Dear Ed:

I just noticed that you submitted a post to me, just as I was to submit to you the second post of the day. So, before reading your most recent post, I will send what I prepared. Later, I will read and reply to your most recent post:

In your recent post, you asked me: “So, if I understand correctly, you understood that you were objectified by your mother?” –

– it happens that even though I heard a particular word many times, for many years (ex., objectified), and knew what a word means, I lose the connection between the word and the definition and so, I look it up. This is what I did in my last reply to you, I looked it up and added to my post: “objectified: degraded to the status of a mere object or treated like an object”. I answered your question based on this simple, literal definition.

Interestingly, after I submitted the post to you I read another member’s post, and that member mentioned the word “objectify“, in the context of the sexual objectifying of women. Next,  I looked into a study on the topic, and  2 hours and 13 minutes after submitting the post to you, I submitted a post to the other member on the topic of sexually objectifying women.

As a result of the latter post, I now have a more comprehensive, less literal understanding of the word. I will now use  the definition of sexual objectification to the context of a child’s objectification: A child’s objectification by a parent occurs when a part of the child’s whole being is isolated from the totality of the child and treated like as an isolated part, one not connected to the whole.

I will now answer your question: “So, if I understand correctly, you understood that you were objectified by your mother?”-

– yes: (1) She isolated the part of me that needed to be (reasonably) fed and focused on that part as if it was the only part that made me who I was, isolating it from the rest of me, not caring to notice any other part. She unnecessarily forced fed me when I was a baby, causing the baby that I was great distress. She witnessed the baby’s distress (she told me that later in life), but continued to force feed me regardless.

Later on, as a child and onward, she regularly over fed me, insisting that I eat more and more, even though I expressed distress over it many times. No matter my distress, she overfilled my plate and then.. more. She isolated my digestive system from the rest of me, and the rest of me (the expressed distress over being over fed) was ignored and dismissed, repeatedly and for many years.

(2) She isolated the part of me that loved school and bragged about my study habits and grades to everyone who’d listen, causing me great embarrassment because she exaggerated my grades to other people and because she went on and on bragging.. but she didn’t express to me any pride in my studying… it was all for other people. She exaggerated and misused part of me selfishly, ignoring and dismissing my distress about it.

(3) She repeatedly told other people that I didn’t like boys, that all I cared for was school. But I didn’t tell her that I didn’t like boys and she never asked. She made it up, she invented a part of me that didn’t exist and bragged about it.

There are other examples, no doubt, but enough for now.

Back to the study about sexual objectification of women, in the conclusion, it says: “The current literature makes it clear that sexual objectification is both directly and indirectly linked to various mental health distresses and disorders in women, including anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and reduced experiences of flow and productivity” – same can be said about a child being objectified by a parent: it leads to various health distresses in children, anxiety, depression, disordered eating and (in my case) greatly reduced experiences of flow and productivity, effects that extend to adulthood and not uncommonly increase and get more complicated in adulthood.

anita