Clarification for 1) Protect the child from the parent…from those compulsions and impulses and tension and anger that bring forth abusing the child/

Dear Anyone at all/Snail: If anyone understands what Snails has written me in her three posts here on this thread, please explain it to me like I was a five year old. Anyone cares to paraphrase it for me? Snails, if you can summarize the three posts in one short paragraph, just one, make it clear for me… Thank you.

anita

Dear Snails:

This is the best of my understanding of your four posts on this thread in context:

The title of this thread is: “Was any of your parents good-enough?” Your first sentence in your first post on this thread is: “If I wanted to make myself feel down, I could by focusing on the bad stuff from childhood – but what would I achieve, to keep reliving it?”

Looking at the question, the first sentence is not an answer to the question. Neither is there an answer throughout the four posts by you. The first sentence provides a clue as to why there is no answer: the whole topic makes you feel badly. But you didn’t turn off the computer or go to another thread, you chose to post on the very thread that makes you feel so badly.

What follows is a mix of sometime honest sharing, such as ” I gained from my childhood is a low happiness threshold” – a sharing about you. At other times you are on the attack. You are on the attack because in your experience of this thread, I made you feel badly (first sentence indicates that).

But you don’t go on a direct attack. I am using the following image to describe what I mean by the indirect attack you were on in these posts on this thread: if this was a battle field you are moving with lightening speed from bunker to bunker, shooting from one bunker, then running from it (weapon hidden behind back, throwing a rock in the air to distract the attacked), then you get to the next bunker, shoot the weapon again and run again, weapon hidden, throwing another rock in the air so to distract, etc.

Your fast and furious attacks start with “what would I achieve, to keep reliving it?” the first bullet is: I hate you for making me relive my past? YOU are making me feel bad!

After that first bullet comes the next: “When I read the word (written by others responding to my thread) -strength, resilience…– that seems to me to be such a good place they’ve led themselves” – the direct equivalent would be: You, anita, are weak, not strong like the other people. You are not in a good place like the other people. They, the other people have led themselves to a good place but not you, anita. You are in a bad place because you are weak.

Then you run to the next bunker and throw me this rock in the air, a distraction: sharing about your lowered threshold for happiness, and you throw me a flower as well, stating that you are glad I survived my childhood. You do so as you run to the next bunker, doing your best to distract me from the attack which you are engaged in. The next attack follows right away after the “flower”: “Are you glad you are the person you are today? living the life you are living today?” The bullet in these questions, the direct attack is something like: “Shut up, anita, shut the hell up!”

Next flower, so to speak is “I hope you are having a content and happy day today.” But as you typed it you did not mean it, quite the opposite. It is just a distraction, a manipulation intended to confuse the target so you can safely run to the next bunker.

And it goes on and on. Fast forward to your last post addressed to me. You wrote there: “Perhaps since none of my posts are clear..you might like to write what you think they mean.. as you seem to think I am somehow attacking you?
I have only been kind to you please show me the same respect!” I have honored your request in your last post and told you what I think your posts mean. You asked if I think you were somehow attacking me? My answer is, yes, I believe you did attack me and I described above how you did it the best I could.

As to your claim that you have only been kind to me, that is a lie, a total fabrication- you attacked me and did it indirectly and with no honesty or honor. You tried to distract me with rocks or flowers in the air so I am not prepared for the next bullet, so that I don’t SEE you attacking me, so you can do is safely in hiding (hiding in the next bunker). Those distractions were not kindnesses. Those were parts of your attack on me.

The benefit for you in this attack strategy is that you get to deny that there is an attack going on. You get to point to the distractions you produced and claim those were kindnesses.

anita