Dear Jack:

Your niche, as one of 7, was the placid niche, the problem free niche. That was your best shot at a happy childhood. A family role, a sibling role, the one submissive to the older, bullying one, maybe submissive to the other older ones as well, and one, unlike your disabled one, “problem free”- unlike him, not one to give your parents trouble.

Authentic Jack though was not problems free, was not placid. It was only his role, so to get along in the family structure, so to have the best childhood he could have in the family you were born in, with the siblings before you and after you, adjusting to your spot with the siblings older than you and later to the siblings younger than you.

Authentic Jack though is not okay with being submissive in life and is not problem free. Never was. It was only to get along then with what was.

To ASSERT and to state your problems and deal with them and assert-> to break free from the early role, to be and become YOU.

Dear Chris:

Thank you for your response.

It is also a distortion of nature, to contribute to one own destruction. It is a distortion of nature when a parent attacks her own child- it doesn’t happen in nature. It happens in human families frequently, a parent attacking her or his child, again and again, giving rise to the bully in the child, deep in his psyche. It is instinctual and automatic rather than philosophical, the making of the internal bully. The bully is there to shape up the child so to please the (bullying) parent and survive.

A young animal, duck, deer, follows its mother wherever she goes, so does a human child. If the mother attacks the human child, the child will follow with the creation of its own bully and attack itself, follow suit.

I disagree then with your statement that the bully is like pain, rarely the problem. I think the bully is the problem taking after the bullying parent that was also the problem.

This is making me wonder, what is the nature of an internal bully (an abusive Superego) in a child and then adult who was not bullied by a parent or by a sibling/ another or others (while unprotected by a parent)??? Is there such a case?

anita