Something You Maybe Should Know
Sometimes when people say that they are telling you something you should know for your own good, maybe it really is for their own good. Maybe they tell you that you should change something about yourself for your own good when really its something that is for their own good, not yours? “Janey, you should quit talking so much and stop monopolizing the conversation”, when really they are the one who wants to monopolize the conversation and they want you to shut up and let them completely take over. Worse yet they can compliment you about something you are wearing or about a new hairstyle when obviously it doesn’t flatter you at all. Then your best friend can be your worst enemy. How do you tell the difference between one and the other?
Also less lethal but still misleading is a friend-enemy who may monopolize the choice of the next store to go to on “Black Friday” or acts like she is being the most helpful when you are deciding where to eat. It is always presented as the most logical choice but over time you or others don’t get to go where they might have planned to go. If you kept score, how many times did they get their choice while you or others did not get theirs? Maybe you had hoped to have Chinese and to top it off it might have even been your birthday and you didn’t get to have your choice for whatever reason your “friend” gave. Then if you begin to feel slightly angry over time, your friend will have a reason why you shouldn’t feel bad and it makes you look and feel like an oversensitive slob.
Could your friend be a little narcissistic and even insensitive? Not that you could say anything about them or to them. The only remedy often seems to be a little bit narcissistic or insensitive yourself. Often you spend too much time being codependent and meeting other people’s needs and may even have difficulty recognizing your own needs. “Let’s invite Judy (that’s you) to the party, I’m sure she’ll bring the food and even make the decorations.” Whoops, isn’t something going “wrong” there? Maybe the party wasn’t your idea and you had something else planned. But you get coopted!
Why Does The Victim Often Have More Trouble than the Offender?
Here I am in trouble again and you may often find yourself in this type of trouble too. The offender gets out of trouble by blaming the offender. Such as they deserved it. They were so stupid that they deserved to lose to me. Why should they trust people so much? If caught often the punishment does not equal in cost, inconvenience or shame what the offense cost the victim. Often victims have to take on the role of being a damaged person whose repair is difficult, often incomplete and leaves scars.
I am a sexual abuse victim. Even the word victim is personally damaging. I didn’t ask for it but I got it anyway or will get it for sure if I tell anybody like I am doing now. I didn’t realize it until the first time I felt a sexual response while making out and it went away. I tried many ways to fix this without any luck and so I live with it. Also, it seems that once a victim, always a victim.
I had a therapist who once called me sexually attractive which made me uncomfortable at the time. At the end of therapy when I was moving out of town, he invited me to come to see him and let him know how I was doing if ever I was back in town. When I came back, I found out that he expected me to have sex with him. I remember nothing that happened after that. Boy, was I naive and I became a victim again. Now I know why I never felt I was sexually attractive because that was dangerous. It also affected my self-esteem. Now does being seen as sexually attractive mark me as someone to be exploited? It seems to be true at least in this case.
I was considered a behavior problem in grade school. Was I reacting to being sexually abused? I had almost men teachers at that time. The best year I had was with my only woman teacher! In those days, no one considered the fact that I was a problem because they didn’t know what to do with me. In fact, at graduation, I wasn’t made the valedictorian because of my behavior so I said I wasn’t going to graduation if they didn’t. We compromised, I got the award for the highest grades in the class instead. I think I was one of the first people to threaten to boycott their graduation. Also, I was told I would never make better than a “B” in high school; however, I graduated high school as the class Salutatorian. I also suspected that they suspected that I was fairly intelligent because they had someone give me a WISC (the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children), but I never learned what my IQ was.
I was also bullied in high school on the bus and nobody did nothing about it. I did nothing to deserve it. In fact, I spend my time reading to the little kids on the bus. I ended up not riding the bus even though I live in the country. I also was a member of what I called the “out” group in high school. the members of which, including myself, all sat in a group in the auditorium to eat our lunches. We all were there for different reasons, the country kids (but that was not my reason to be there), the less intelligent kids, the poor kids, etc. I was there just because I didn’t make into one of the uppity groups whose members snubbed us.
In ending, I would like to say that from my point of view that I became a victim of other people’s enjoyment at my expense. Victims of crimes also seem to get not fully repaid for their losses caused by those who victimize them. Victims of break-ins often never feel comfortable in their own homes again.
What are the losses, peace of mind, monetary especially the extra cost of legal fees, medical expenses, the cost of therapy needed? Also, the inability to have normal emotional responses again, the lowered ability to trust people, tragic memories or the loss of memories of things that happened, fear of getting into certain situations again. What of these costs does the offender ever have to pay and does the suffering of being caught and having to pay for these offenses by going to prison ever catch up with them? Remediation often doesn’t really happen for some reason such as the inability to identify or catch the offender or the offense is not considered a crime.
What A Nice Surprise.
I was pregnant with my second child and though I hoped for a girl as my first was a boy; but I didn’t know because we had no way of telling at that time. When I did have a girl, I was pleasantly surprised and had a smile on my face; but I didn’t realize until later that I wasn’t prepared for a girl (I had had two brothers (oops I almost misspelled them as “bothers”), but my good friend gifted me with an assortment of girl items which were greatly appreciated by me. However that night I went into a trance state (a form of hypnosis which I had earlier had used for help labor) and went through all the possible thoughts and ideas and scenarios that were connected with having my first girl child.
I guess I was not really prepared and my mind told me that. It was a significant event for me and went beyond the happiness of having a boy and now a girl (P.S.: The third child was also a girl and I was more prepared for her.). These sometimes negative thoughts were a form of preparation especially for me. I regretted losing a night’s sleep with a new baby; I realized I had mixed feelings and possibly without acknowledging them, they might have interfered more with my attachment to my new baby.
As a psychologist, I realized their value and acceptability of my mixed feelings in my forming my relationship with my baby girl. I don’t know if this could have affected positively or negatively my only experience of postnatal depression which I had with this birth. I don’t know for sure if it decreased my experience or increased it; but I feel that as a psychologist, my experience of working through some of these issues immediately after the birth helped and so did my gift from my good friend.
Relating my experience above is also a gift to a good friend of mine who is expecting a girl for the first time after creating a big brother for her too. As one who might possibly use this information, I am just suggesting to her what might happen and how I felt when this happened to me. I also had the encouragement of a friend who is and was at that time the mother of several girls and the support and the help of having had previous trances to help with labor. Was this my hypnotist’s post-hypnotic suggestion? It could have been as it was just like him to do something like that. I am wishing my friend who is going to give birth soon that everything goes well and I will be thinking of her.
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