(no subject)
I feel bad that you’re examining yourself and your behavior in order to explain his unethical actions; it’s the way young children come to believe they are defective or unlovable when in fact, their parents are limited.
I realize that this happened to me -- when I was growing up, I went through some very painful, awful experiences that no one ever talked with me about or explained to me in a way that helped me process them effectively. When I was growing up, I was bullied by some girls that lived next-door and across the street from me. I won't say it was traumatic, because that almost goes without being said, but the experience itself wasn't as traumatic, I think, as the fact that no one was there for me through it.
Here's where the conversation gets interesting. I'm connecting the dots as I get older, and I think my mother was, in many respects, a somewhat absent mother. Yes, she loved us immensely, and she never let us believe otherwise. But she rarely spent any time with us. More importantly, she didn't talk with us. There wasn't an "open-door policy" on her time and attention -- I don't remember ever sitting down with my mother, at any point in my childhood or adolescence, and sharing my problems. I was never reassured that what these girls were doing to me wasn't my fault, that it didn't reflect any defect or unloveability in me. I think the real shame of my childhood was having no one to reassure me of how great I was. My brothers were another continual torture: the one didn't seem to have the slightest thought for me, and the other seemed to make it his goal in life to intimate me and make me feel bad about myself.
What's more, my mother could never devote any time to us apart from her various boyfriends and husbands. If we spent any time with her, one of them was always in the picture. I think she was always trying to get the love from them that she never got from her father. Trouble was, she kept choosing men that were jealous, petty, controlling and unkind -- not surprisingly, the exact traits she recalls her father having (in addition to physical and emotional abusiveness).
I don't know. I think my mother was, while very affectionate, still absent in a lot of ways. She was a single mother most of the time, and operating her own business from home, so she had to work a lot. But I look back at that period in our lives and wonder why some things never were.
I realize that this happened to me -- when I was growing up, I went through some very painful, awful experiences that no one ever talked with me about or explained to me in a way that helped me process them effectively. When I was growing up, I was bullied by some girls that lived next-door and across the street from me. I won't say it was traumatic, because that almost goes without being said, but the experience itself wasn't as traumatic, I think, as the fact that no one was there for me through it.
Here's where the conversation gets interesting. I'm connecting the dots as I get older, and I think my mother was, in many respects, a somewhat absent mother. Yes, she loved us immensely, and she never let us believe otherwise. But she rarely spent any time with us. More importantly, she didn't talk with us. There wasn't an "open-door policy" on her time and attention -- I don't remember ever sitting down with my mother, at any point in my childhood or adolescence, and sharing my problems. I was never reassured that what these girls were doing to me wasn't my fault, that it didn't reflect any defect or unloveability in me. I think the real shame of my childhood was having no one to reassure me of how great I was. My brothers were another continual torture: the one didn't seem to have the slightest thought for me, and the other seemed to make it his goal in life to intimate me and make me feel bad about myself.
What's more, my mother could never devote any time to us apart from her various boyfriends and husbands. If we spent any time with her, one of them was always in the picture. I think she was always trying to get the love from them that she never got from her father. Trouble was, she kept choosing men that were jealous, petty, controlling and unkind -- not surprisingly, the exact traits she recalls her father having (in addition to physical and emotional abusiveness).
I don't know. I think my mother was, while very affectionate, still absent in a lot of ways. She was a single mother most of the time, and operating her own business from home, so she had to work a lot. But I look back at that period in our lives and wonder why some things never were.