Dear Anita,

“When parents feed, shelter and clothe their child and take away the child the following: hope, courage, the feeling of being wanted and valued, are they doing the child any favors, meaning, is it worth it, for the child?”

No. (Sad smile.) Of course not. How could it be? The only imaginable case where it could be okay would be if the child got those things, on a consistent basis, from another person or group of people in their life… that does sometimes happen for some children.

I’m having a less than great day today due to a health issue I won’t name here. (It’s chronic yet mostly manageable but also a bit rare and not well-known.) Though not brain-related, it affects neuro-transmitter levels, and puts me in an irritable mood in which negative memories surface and my thoughts tend to repeat. In this mood, I often end up thinking of what I would like to say to my sister, or other family member. I don’t bother/have never bothered to say these things IRL because she would only talk over me or deny the things she has said and done. (But when I’m in this mood, I would happily punch her in the face. And I feel like that would be the least of what she deserves for how she treated me growing up.) She thinks all/any of my problems are either my own fault or perhaps caused by our father. As an adult, she has told me that I’m my own problem, that she deserved to have children and implied that I didn’t deserve them or a husband, etc. When were children, she was always telling me that no one liked me, that no one could like me, that I was stupid, fat and ugly, that I was driving mom and dad crazy with all my problems and needed to shut up and stop bothering them. Every day it was some nasty, hurtful comment or other. What floors me is the parents seldom called her on what she said and didn’t acknowledge the impact of it. Sometimes they told her to shut up, but this was typically at times like when they were driving and needed to focus on traffic. I always wondered why they never thought, “Whoa, what is wrong with this kid? Why is she always saying nasty stuff to her little sister? We need to take a good look at her, figure where this is coming from, and put a stop to her behavior.” Especially since, as the older we got, kids who knew both of us would say, “Jeez ‘Mary’, you’re really mean to your sister.”

Of course they had plenty of their own reasons why they never thought these things. They were both fairly estranged from their own families. My dad was bullied by an older sibling and this factored heavily into his having a poor self-image, a huge chip on his shoulder, and a hair-trigger temper. Neither of my parents were at peace with their estrangements but instead greatly absorbed with resentment to the point where it occupied their thoughts. (And sadly, I’m now repeating their behavior. Sigh!)

One day, I was feeling a lot of self-hatred but had a moment of detachment from my thoughts and decided to google ‘self-hatred’ in an attempt to figure out where it comes from. I found an interesting blog on it written by a therapist.