Dear Midnight:

When you were a young child and your brother bullied you, scared you, I assure you of the following: you did not think that it was a “normal situation of siblings bickering.” That may be what your parents said when you told about what happened (?) or it may be what you figured years later that it was. At the time your brain didn’t have the information (and misinformation) it now has.

In other words, what seems to you now is not what was happening then. The brain of a young child is raw and free of assumptions and expectations and distortions. It perceives danger and it gets very scared.

anita