I think you are very intelligent but suffering a great deal. Your writing skills are great and very to the point . I’m always amazed at how people write so well .

I did wonder could you help out with your father for awhile with the home rentals and get a bit of experience under your belt . Perhsps it’s a job you may find helps him and you .

Dear Pain:

Well, rocks can’t put two words together and you write well, you really do, so there (“I am dumb as rocks”).

You wrote: “I don’t know anything”. That would have been good compared to the situation you are in, which is, you believe you know things that are not true, for example, that you are “dumb as rocks”. If you didn’t know, you would have been open to consider that maybe you are pretty smart!

“In life, you have to be brutal and uncaring just like the forces of nature to get what you want”- a hurricane will cause a lot of damage in a short time, yes. But water flowing gently over rocks, over time, with persistence, water shapes rocks. You can be powerful too, being gentle with yourself and persistent.

It is so very wrong that your father calls you dumb, so very wrong. No  wonder you believe that about yourself, if he called you that from an early age… a child automatically believes what his father says.

anita

I totally understand you not wanting to share your name. It’s great to see you still reaching out, and in no way are you wasting anyone’s time. You don’t seem to me to be throwing a pity party, you’re someone who’s obviously hurting and is reaching out; that takes courage. Like Anita said, let your horse rest here. I sincerely hope you can start to see that you do have value and you definitely do matter, cause you do. None of us can magically take your pain away, but we can listen and be there for you. That in itself can really help. Take care my friend and remember you are not alone.

Pain, I just wanted to chime in with two comments:

1 – You are definitely not dumb. I seriously know some people with PhD’s that don’t write as well as you do. I’m serious.

2 – I wish I knew how to deal with abuse. I am in the same boat, trying to figure out how to move on and how to live with the past. Acknowledging what happened and facing my fears head on has helped a great deal, but the most vulnerable work that requires looking inside and being extremely honest with myself is super hard. I don’t know what kind of abuse you are referring to, but in my case, it was extremely necessarily to take distance from my family/abusers. After that, I could feel all I needed to feel (and still am feeling) and accept, just accept. I’ve been doing this for 5 years, and from what I gather here and in life, it is a life-long process. There’s no magical cure, unfortunately, but it does get better with time.

I wish you well!

Dear Pain and Niv, I will say what has worked for me in regards to dealing with past abuse, it might resonate with you, everyone’s different. What I did, and only recently, was to allow all the feelings about the abuse come through and really feel them. At the same time I showed my younger self love and compassion and let him know I was there for him, that I had his back. I realised I had ignored and even locked away my younger self who those things happened to . That part of me felt so alone and abandoned by me. I made peace with him, making sure he knew none of it was his fault and he didn’t deserve to ever be treated in that way. By doing this I was able to start taking the power back I had given to those who abused me in different ways, and to the event itself. I started the process by writing down whatever came out, as I did that I started getting answers, and things about myself and my past started to become more and more clear. I did this all on my own. Then I looked up articles and videos that resonated with what I was doing. Every day though I just wrote and wrote which helped me get clear about my pain. Like I said, this is what worked for me personally. The simplest thing I feel would be to look at who you were at the time of the abuse and show him/her love and compassion, picture yourself hugging your younger self and go from there 🙂

Hi Pain,

How are you?

You say : I am so dumb I can hardly believe it. I find myself wordless when I arguing with someone, I am useless in social situations….I never had any friends, no social contacts, no one in my life. Do you equate intelligence with social skills? I don’t. In fact, I find that many intelligent people have rather poor social skills. You said you got A’s in some of your uni courses — which courses? Are you better with numbers than you feel you are with words?

My advice is to try hard to attain at least one solid marketable skill. Have you ever taken a software programming class like java? You might find it fun, and if your uni doesn’t offer a beginning programming course there are online courses available. It doesn’t have to be programming; it can be anything that interests you, that takes your mind off your troubles, that you can parlay into a career. The goal is to become so skilled at whatever it is that you become an expert at it. Once you are an expert, your options will open up.

What interests you?

B