrealistic expectation, and an all-or-nothing thought distortion), whenever I felt distressed, I figured that the progress I thought I made the day before, didn’t really happen. And so, I dismissed the progress of the day before as non-progress, and started each day from scratch, not building on top of previous progress. The result: no progress for decades.

It is relatively recently, while communicating with members in these forums, every day, 7 days a week, that I finally started building today on top of the progress made yesterday, and as a result, I am experiencing ongoing progress.

I will now share about my bullying experience with the intent of seeing more than I saw before, understanding more. I intend to get some emotions unstuck while typing. I intend to type slowly, not share about events, but mostly emotions.  After this part of my post, I will reply to your recent post (with the understanding I will have when I get to it):

She used me, that’s all. Used me.

That’s all I got, all I want to say about my childhood, it says it all. “She” refers to a woman I happened to be born to.

I took some time after writing the above. I should explain a bit, just so that the reader (assuming someone is reading) may understand what I mean by her using me: she used me for two things: 1) as an audience, an empathetic audience for her histrionics (going on and on… and on and on about her pain, her sorrows, her… her painful life), and 2) as a thing to blame and to punish.

As the child that I was, I was a sitting duck. The online definition of a sitting duck is “a person or thing with no protection against an attack or other source of danger“. What stands out to me in this definition is “a… thing“- it feels more accurate than “a person”: she used me as a thing.

What I am in touch with this very moment is the intense, massive, persistent guilt in me all these many years. It is a heavy-weight burden, definitely a block to … the flow of life inside me. It feels like a pain, a deep emotional pain. The feeling that I am at fault, that is, deserving her blame. It hurt just now to type these words: “deserving her blame”. As I typed these three words, I felt… deserving of her blame, and it hurt.

Oh, how I wished since early on to live without that guilt, I remember (I think I was a teenager, but not older than in early 20s) that I said to myself: if I could live one day without this guilt, my life will be worth living.

This guilt is blocking the life within me, it continues to create distress within me.

This relentless feeling of guilt- not always felt but always there- it has been telling me all these years that who or what I am does not deserve to be alive, that the right thing to do is to get rid of this guilty thing that is me. Because that’s what should be done in a just society: get rid of the ones who are guilty, punish them, isolate them, imprison them, suppress them so that they don’t harm innocent people.

It made me feel worthless, of course, like not worth life… it’s just a matter of time before any other person finds out that I am not worthy of any positive attention. When given positive attention, I still either reject it (not letting it in, or not letting much of it in), or (when I like the person who seems to like me), I am eager to express anything and everything that will please the other person: religious views, political views that are not mine, but his or her. So intoxicating is the feeling of being liked, of being thought of as a worthy of someone’s seeming positive attention, that I- for a short while- will do anything, say anything for that feeling.

Connecting the topic of Guilt to Bullying and the forum I chose: Parenting, I read from The Positive Parenting Centre. com/ Understanding Emotional Bullying in Children: ” Your typical emotional bullies are master manipulators controlling their target by disempowering them through fear, shame, guilt and embarrassment”, 

“Emotional Bullying…  targets the positive emotions of its victims such as trust, pride, happiness, hopefulness, contentment, confidence and worthiness”.

Paired Life. com/ Guilt tripping is a form of Bullying: “A guilt trip is a form of psychological abuse. Some psychologists may call it emotional manipulation. I call it bullying… Guilt trippers will make you feel responsible for what they do, feel and have suffered. They dramatize situations… Now the worst thing one can do is lay a guilt trip on a child. Yelling and screaming about how disappointed you feel is darn right selfish and egotistical. What kind of nut are you?”

This term, Emotional Bullying is helpful to me. I wasn’t familiar with this term. Yes, she targeted my positive emotions, like the quote above said, attacking my positive emotions of trust, hopefulness, contentment, confidence, worthiness, and so, these emotions went into hiding, repressed, suppressed, blocking life from flowing through me.

Instead of the beauty of life (trust, hopefulness, etc.), I suffered the intense distress of excessive, tormenting guilt, shame, fear, anger, and conflict- within me and with others.

She said I was guilty, in many words, many times, with lots of dramatizations/ histrionics, threats etc. Was she right? She was convincing and I believed her (not fully, hence inner conflict). Was she right, was I guilty?

In my mind’s eye, I am seeing her and I back in time. I want to see the true picture, what truly happened. Before getting to the real picture, what was the unreal picture in my mind all these years? It was seeing her as innocent and good, and seeing me as guilty, bad, the one who made her suffer.

And now, what do I see…. she is not good. There is a sadness in writing this, still somewhat of a shock to the system: I still see her as good… look at her, nice and warm and all-good. She wasn’t? The other image, I have this other image of her too, since an early age: Angry, with a capital A.

Who was she in the picture with me? I want her to be good, I want to see her as good, but she is not. She wouldn’t have gone hours at a time, repeatedly, through the years, hurting me so badly, seeing me hurt, never to regret and stop, never to apologize and stop. She wanted to hurt me all these years.  She succeeded.

Not that it is a difficult task for a mother to hurt her child. For her, to hurt me is an easy and safe task.

When I type about her (here and elsewhere), I shift, inattentively from the past tense to the present tense- because in my mind, she is still there, screaming at me, blaming me.

But she was wrong, she is wrong all along. The girl was innocent, the mother was guilty.

This is the end of my self-help work today.

* I am aware that this is a public forum, and there is a risk of cyber bullying, as well as the risk of members replying to the original poster (me in this case) angrily, impatiently, inattentively, and/or dismissing the OP’s abilities and successes and focusing on the OP’s inabilities and failures, sometimes insisting on the latter. This is why, due to the very personal nature of what I shared in this post, I ask that members do not comment on what I shared (it’s okay to comment or use the poem and online sources that I included in this post), and instead- if you want to do your own self-help work, share about your own experience. If you choose to do your own self-help work (here or on your own thread), and like me, you don’t want members to comment on what you share, please state so clearly.

One more thing, I reserve the right to not reply to any member who was or is disrespectful to me either because of ill-intent (the intent to hurt me), or because of serious carelessness (ex., failing to notice that I asked to not comment on what I shared and proceeding to comment).

And now, to your post, Lindsey62, in regard to what you would have said to the OP who had a thread about being bullied:

“I have what are really random thoughts. That these difficult situations don’t last forever, and that we find a way through” – I can see how bullying effects can last forever, effects lasted so far in my life. The way through, I believe, is what I did here, in this post

“It’s good to practice what to say, if the bully gets in touch, because it’s less likely then to be in a flustered or upset state… Practice over and over, to give yourself courage. It might be an idea to take up a physical sport or pastime that could be a protector. Perhaps use a mantra word or saying” – I so hope the OP of the deleted thread will be reading this. I think that it is an excellent advice, in regard to her bully, a woman her own age. Of course, this advice is not applicable to a child who is bullied by a parent.

Continued excellent advice: “It can help to walk in Nature. Find trees. Perhaps also, imagine what you might say to a friend in such a situation… There’s nothing wrong (in my book) about experiencing anger. A person is doing hurtful things, so don’t become an “echo” of yourself:  what about your life, and what you feel or need? Sometimes we need to put ourselves first to keep ourselves safe and not wither away. This may involve removing ourselves from toxic people“.

“I have ptsd and I was helped a lot, going past a place of memory, to say to myself ‘I am strong, and I can do this’. I felt a surge of energy and was able to pass the place. It felt good” – I will say the same thing to myself right now: I am strong, and I can do this!

anita

• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by .