Nature vs Nurture

Kimera wrote:I learned at an early age that people can't be trusted. My mother was a jealous and vindictive person. If she knew something mattered to me, she'd find a way to ruin it. So I learned how to hide what matters. I hid it really well, even from myself

I can relate. Particularly about the last sentences.

It took very very long time to me to learn that all people are not like that. Mother is something like the basics of relationships. So if mother can't repress their desire to ruin, how is the world

I'm German. My father was born in '34, my mother in '38. I'm adopted and was the second child. At the time, people were only allowed to adopt one child, but my father's good reputation as a teacher got them an exception. They divorced when I was six.

When I was 16, I was an exchange student in Missouri. My host parents would tell their kids and me that they loved us. I thought it was part of the language barrier, as in my world love was reserved for relationships between man and woman. My knowledge about emotions was limited to the very obvious.

I've recently visited my mother and was able to see her with my newfound knowledge. She's a covert narcissist. By the book. The divorce broke her, she's been on auto-pilot since. I was the only thing she was proud of, but I was never loved, I was managed. Needless to say it wasn't so great for my brother either, so I became his punching bag. My mother advised him not to hit the same spot over and over again, since that could cause cancer. She sure was worried about my future.

I don't know what happened to her. I only know that her childhood must have been spent between bombs and hardship. It may have been the circumstances paired with bad priorities by my grandmother, maybe worse.

My father is a different story. He's got his burden to carry, but found a good woman to care for him. He did not have the means to compensate for my mother, I think he was her co-dependent. He remembers how the Russians arrived at the end of the war. How he was convinced, they'd kill him, his brothers and his mother, and how he, at 12 years old, felt he had to protect them, because his mother, a caring woman, was very ill at the time. He remembers how the Red Army used kids to keep taps on their grunts, how they were tasked with reporting rape or other violence. And he remembers the humiliating track past their own nation's victims, when they were evicted from their land given as war reparations. But he also remembers Polish soldiers protecting them, and their officers replacing what had been robbed.

Essentially history has messed with both of them in unhealthy ways.

tl;dr: Nurture. Totally.

WhoElse wrote: so I became his punching bag. My mother advised him not to hit the same spot over and over again, since that could cause cancer.

that's mad