know I'm going to get hammered for saying this

Being smarter than the rest of the family while simultaneously at the bottom of the family/gender hierarchy meant that I understood them better than they understood me (basic Power Dynamics 101. Think master/slave. More on that later, maybe.)

Anyway. So: I get them; they don't get me.

I do all the adjusting, coping, adapting, because I can, because I know how. And (least palatable): Because I have to. Have no choice (arguments about 'perception of choice' vs. 'actual choice' may be entertained at some future date. But not now.)

They do none of the work necessary to having a relationship with me; they totally take advantage of my willingness/ability to morph myself to fit any situation. Having all the power, they can do whatever they want. (Except the younger of my two brothers - he came along too late in the story to be any real part of the dynamic I'm describing here. Though of course as a male in a patriarchy, he eventually gets his slice of the pie. Me? Still waiting. Any time now, I'm ready :-)

End result: I grow up not knowing how to do it any other way; hence, when I get out in the world, I carry with me the same limited coping skills I developed growing up in my (entirely sub-optimal) environment.

So now as an adult I'm trying to undo this: Remove the top of my own head, stir things around in there to see if I can find which wires, circuits, whatever to re-connect in some fashion that's more useful to me. Cranial screwtop, I call it.

This is difficult, because my whole life, starting with my father's negativity and total unwillingness to ever say anything positive to me on any subject whatsoever, compounded by my mom's total silence on nearly any of these same subjects, then further hammered home by the culture's (and the world's) insistence that women only exist to please men and reflect them back to themselves at twice life size (see previous Virginia Woolf quotes for elaboration), I've developed a pretty major resistance to even admitting that I might possibly be good at something. I mean, how many times does one have to be fried to an utterly blackened crisp to finally learn not to put oneself in any kind of place where one might mistakenly be perceived as the human equivalent of a fricking lighting rod?

They even have a name for it, there's something called the Impostor Syndrome (which I won't link to any references right now because I'm too fried, maybe later). I think it's basically a survival technique akin to the trapped-wolf-chewing-off-a-foot analogy: You do it because you can't think of any other way to get out alive.

But I think most of us would prefer to have all four feet functional, thank you very much. Going through life with a self-inflicted limp (again images of women being expected to hobble ourselves in order not to threaten men flash through my mind) is really not what you want.

Hence all the efforts to self-heal (yes, more overused psycho-babble/New Age [read somebody say it should be pronounced like 'sewage'] speak]).