Posted by Racer on March 31, 2004, at 17:40:51
In reply to Childhood, posted by lonelygirl on March 31, 2004, at 17:11:11
Listen, you can't measure your pain by how much pain someone else experienced. (That really is analogous to cellular automata -- you could look it up...) The only thing you can do is check your own Pain-O-Meter and see how bad your pain was to you. Machts nichts what someone else experienced, although it's natural to try to look at it that way. But there's a name for looking for an external meter for your experiencial distress: Invalidation.
As for feeling guilty, that's natural, too, and it's part of this weird disorder called Depression -- I'm betting you've heard of it. "Gee, I don't deserve to be depressed -- nothing really bad ever happened to me, not like the kid down the street who got beat twice a day..." Want to hear something I read in an analysis of some research studies a few years back? Sexual molestation didn't -- in and of itself -- cause lasting damage. For those few children who experienced molestation and got good support from their caregivers right away, there were few if any lasting effects. Guess what causes the damage? The inappropriate responses of the caregivers, which are a lot more common, since caregivers tend to do the bulk of the molesting. It really doesn't matter why you experienced pain -- it matters that you did experience that pain. Now, though, it's time to examine that pain and try to work through it. Worrying about overreacting to nothing does nothing healthy for you. It only makes your current distress that much worse.
I'm very fortunate in many ways to have grown up with my mother. Yes, I experienced abuse throughout most of my childhood, and from a very wonderful woman whom everyone around me would never have believed a word I said against. Here I am, a badly damaged adult, saying that I was fortunate to have had this woman for a mother. (Everything's relative, right? Hamster mothers eat their young...) Do I still have some anger and pain over things that happened? Yes, as a matter of fact I do. Do I blame my mother for some of her behaviors? You betcha! Do I blame the people around me who *should* have protected me? Damn straight I do. And how does that effect me now? Well, let's see -- I'm trying to be successful in processing the left overs in therapy. Do I ever mention this sort of stuff to my mother? Very rarely, and I always stress the point that it's what *I'M* working on, not something she can do anything at all about at this point. She's got her own trauma over it, and that's her business. My business is to process what happened and try to learn to adjust my own behaviors in order to avoid continuing to recreate the same situations over and over again.
Here's my easier said than done advice -- a specialty of almost everyone who gives advice on this sort of thing, and something I should probably bookmark and reread weekly for my own good -- ignore what other people say about how lucky you are in having such a close family. Say something neutral like, "Yeah, I guess I am" and then put it out of your mind. It's one of those meaningless politenesses like, "How are you?" is always replied to as, "Fine, thank you, and you?" Means nothing more than that. Work, in therapy, on allowing yourself to experience how YOU felt about your existence, and how to get past it.
Good luck to you, kiddo -- you know that you have my support.
poster:Racer
thread:330942
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040327/msgs/330954.html