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When people have this kind of upbringing it's a huge advantage. Like armor, or an emotional trust fund. We have some inherent propensity to be optimistic or not, resilient or not, and so on, but good parenting that values the person inside whatever package or possessing whatever skills is maybe the best preparation for life we can be given.
And many don't receive that gift. I didn't. I'm pretty sure the OP didn't. Seems most of the people commenting in this era of the discussion didn't. Some people not only don't receive that gift but have their inherent healthy sense of self hijacked by their parents.
Advice on the importance of choosing your parents well always leaves me a little befuddled.
Yeah. I think that one area in which I might be sort of lucky is that I know a lot of the negative messages in my head come from my parents, but I've also had a lifetime of watching them fail spectacularly and lose my respect. So I have some pain, grief, maybe anger, over the way that my childhood was and how I was treated by them....and yet it's easy to see and think, "Yeah, but they are idiots, I mean, who would listen to THEM? Look at how they ended up, look at all the stupid things they've done!" My thinking mind can throw out their BS with relative ease, even when my emotional self knows "that was pretty messed up, though" about those childhood messages.
My Mom pretty much raised me with the belief that blonde, blue eyed women are attractive and valuable to men, and brown haired, brown eyed girls like me were ugly, common, and essentially trash. But then, to illustrate the point... I watched her fry her hair to a gross, dry chick-yellow haystack multiple times attempting to be a fake blonde. It was ugly. It was so much uglier than healthy brown or black hair (I actually believed that Asian, Indigenous American & Islander women were the pinnacle of beauty, myself, though I don't recall where the idea came from. But long, shiny black hair was what I found to be most beautiful, as a child...as an adult, I like healthy looking hair but am less interested in color, except for a slight bias against blonde.)
But I had a turning point that I guess many people never really do. I hit my teen years running angry with a "Hell with it, I'm going to be who I want and like who I am, and if anybody doesn't like it, they can go jump off a cliff." (That is a very sanitized version of the original thought that would have been filled with profanity.) I somehow cultivated a confidence that at the time had an edge of hostility to it. And so weirdly and perhaps ironically, my peers were drawn to that.
But...it was the 90s lol...maybe it was just a different time.
Yeah. I think that one area in which I might be sort of lucky is that I know a lot of the negative messages in my head come from my parents, but I've also had a lifetime of watching them fail spectacularly and lose my respect. So I have some pain, grief, maybe anger, over the way that my childhood was and how I was treated by them....and yet it's easy to see and think, "Yeah, but they are idiots, I mean, who would listen to THEM? Look at how they ended up, look at all the stupid things they've done!" My thinking mind can throw out their BS with relative ease, even when my emotional self knows "that was pretty messed up, though" about those childhood messages.
My Mom pretty much raised me with the belief that blonde, blue eyed women are attractive and valuable to men, and brown haired, brown eyed girls like me were ugly, common, and essentially trash. But then, to illustrate the point... I watched her fry her hair to a gross, dry chick-yellow haystack multiple times attempting to be a fake blonde. It was ugly. It was so much uglier than healthy brown or black hair (I actually believed that Asian, Indigenous American & Islander women were the pinnacle of beauty, myself, though I don't recall where the idea came from. But long, shiny black hair was what I found to be most beautiful, as a child...as an adult, I like healthy looking hair but am less interested in color, except for a slight bias against blonde.)
But I had a turning point that I guess many people never really do. I hit my teen years running angry with a "Hell with it, I'm going to be who I want and like who I am, and if anybody doesn't like it, they can go jump off a cliff." (That is a very sanitized version of the original thought that would have been filled with profanity.) I somehow cultivated a confidence that at the time had an edge of hostility to it. And so weirdly and perhaps ironically, my peers were drawn to that.
But...it was the 90s lol...maybe it was just a different time.
That's a huge steaming load of PROJECTION right there... might as well be *the* illustration for the word in the dictionary - she projected her self-loathing feelings about herself onto you. She felt 'ugly', 'common', and 'trash' over her *own* looks and proceeded to put it all on *you* - and any and everyone else like that - including YoursTruly.
She felt (feels?) 'worthless' and she projected that garbage onto you so you could be miserable like her. Misery loves company, as we all know.
of course. You cannot blame your past/parents forever. YOU are in charge of your own happiness as an adult. No one else is. YOU alone have the power to change yourself, your attitude, your looks, your environment, your jobs, your friends, ...
You can't stay the same and then complain that it stays the same.
Absolutely can't blame your parents for everything. I have a sister who will be 70 next month, and she's still whining about how my mother did this or said that when she was a kid. My mother faced her demons and got therapy in her middle age, so she showed us that change is possible, but this one sister just clings to her misery and her excuses.
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