we learn to relate to others

the same way we learn language: By hearing it over and over and over again from the people we grow up with.

It is learned at such a deep level that it is mostly unconscious.

Many parents try to instill more conscious messages, hence the litany of 'shoulds' many of us can recite from childhood. Some of them have actual words, like the "Suffering builds character" my father was so fond of. Many of them are just feelings, that get triggered every time a similar situation comes along - the feeling of shame when you even hear someone being mocked, for example, bringing back the burning ears and sick-to-the-stomach feeling of wishing the earth would open and swallow you up. Or flinching when you see that same glare of utter contempt on a mother's face that looks just like the one you saw so may times when you were little. They can bring you to your knees with a glance, a scowl, a word. We are so craven, you see, we're all really just little children inside, never having grown up, never having been loved well enough, we seek, crave, long for that acceptance, word of praise, glance of appreciation that we never got. Such simple things, yet so hard to find, as unreachable (or so it sometimes seems) as the moon.
***

My brothers think this shit is lame; that I'm being pathetic, a whiner, a sissy.

The thing is, they got both sides of the coin - the mocking, plus the knowing that eventually, being men, they'd get to be part of the mocker's club themselves.

Me, on the other hand, being the girl, and the oldest, knew all along that I was never going to get to join that elite club. I watched mom be a doormat over and over again, disappearing from rooms at the slightest sign of conflict or unpleasantness. She always managed to be elsewhere when the shit hit. No wonder she has no memory of any of it, and imagines my childhood to have been entirely peaceful and pleasant: She wasn't there.

Let me repeat that, for emphasis: She wasn't there.

Oh yes, her body was there often enough, washing clothes and cooking and cleaning; but mentally? Emotionally? She was totally checked out. She was on some other planet, some safe place between her ears that had no connection whatsoever with my personal reality. In fact, she almost never checked in; never sent messages; never asked me how I was doing. She really just didn't know. Because she wasn't there.

Wow. No matter how many ways I stumble on this little 'gem' of truth (barking shins and stubbing toes each time), I'm still dumbfounded by this realization.

It's as if my mind (and human minds in general, I don't think this is something unique to me) simply cannot process the idea of a mother this disconnected, this dissociated, this uninvolved. It's as if the organism would cease to function. As if a tree discovered that it's own roots were trying to strangle it, or like that Twilight Zone episode where this guy's hand becomes possessed and he tries to strangle himself.

It's just so unnatural, so completely contrary to everything nature evolved us to be, that it just simply does not compute.

I imagine I can come back to this in a few hours or days or weeks and marvel, yet again, at this revelation; it will always seem fresh, because it is so shocking. And potentially devastating.

So how to keep it from repeatedly shutting me down? Well, I think that's what dissociation is for. Taking that which is impossible to deal with (at least, single-handedly, without help from another, understanding soul)