Older musings on The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller

p.146
“The child was not given the nourishment needed from [the mother] and has found no substitute for this in later life. Without drugs, this gap can literally express itself as a feeling of physical hunger, gnawing away at the stomach, which contracts in response.”
- The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller

Constant hunger, but not for food; for attention and affection.

I remember saying I was jealous of her students because they got more of her time than I did - and I was told that was wrong because they’re impoverished, etc. That doesn’t change the fact that I felt - and still do - that my mother had chosen to lose herself to her school.

I remember doing assistant work for so many projects - worksheets, goody bags, cataloging, marking books for the collection, inventory, stuff for the yearly ‘reading carnivals’... I probably could have paid for college had I been paid minimum wage for all the time I spent working. I was “paid” in Tootsie Rolls or occasionally some thing I wanted.

All I really wanted was to be treated kindly, listened to with respect, and engaged with on an appropriate level. I can count the number of times my father has played chess with me (supposedly he likes chess) and it’s in the single digits. The only game mom really has ever played with me since...middle school? is Uno. I’m very aggressive in these games, possibly as a way of ‘punishing’ her for ignoring me all those years.

I still feel her school took her from me - although ‘took’ isn’t really correct; it’s more like a person who enters and stays in an emotionally abusive relationship despite everyone telling them to get out. School is where she hurt herself to the point of being almost disabled; she’s hurt both ankles, one to the point of requiring surgery and removal of the nerve to alleviate the pain. Even now, years after, she can only hobble.

I see in her constant martyrdom and stupid, arrogant overachieving the little kid still trying to impress a parent who only sees her as a tool. It’s not going to work. It never would have. You can’t make a narcissist love you, accept you. You might as well try to teach a snake to tap dance.

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I don’t understand the whole “inner child” concept. Probably because I don’t think I ever really thought of myself as a child, nor was I really treated as a child when I was one. I was usually treated as a miniature, inexperienced adult - the curse of the gifted/autism spectrum.

I wasn’t supposed to get frustrated or want things that didn’t have monetary value or couldn’t be bought. I remember dad yelling at me over math homework when I asked for help, as even with his explanations I just wasn’t getting it. Small wonder I don’t like math and insist on doing things entirely by myself - that’s what I was forcefully taught. To not ‘bother’ other people by asking for help and to be the ‘little adult’ they expected.

I am in no way upset or angry at the (informal-ish) diagnosis of ASD; it just confirms what I already knew on some level.

I AM upset at the adults who constantly treated me as not a child and expected behavior more appropriate from an adult.