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Cake day: February 25th, 2024

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  • I can’t remember the name of the book now, but in high school we read a ‘true’ story of child abuse. I’m sure it was edited to both tone down and turn up certain elements, but it was pretty much a brutal shock to people who are mostly from decent families that love them. Whether the kids were rich, poor, or middle class in my school, just about everyone there could at least return home to parents that didn’t commit those horrors.

    I remember the diapers, the exposure to the elements, and the way the other children were pitted against the abused kid, and honestly? It was the emotional abuse that was the worst to read.









  • All I can think is that she has a completely different personality as a therapist.

    I am sorry you’re having to experience this. It is a horrifying behavior that is very, very common among people with different social groups, and especially professions that ‘serve’ or help people. Doctors, EMTs, nurses, therapists, even cops or firefighters… I’ve seen it in all of them. They are exceptionally kind and caring until they clock out, and then are vehemently demanding of perfection, calculating in their coldness and disdain, and nearly psychopathic about other things that they find irritating in those they help while on the job. They completely suppress or sidestep their feelings about the issues while on the job, and let it all out on the people who are close, like family.

    I know you’re having advice chucked at you from all directions, and in the last big post you said you had tired of that, so ignore everything after this if so and I’ll put it in spoilers.

    spoiler

    I knew of an individual who had issues (not similar to yours, but hauntingly parallel, in some ways) that were not responsive to medical interventions. The only thing we could do for him was seek psychological therapy for the depression that was plaguing him due to his health. Some of the physical symptoms were alleviated, and some became responsive to medications. While not completely healthy, the easing of the psychological illness altered the psychosomatic symptoms that blended with the more typical physical causes, enough that they weren’t masked and making the overall effects much, much worse.

    I would really, really avoid your mother, who seems to be a negative spot in your world, and see if professional psychiatric/psychological intervention could help at all. I’m not saying you’re crazy, or it’s all in your head. Psychosomatic illnesses are real, and a horrible thing to suffer. They are definitely not something you can “just stop thinking that” away. I’m also not saying that’s what you have, but if no other doctor has suggested therapy while they continue their work in diagnosing you, maybe consider it.



  • My friend got sucked into it because of a girl. His parents weren’t religious. I don’t think he had gone to church more than twice in his life by high school, and he, just like the rest of us, trash talked our school’s requirements to have a ‘chapel’ hour once a week. He was as blasé as they come about religion, perhaps an agnostic in the christian hemisphere at best, but when he started dating a christian girl, he went to church with her, made friends with her friends at church, etc. Now 15 years later he’s indoctrinating his kids with her, and a deacon at his church. The power of social influence is enormous. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to break free, or even just consider information that is contradictory, if you have the combination of early influence and the later social influence from family, friends, and the wider social circle that is part and parcel of a church.