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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (20570)	4/17/1998 1:36:00 AM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

You write fine, Michael. I have never noticed anything about your writing that is any kind of a problem, except your spelling, and now that SI has a spell checker, that is a distant memory. I'm sure you know that spelling has to do with a certain kind of photographic memory part of the brain that some people have naturally and some people have to struggle with, and that it is not related to general intelligence at all. You express yourself very well, and I have been noticing lately that you are a little more mellow and flexible and consider your opinions more than I seem to remember you doing in the past. Of course, I am trying to be mellower also, so perhaps we are getting along better and that has changed my perceptions. When my mother was very little, two I think, she remembers her father kicking her. It might be her very first memory. He beat her all the time when she was small, and even though they had money and a nice farm during the Depression, she grew up miserable and emotionally ill because of the way her father treated her. Because of those early experiences, she was unable to really trust or love or nurture when she became an adult, and also repeated the physical violence on me, and then I grew up all screwed up also. It's a pretty miserable chain of violence being repeated from one generation to the next, and that is what happens unless an adult remembers how horribly it all hurt, and decides to NEVER do that to his own children, and gets professional help if he or she still has trouble controlling the violent urges. Parents hit their children because they were hit, although certainly some parents who were beaten resolve not to beat their own children. It would never occur to a child who has not been beaten to beat their own children, because we learn how to be parents from our own parents. My mother's story just got worse and worse as she got older. Because she was in so much pain from her childhood, she learned to compensate by creating a whole bunch of compartments in her head to store pain that she could not deal with at the time. As an adult she was very well educated and had a genius IQ, but her life has been full of waste and sadness anyway. Because she had to deny so much to survive her childhood, that became a pattern and she also denied that she had problems when she was an adult because it would have been too much for her if they had all come tumbling out, so she refused to get any therapy to help her. She developed a drinking problem and a tranquilizer problem to kill all the pain inside her, and of course that caused even more problems. She was in love with my father when she married him, but very screwed up in the head, and the marriage was cold and full of tension. Really, she could not love anyone who didn't hurt her, because her psyche was all messed up. She finally divorced my father, and married a man who beat her, because that is what seemed normal to her. He tried to kill me by bashing my head into a brick terrace, when I was an adult, and she chose to stay with him anyway, after I had called the police and he was arrested. She has no maternal instinct. All of these very sad things stem from growing up with a father who beat her, just as I am sure he was beaten by his own father. There is way too much damage and pathology in this situation for me to ever go back to it and maintain my own emotional health, that I fought very hard for and paid therapists a lot of money to get. Whenever I am around her, it jeopardizes my health too much, and my therapists have advised me to have no relationship with her at all. Obviously, my own child and my husband are much more important to me, and I agree with the therapists' recommendations. I think that is all very needless, and tragic, and that is why I am so adamantly against hitting my own child, ever. While I have come to accept that a few open handed spankings will probably not damage a healthy resilient child, and that there is a difference between this and child abuse, really there is always a better way to handle a child than hit them.