Dear Helcat:

You are welcome and thank you for posting again in 2 days, just like you said you will 2 days ago. When a person keeps his/ her word like this, I appreciate it. I appreciate you for it!

“It’s wonderful to see you speak about yourself so compassionately. You are indeed a loving compassionate woman” – thank you! Feeling compassion or empathy for myself is a new experience, still feels new to me.

“My mother also spoke badly about men. Sometimes, I think that can set up a frame for expecting and accepting poor behaviour while we’re in relationships? What do you think?” –

– what comes to my mind first (and I hope that you don’t mind if I answer in a stream of consciousness kind of way) in regard to what I learned to expect from men is that I expected from everyone, men and women the same behavior as my mother’s. I still do, I’ll give you a small example that happened today: in another member’s thread, the member mentioned my name, as I read my name, I felt fear as I expected a verbal assault to follow my name, and then, a relief when an assault did not happen. This happens every day in real life, let’s say I am washing dishes and a dish falls from my hands, not breaking, but it creates a loud sound, what follows in my mind is that an assault is about to happen next, verbal or otherwise.

Next thing that comes to my mind is that because I was so scared of my mother, spending time away from her with whomever, felt like an improvement, it felt safer. I needed a break/ a relief from the ongoing tension that I felt in the presence of my mother and… anyone, anywhere, anything would do as a break from her.

Next thing that comes to my mind is that a combination of my very poor self-esteem, absence of self-empathy, and the extent of my severe and ongoing dissociation and inattentiveness led me in the past to passively accept disrespect and mistreatment, not being adequately aware of what was happening.

And last thing that comes to mind, and this may answer your question best: because my mother talked badly about everyone, men, women and children, saying that they all hurt her in one way or another, and because the only person- in her mind- who deserved empathy was herself, I felt angry at everyone, no empathy for anyone but for her, and I proceeded to be a very distrustful adult, angry at everyone, sooner or later. It’s not so much that I was expecting others to behave badly, it’s that I believed that everyone was inherently bad.

anita