I have two nParents. My nDad was mostly not involved in parenting us at all, except to jump in and threaten to beat us or actually beat us (he only actually beat my brother; he only threatened to beat my sisters and me) when my nMom got frustrated or really angry with us. I think he did this just to get her to shut up and/or calm down.
My nMom was easily irritated and quickly escalated to full-out anger at the slightest infraction. Sometimes she would punish us—or threaten to--for stuff we didn’t even do, and the punishment was always much harsher than would be expected for the behavior. Here is an example: One day after school, she gathered all four of us (my three siblings and me) in the kitchen and started screaming at us about how she had spent the entire day cleaning the house and now one of us made a HUGE mess in the kitchen. She was highly pissed off about it. She said that she was going to punish all of us if one of us didn’t confess to it. None of us would confess, so we were all sent to our rooms. Then, a bit later she brought us all out again, started screaming about the same thing (the mess), and insisted that one of us confess. All of us started crying and denied that we had done anything. So, she hit all of us with her wooden spoon that she kept on top of the refrigerator for just such events. [Anyone else have nightmares when they see those wooden spoons in a store? I won’t even have one in my house. It’s like I have a PTSD flashback when I see one.] By the way, the “huge mess” that so greatly pissed off my nMom was a tiny bit of spilled Sweet N Low next to an opened Sweet N Low packet sitting in the middle of the kitchen counter. I don’t know why, but none of us kids thought to suggest that this mess was probably made by our nDad, who drank tea with Sweet N Low in it Every. Single. Day. Of course, the mess was made by him as he later confessed to my nMom, but we kids all got punished for it. And of course the punishment was way out of proportion to our “crime”.
As an adult, I find that whenever a supervisor or person of authority brings up some mistake that I have made, my brain immediately jumps to the conclusion that I will be fired or some other really horrible thing will happen. My therapist said that this is likely because of my nMom’s overreaction to any infraction when I was a child. She said that living in a chaotic environment in which you never knew what behavior would set off nMom or how bad the punishment would be caused me to assume the worst in any situation involving something that I did wrong or when I am being falsely accused of something.
This has been absolutely crippling to me as an adult. It’s really hard to be comfortable or feel safe at a job when you constantly fear being fired over minor infractions. And just to illustrate why I know that my reaction is over-the-top: I am a tenured professor. Objectively speaking, it would be quite difficult for my University to fire me unless I do something outrageously unethical or stupid—which won’t happen because I am a hardcore rule-follower. Yet, any time I do make a mistake, I start losing sleep and having panic attacks over how I might be fired for it.
I just wondered if this happened to anyone else (this huge fear and overreaction to criticism from work), and if so, how the heck do you deal with it? I don’t like living in fear, but I can’t seem to move past this.
Submitted December 16, 2016 at 04:03AM by EN_Fan http://ift.tt/2hTyL7K raisedbynarcissists
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