My First Time

I was bulimic for a number of years in college (4, to be exact) and continued to have some trouble with it on and off for many years afterward. It came and went, but got worse any time I felt like I was being treated like I didn’t matter – with disrespect or simply as if I was a child.

I finally stopped partly because I just couldn’t do that to my body any more (the last time I did it, about a year ago, I thought I was going to have a heart attack), but partly because I realized that it’s not _me_ that hates me, it’s the ‘bad parents’ inside me that hate me.

So I started talking back to those bad parents – out loud, or in my head, or whatever. I yelled at them and shouted at them and cursed them.

I also told my mom off, finally, after all the years of pretending everything was fine. Of course, I don’t live with her, and I’m not financially dependent on her any more.

This seems to be part of the process of separating oneself from these parents who sort of trap you in their need to be in control. They don’t let you grow up; they don’t let you have any power. They keep you trapped in their rules and meanness, and then they expect you to be happy with that. WTF???? They wonder why you don’t like them. Parents are stupid. (My dad died when I was 24, so I was no longer under his control, though his influence stayed with me for a very long time. I still fight his voice in my head sometimes, when I feel something very negative going on. Those voices are powerful.)

I realized that the bulimia was about feeling ashamed for who I am. The shame came from growing up with parents who never let me feel like I was a good person, who always tried to make me feel bad about myself. We live in a culture where children are treated as if they are bad people – criminals – whose only purpose is to cause trouble for the parents. Pretty fucked up, if you ask me.

One person whose writing helped me a lot is a lady named Jean Liedloff, who wrote something called the Continuum Concept, which talks about how kids are raised in a primitive tribe.

They have a totally different way of treating their children – with respect, as if their feelings and opinions matter. As if children are actually _people_.

This helped me because it let me see that the way my parents did things was simply WRONG, and that it wasn’t my fault that they treated me the way they did. They were just clueless and stupid and didn’t know any better.

Which does not, in any way, let them off the hook. But it helped make sense of things, and it helped me begin to stop beating up on myself and start putting the blame where it belongs: On my parents.

Another person I find very helpful is Alice Miller, especially a book called Drama of the Gifted Child. It talks about how all children find ways to cope with how their parents treat them, because all of us need to feel loved.

When we don’t feel loved by our parents (which is totally an unnatural thing, for parents not to love us), we warp our thinking around to make it our own fault. Because to think that the people who are responsible for keeping us safe don’t _care_ about us is a thing that a small child can’t afford to think. It’s too terrifying – a child with no one to take care of it will die, at least in primitive terms.

No child can cope with that, so instead we make up another explanation, namely that it’s _us_ who is bad, that it’s our fault, that we did something wrong to make our parents treat us this way. The other reason kids do this – blaming ourselves – is, that way it feels like we have a little bit of control over the situation. Like, if maybe we were better people, our parents would treat us better.

But it’s not true. Parents who treat their kids like this just simply want to be in control. They want the power trip of having somebody to push around, just like their own parents did before them. It gets passed on down the generations over and over again.

How does this help you? I’m not sure. You could read those books – they’re easy to get at the library. Or you could look the people up online and read their websites – both Alice Miller and Jean Liedloff have websites.

Or there are lots of other books out there that talk about how parents _should_ be treating their children, which might help because it could let you see that it’s not your fault that they treat you this way. It’s THEIR fault. If you can begin to get angry with them, at least enough to stand up to them and start making them treat you with respect (and I know this is not easy – you really need another adult, somebody from outside your immediate family, to help you with this. Maybe your counselor?), maybe you’ll be able to start being nicer to yourself.

I think if you can start insisting that other people be nice to you, or you won’t have anything to do with them (yes, you’re only 15, which makes it hard. This is why you need another adult from outside the family to help you stand up to them), you can start being nicer to yourself.

But again, please feel free to tell me if you think what I’m saying is stupid or that I’m full of shit. Because really, only you know what you’re going through. I’m giving you ideas based on what worked for _me_, but you may need something different than that.

I hope you will keep writing here and telling us what is happening with you.

Peaches talk to me, I’m 15 too, heyy i cut too, not as much as you though cause I’m scared of cutting but when I’m depressed enough I can and it feels good. email me?? aleshya.starry.girl@hotmail.co.jp