Hi, Teartracks. I hope you remember me from the last time I posted on the board. I haven't reposted my story yet. (It just seems too huge an undertaking right now.)
I've been thinking about this post on and off all day, because it's a rich area for discussion and seems so complicated to me.
I think a child born and raised in a hostile (hostility can take many forms) environment (family or institution) loses his ability to recognize that gentleness, friendliness and favor exists in the external world.
I was raised by a father with diagnosed, but untreated, borderline personality disorder, and a uNPD mother. It was an unrelentingly hostile and at times violent atmosphere. Somehow, though, I do remember some kindness and gentleness. There was a friend of my mother who sometimes paid me special attention (she would paint my nails or play cards with me). There were teachers along the way who were kind and encouraged me. Babysitters who showed me mercy. A few friends here and there who may not have known about my situation, but unknowingly offered me relief from it. They may seem like teeny tiny small things, but I held onto them for dear life. So I didn't completely lose the ability to find some gentleness and kindness in the external world. So your comment, in a way, made me feel a bit blessed.
Unwittingly (because he has lost his ability to recognize that goodness exists), he relates to friendliness and goodwill (not understanding the law of reciprocity in the healthy sense) the same way he relates to hostility.
Sometimes I react to genuine friendliness and goodwill with surprise and bewilderment. Sometimes I react with gratitutde. A very small gesture will touch a part of me that aches and then my eyes well up with tears. (Another surprise!) Othertimes, I try to bat it away with "No, you don't have to" or "don't go to all that trouble" or "I'm fine." I do find it difficult to accept kindness. Not, I think, because I'm relating to it in the same way I relate to the hostility, but because the hostile envirnoment I grew up in convinced me that I don't deserve it.
The child, now an adult may navigate his way through life with a measure of success using the set of examples he was taught in the family home. He is basically applying the old, If it looks like a duck, meaning if it's another human, then it must be like the humans he was raised by. So believing that if you've seen one, you've seen them all, he uses a somewhat standardized (maybe with a few upgrades of his own), version of the hostility he was taught by FOO, when relating to others. I think he is fully conditioned to accept the same treatment/relating (reciprocity) he experienced with his FOO. To him, they're all DUCKS, including himself and he has been thoroughly indoctrinated on how you relate to a duck!
I never wanted to be that way--to relate to others with the hostility I grew up with--so I have a tendency to turn myself inside out and go to great lengths to be helpful, gentle and kind to others at the expense of myself. I also turn a fair amount of that hostility I learned from my FOO on myself. I'm working on that. It's like pulling out really stubborn weeds, though.
I think this partly explains the conundrum of how people become who they are or the way they are.
Your thoughts?
