Dear Katie:

Nov 2019, you wrote about your cousin: “She would always put me down, and sometimes not even so subtly.. when I was 12, she would tell me I wasn’t pretty enough to be popular.. once my cousin began to laugh at me for not being pretty enough.. She would laugh at me, LAUGH…she would look me up and down, laugh, and say, ‘no offense Katie, but you’re not pretty. I know you’re not popular because you’re just not pretty enough.’ … when I was 14, my cousin told me my eyebrows were too thick. She told me my legs are too fat. She began to tell me my nose was too big… She always had something bad to say about me.. my cousin would laugh at me saying I desperately needed a nose job)”

You explained in that thread that your cousin’s mother tells her daughter (your cousin) negative things similar to what she tells you, putting her own daughter down. Your cousin’s response to her mother’s verbal abuse is not to blame her mother and confront her mother so to stop the verbal abuse directed at her. Her response instead, is to take it out on you (the bold face here are your words).

So she allows her mother to throw insults at her and her reaction is to throw insults at you. She is afraid to confront her mother and you are afraid to confront your cousin. Let’s look at your fear as you wrote about it in your recent post here: “I have just been too afraid to tell her, and I have no idea why. Maybe I’m afraid of her. I feel nervous when I think about how I would confront her”-

– imagine you confronting her, as an exercise (not planning at all to execute the plan) and type away whatever comes to mind as to what you say, what she says, what you  do, what she does, etc.

anita