Prudence Deer

At times - most times - I'm unable to understand how to cope with common problems that other people seem to deal with. It may not be easy for them, but they seem to know what to do. I've always felt like life was difficult every step of the way. No big problem has ever had a clear answer, or at least a reasonable choice. They all feel as though I'm reinventing the wheel while also knowing that it's been done before. I just wasn't clued into the solution. When I think about my childhood, I realize why I've felt that way my whole life. It's because my parents never tried to teach me anything about life. Granted, that may be due to the fact that they didn't know a lot themselves, but they'd done things. At the time i was born, my father was 28 and he'd purchased a house. I didn't buy my first house until I was 56, and I was embarrassed that I knew so little about how to go about it. My brother, who'd stayed at home until he was in his 30s, h...

 I wasn't a good scout. I was a Cub Scout and that went pretty well overall, given that the tasks we were given to do were all pretty easy and I wasn't at all ambitious about achieving anything. When I moved up to the Webelos, things got worse. They made doing the tasks to earn little pins more of a focus. There were also five "Tommys" in my group which was weird. But the worst part was dreading the move to Boy Scout. I kept hearing rumors about the things that happened when you became a Boy Scout. First off, there were camping trips. Ugh. I'll have to dedicate an entire post to camping, but suffice it to say that our family vacations were always spent crammed together in a camper because my cheap-ass father wouldn't spring for a fucking hotel room from time to time. Anyway, the Boy Scouts supposedly had something called a jamboree and it sounded nothing like the jamboree of the country bear variety at Disney World. There were stories that all new scouts at th...

 I've been thinking a lot about the various aspects of my personality and wondering which of them are truly mine and which ones were created by the treatment I received as a child. When I go down the list, I wonder if any of these traits actually belong to my true self. Sometimes, it makes me wonder how much I really want to complete this course of discovery of self. Will I even like who I find when I help my true self flourish and grow within me? It's scary.  While I want to be free of the pain that my parents forced on me, not knowing who I am deep down makes me feel like I could be on the verge of losing the only self I've ever known. Will I be lonelier without him? Will I be happier? Maybe more grounded but without many of my creative abilities?  Does it even matter? I've shown myself that I can't continue with things as-is. I've tried desperately to pursue relief for my TMS pain, only to have it return again and again. In some ways, this feels like my last ...

 Hello, Enlightened Witness. It has only recently occurred to me that my brother may not have experienced our mother the way that I did. I think that's why he venerates her while I work at digging out from the pile of shit she dumped onto me my whole life. I think this may have happened because she was never alone with him the way that she was alone with me. I was always there watching and witnessing. That alone may have stilled her harmful impulses, but I also think that she chose to own me in a way she never did to him. I was her first child. I was the first child of a woman whose parents had made no secret of the fact that they'd had her for the express purpose of being taken care of when they were old. I was the first "thing" she'd had in her life that she could call her own. This was the early 60s, which for all intents and purposes, was still an extension of the 50s, especially in the small town where my parents grew up. Women were not their own. Only their ...

Hello again, enlightened witness. As I stated in my last post, I feel tremendous gratitude for the information contained in Alice Miller's books. I feel that those books are genuinely helping me to find myself. So you can imagine how troubled I felt when I read an interview with Miller's son, Martin  and I learned what an awful mother she was. I've struggled to separate the author's works from her personal life and continue to do so. I won't get into the weeds with details about how awfully Alice Miller treated her son. You can read it for yourself in Martin's book if you wish. It's title is  The True “Drama of the Gifted Child”: The Phantom Alice Miller — The Real Person. I will say that these facts have made me take a closer look at myself, not just as a victim of parental negligence, but as a perpetrator of cruelty myself. It's not something that's easy for me to admit, but I often feel the urge to punish others and, when those others are clearly ...

Today, I am going to begin to explore parts of myself I thought I already knew. Thanks to the books of Alice Miller, I've learned that I have very likely misplaced my focus when trying to sort out the problems of this life. Instead of self-help, I needed self-discovery. If you've never read anything by Alice Miller, I'll give you the Wikipedia synopsis of her work:  Alice Miller (12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010), was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse. She was also a noted public intellectual. Her book The Drama of the Gifted Child caused a sensation and became an international bestseller upon the English publication in 1981. Her views on the consequences of child abuse became highly influential. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies. I've read three of her books, so far, and they clearly represent a singularit...